Black Skin, White Masks

 

Hello friends,

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen,

Although it is wearing on the nerves.

-Ralph Ellison

 

The discipline of Sociology has generated great contributions. Skin colour bias has spawned a global, multibillion-dollar industry in cosmetic creams and invasive procedures. It starts when children are young: the moment a child is born, relatives start comparing siblings’ skin colour. It starts in your own family – but people don’t want to talk about it openly.

A perfect life from perfect skin – but only for those of the right shade – is the message and mindset that’s being passed down. This has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in cosmetic creams and invasive procedures such as skin bleaching, chemical peels, laser treatments, steroid cocktails, “whitening” pills and intravenous injections – all with varying effectiveness and health risks. It’s more than a bias, it’s a dangerous cultural obsession.

This is not bias, this is racism.

Is in India these kinds of biases are internalized?

In India, these were codified in the caste system, the ancient Hindu classification in which birth determined occupation and social stratum. At the top, Brahmins were priests and intellectuals; at the bottom, outcastes were confined to the least-desired jobs such as latrine cleaners. Bhatia says caste may have been about more than just occupation: the darker you looked, the lower your place in the social hierarchy.

Fair skin bias was perpetuated and strongly reinforced by colonialism, not just in India but in dozens of countries ruled by a European power.

It’s the idea that the ruler is fair-skinned, says Emmanuel:

“All around the world, it was a fact that the rich could stay indoors versus the poor who worked outside and were dark-skinned.”

 

Whiteness and white privileged are not terms that are easily identifiable, well known and or universally accepted. They are terms that have been traditionally overlooked from local and traditionally overlooked from local and national discussions in the public cultural political and educational realms. White issues of multiculturalism, diversity, and cultural pluralism and other necessary themes related to identity and cultural integration are generally discussed within an air of assurance.

Frantz Fanon wrote his famous ‘Black Skin, White Mask’ 1967 in the early 1950s, it caused such a stir because it was written by intellectual outside the prevailing white power structure who deliberately took form what we would now call subaltern.

The introduction to Black Skin, White Masks contains key conclusions and foundational pieces of analysis summed up Fanon’s simple declaration: that Black people are locked in blackness and white people are locked in whiteness.

All it needs is one simple answer and the black question would lose all relevance.

What does man want?

What does the black man want?

Running the risk of angering my black brothers, I shall say that a Black is not a man.

-Fanon

The book is notable for its gigantic ambition, seeking to understand the basics of anti-Black racism in the deepest recesses of consciousness and the social world. The book is Fanon’s major work on blackness. In fact, his focus shifts in the years following the publication of Black Skin, White Masks, moving away from blackness as a problem—perhaps the problem—of the modern world and toward a wider theory of the oppressed, colonialism, and revolutionary resistance to the reach of coloniality as a system. But that shift is unthinkable without Fanon’s early meditations on anti-Black racism.

Fanon engaged the fundamental issues of his day: language, affect, sexuality, gender, race and racism, religion, social formation, time, and many others.

His participation in the Algerian revolutionary struggle shifted his thinking from theorizations of blackness to a wider, more ambitious theory of colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, and visions for a postcolonial culture and society.

Fanon’s reflections on anti-Black racism and how it forms, then deforms, the subjectivity of white and Black people both, is crucial for understanding the multiple levels of colonial subjugation and the terms of its overcoming. There is something about anti-blackness as treated in Black Skin, White Masks that is a concrete, uncomplicated distillation of coloniality as such. Fanon’s first book, then, can be said to set out the basic structure of his anti- and de-colonial work, initially and emphatically in the terms of describing the effects and affects of anti-black racism.

Fanon’s method in Black Skin, White Masks is a complicated question and one of the more interesting bits of scholarly discussion. 

Woman of colour and the White Man

The Man of colour and the White Woman

The second and third chapters of Black Skin, White Masks theorize interracial sexuality, sexual desire, and the effects on racial identity. Fanon’s theorizations return to one and the same theme: interracial desire as a form of self-destruction in the desire to be white or to elevate one’s social, political, and cultural status in proximity to whiteness. In that sense, all depictions of interracial sexuality  are for Fanon fundamentally pathological. The black woman who desires a white man suffers under the delusion that his body is a bridge to wealth and access.

The white body and Black desire for that body function much as language does in the opening chapter to Black Skin, White Masks: the passage to standing in the world, made impossible by the epidermal racial scheme, and therefore fated to alienation at every turn. Fanon’s analyses are provocative, associative, and infused with the language of psychoanalysis and existential-phenomenology.

And thus, in each turn of the story, interracial desire is pathological, not because of the content of the characters and their desire, but because anti-Black colonialism is a total project that has infiltrated, modified, and calcified all aspects of the life world.

