Critique on '' Black skin White Masks''

                         
                      Because of Fanon's  schooling and cultural background, the young Fanon conceived of himself as French, and the disorientation he felt after his initial encounter with French racism shaped his psychological theories about race and culture. 1945 letter to brother: "I made a mistake. Nothing can justify my sudden decision to defend the interests of the French peasant when he himself does not give a damn." During this period in Lyon, a disheartened Fanon began what he believed to be his thesis (originally called "Essay for the Dis-alienation of the Black"), which instead became Black Skin, White Masks.

                              There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect…. For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white... The psychoanalysts say that nothing is more traumatizing for the young child than his encounters with what is rational. It's a sociological study of psychology of racism. 

                            The unity which will come eventually, bringing all oppressed peoples together in the same struggle, must be preceded in the colonies by what I shall call the moment of separation or negativity: this anti-racist racism is the only road that will lead to the abolition of racial differences. 

Fanon’s response is direct: “Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. … I needed not to know. This struggle, this new decline had to take on an aspect of completeness.”4 Sartre’s declaring an end to racialism undermines the power of experiencing blackness positively; rendering it as a temporary move on the way to universal humanism makes it almost powerless. The racialists read Fanon’s final chapter as such an abrupt move that it cannot be read as undermining the force and significance of the entirety of the text. As Gines explains, Fanon’s apparent move away from race consciousness is only a move away from the past in order to bring about a new and different future; it does not require the elimination of race consciousness or a move to a universal notion of humanity. She says:

[H]e seems to deny the existence of the Negro and the white man when he states, "The Negro is not. No more than the white man" (BSWM, 231). But Fanon does not require the Negro (or the white man) to reject race consciousness. Rather, he requires that they both "turn their backs on the inhuman voices ... of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible" 

The anti-racialists read Fanon’s response to Sartre a little differently from the racialists as well. For example, Kruks claims that “Fanon’s objection is not that Sartre is in error in asserting that négritude is a transitional movement. Sartre’s mistake, in fact, is to have told the truth!”11 Fanon can acknowledge that the movement is transitional; what else could it be? However, making the transition is better and more possible if one imagines it to be not a transition but a legitimate way of being forever. Knowing it is only a transition “destroy[s] its vitality”12 by making it less an end, more a means to another end. One’s race matters, but once realized can then be left behind and one can be reasonable and simply human again. Interestingly, Kruks goes on to explain that Fanon works out a much more complicated notion of identity in his later works, but she is clear that Black Skin, White Masks takes a terrible turn toward a universal humanism. Furthermore, she says that it is this kind of mistake that undermines the positive contributions a politics of recognition or identity can still make. Even when not referencing Fanon specifically, these are two positions that set themselves as opposite one another—one is either for retaining race consciousness or for working toward its abolition, even if that occurs by making it well known in the present. And, these two positions are understood as contradictory as well as the only two options available. We find ourselves impaled on the horns of a sharp dilemma. One horn is held up by the like of Gines and Lucius Outlaw; the other horn would represent positions of Anthony Appiah and David Roediger, to name just a few. But, like most dilemmas, giving us only these two choices is misleading, and the fight between these two sides will not be resolved. One should not read Fanon to figure out what it will or even can mean to be “raced” in the future. Fanon exposes injustice by writing about experience and by projecting a future shared community of hope and freedom without clear indication of the role our group identities might play. If freedom is about being able to be actional, being able to make meaning in the world, then whether or not we will be raced is not as important a question as what race is about now. 

Fanon’s response to Sartre is evidence neither of Fanon’s racialism nor his universalism. Fanon says, “a consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of it being. … Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source of the [experience of being black] but in a certain sense to block that source.”14 This is not a call to some permanent racial consciousness; rather, it calls for a commitment to the experiences of living in the world, which is at present quite raced. When Fanon ponders “One day, perhaps, in the depths of that unhappy romanticism …”15 the ellipsis does not clearly point to a realization of Sartre’s accuracy. When he states that Sartre “shattered my last illusion,”16 Fanon is not admitting that authentic race consciousness is an illusion in such a way as to require the giving up of the illusion of race. Fanon is insisting we live in the present with indeterminate hopes for the future, i.e., he is demanding that we not look to some end and assume we know what is to come.

          What is is what is to come. As Fanon says, we are indeed a part of being to the degree that we go beyond it. Being, as the possibility of (comm)unity, becomes the form of the ideal. Moreover, precisely because it cannot be given and does not function as the a priori, being is therefore an ethical ideal—it is the ideal of a community that is yet to exist and yet ought to exist, as the fulfillment of transcendence within immanence. … The ethics of community is therefore the inverse of the repression of difference.


Weate is explaining that as Fanon turns away from the past, toward the future, at the end of Black Skin, White Masks he is attempting to fulfill an ethics of community that respects plurality and difference while simultaneously including everyone equally. Kruks makes a similar point: “the affirmation of identity can be liberating only in the context of a struggle to transform wider material and institutional forms of oppression.” Even Posnock recognizes Fanon’s efforts to work outside these dilemmas and dichotomies when he tells us that Fanon “destabilizes the identity logic of us/them, identity/difference, inside/outside, native/stranger.” He continues, Fanon’s life “eludes these binaries.” One wonders why, if Posnock sees this, he still forcefully insists that universal humanism, not identity politics, is the main thrust of Fanon’s work. Posnock seems stuck in the either/or binary that he recognizes Fanon will not entertain. Posnock needs to either argue for or against racial categorizations, but he has not learned, not even from Fanon, that this is a fight we should not engage.

 A cursory review of the Oxford English Dictionary’s twenty-nine definitions of the noun “race”24 that relate to groups categorized by descent or common features reveals that race could refer to all humans, “the human race,” to one family, to one species, to a tribe, to a band of tribes which make up an ethnicity, to one class, and many more. The birth of scientific racism did, somewhat successfully, reduce the meanings of “race” to only a few possibilities all centering on inherited biological characteristics separating our subspecies of humans, which supposedly also explained moral and cultural characteristics. It is the attempt to explain those moral and cultural characteristics, especially insofar as they are ordered in decreasing value, that leads us to want to eliminate racial categories altogether. But “race” can have many meanings, not all of which involve notions of superiority and inferiority and result in invidious racism. Insofar as all categorizations are in some sense arbitrary,25 some physical and cultural differences can be quite relevant in certain situations. To demand now that we can no longer use these categories could do a serious disservice to many people.There is value to studying biological differences between people that we take to be from different races. First, there’s the medical significance of race, i.e., different diseases and treatments correlate with different races. 

The concept of the social constructivity of race is of no value without a prior understanding of what is involved in the construction of any phenomena.”

What we learn from an existential phenomenological method, such as Fanon’s, is that to be (a free) human is to create and bestow meaning on the world, and this is done intersubjectively.

So, essentially, everything is a social construct. Biology, as an organized investigation of living things, is itself a social construct. Kruks, defending existential phenomenology, shows that this is fundamental to phenomenology.

Beauvoir argues that none of these [biology, psychoanalysis, and class] is a destiny in the sense of possessing natural causality or inevitable determination. Rather, it is through custom, “this second nature,” that the “facts” of biology come to play such a dominant role in woman’s situation. Merleau-Ponty too would say that biology acquires its significance only in culture.

But how does society construct something? Through its members. Still, we do not and cannot give just anything any meaning we want. Rather, we are limited by many things, not the least of which are the sedimented and habituated meanings we inherit (in every sense of the word). Institutions, even though made up of individuals, do take on certain powers of perpetuating concepts and practices even when we consciously work to change them. So, we must turn to phenomenological analysis whereby we first attempt to bracket our prejudices and analyze the phenomena directly. To demand that race come to mean this or that, or nothing at all, is to add a prejudice to our analysis, not to bracket prejudices. Gordon again:

one can talk about the world in meaningful ways without committing oneself to the thesis that the world “must” continue to be as it is presently conceived. Whether it “must continue to be” as presently conceived is not relevant to its description. What is important is that it is presently conceived in such-and-such a way and that the conception itself can be communicated reflectively both to oneself and to others.

Fanon challenges us to establish a goal of creating a new humanity. Much work has gone into discussing what role notions of race will play in that new humanity; however, more work needs to go into marking out phenomenology as the path to this new humanity. Fanon’s sociogenic principle demands we look to the social world, the world of meaning and creativity, to find the freedom we so desire and deserve. We must make sense of the past while remaining open to ever new and ever more possibilities for the future. Freedom is being actional, living in the social world as a creator and bestower of meaning. Unfreedom is the failure (often by force) to be actional; deciding ahead what, if anything, “race” will mean only limits our freedom. Race may come to mean something altogether different; it has changed much over the past three hundred years. It may come to mean nothing at all. We need to work together to challenge racist enemies instead of fighting with each other about how best to battle racism. Right now we need to form coalitions that demand affirmation and recognition in the present as well as material and institutional changes. 

             Fanon's conclusion has become famous among post-colonial thinkers, perhaps because of its marked pointillism, perhaps by virtue of its simplicity of prose, its breathable anger, its shock of speakability. It is here where I will end.

No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be free.

I am my own foundation.

The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved.

The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man.

I, the man of color, what only this:

That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.

Superiority? Inferiority?

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself.

At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.

My final prayer:

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!