Internalized racism

When a woman of colour go after white man and put down man of their own colour, Fanon says, the cause is just what many of us suspect and that is Internalized racism. 

Nor do these women truly love these white men, they just love their colour. They go with them not out of love but to deal with their own hang-ups about race.

It is just because black woman feels inferior that she aspires to gain entry to the white world.

Desire of being white

Secretly one wants to be white. Marrying white is her way of doing this. She looks up to the white people and looks down 

Dependency complex of colonized people

“Not all peoples can be colonized; only those who experience

this need  for dependency.” 

Having lived under the extreme ambivalence inherent in the colonial situation,  Mannoni has managed

to achieve a grasp, unfortunately too exhaustive, of the psychological phenomena that govern the relations between the colonized and the colonizer. Mannoni’s study is sincere in purpose, for it proposes to prove the impossibility of explaining man outside the limits of his capacity for accepting or denying a given situation.

Thus, problem of colonialism includes not only the interrelations of objective historical conditions but also human attitudes toward these conditions.

“The central idea is that the confrontation of ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ men creates a special situation—the colonial situation—and brings about the emergence of a mass of illusions and misunderstandings that only a psychological analysis can place and define.”

In order to show us that racism does not refl ect an economic situation, M. Mannoni reminds us that “in South Africa the white labourers are quite as racialist as the employers and managers and very often a good deal more so.

Mannoni believes that the contempt of the poor whites of South Africa for the Negro has nothing to do with economic factors. Aside from the fact that this attitude can be understood

through the analogy of the anti-Semitic mentality,

“Colonial exploitation is not the same as other forms of exploitation, and colonial racialism is different

from other kinds of racialism."

-Mannoni

To conclude our consideration of  Mannoni, we must remember that 

“economic exclusion results from, among other things, the fear of competition and the desire both to protect the poor-white class that forms half the European population and to

prevent it from sinking any lower.”

In practice, an inferiority complex connected with the colour of the skin is found only among those who form a minority within a group of another colour. In a fairly homogeneous community like that of the Malagasies, where the social framework is still fairly strong,

an inferiority complex occurs only in very exceptional cases.

Actually, in the absolute sense, nothing stands in the way of

such things. Nothing except that the people in question lack the opportunities.

But they do not complain!

Wherever Europeans have founded colonies of the type we are considering, it can safely be said that their coming was unconsciously expected, even desired, by the future subject peoples. Everywhere there existed legends foretelling the arrival of strangers from the sea,

bearing wondrous gifts with them.

The nature of blackness is within the mind

Is negro a symbol of sin?

-Fanon

As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal confl icts, to experience his being through others. There is of course the moment of “being for others,” of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is madeu unattainablein a colonized and civilized society.

The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other.

What forces colour to colour man to feel inferior?

A feeling of inferiority?

No, a feeling of nonexistence.

Sin is Negro as virtue is white.

All those white men in a group, guns

in their hands, cannot be wrong.

I am guilty.

I do not know of

what, but I know that I am no good.

We need barely to open our eyes that had been blindfolded, and someone already wants to drown me in the universal?

What about the others?

Those who “have no voice,” those who 

“have no spokesman.” . . .

The torturer is the black man, Satan is black, one talks of shadows, when one is dirty one is black—whether one is thinking of physical dirtiness or of moral dirtiness. It would be astonishing, if the trouble were taken to bring them all together, to see the vast number of expressions that make the black man the equivalent of

sin. 

But the question is that does this really true or related with our psychology or mental state or inferior complex?

As long as one cannot understand this fact, one is doomed to talk in circles about the “black problem.” Blackness, darkness, shadow, shades, night,

the labyrinths of the earth, abysmal depths, blacken someone’s reputation; and, on the other side, the bright look of innocence, the white dove of peace, magical, heavenly light. 

The collective unconscious is not dependent on clever heredity; it is the result of what we shall call the unreflected imposition of a culture. Hence there is no reason to be surprised when an Antillean exposed to waking-dream therapy relives the same fantasies as a European.

Thus, The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the problem of Negroes living among white men but rather of Negroes exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society that is only accidentally white.

By way of conclusion

Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the

fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it

is only by being acknowledged or recognized.

—Hegel, 

The Phenomenology of Mind Man

The conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks follows through on this notion of futurity and a dialectics dedicated to the destruction of pre-existing forms of relation. Fanon’s conclusion is written in very short paragraphs or provocative, declarative sentences. 

Across the final pages, Fanon outlines a theory of history and memory that underpins his vision of Black liberation, including most prominently the notion that we are not bound to history, we are not slaves to the past, and therefore any kind of future is possible. Fanon rejects the idea of reparations, for example, precisely because that idea would link Black people to the past in a crucial way and make that link inextricable from imagining justice.

My final prayer:
O my body, always make me a man who questions!

-Fanon

Thus, human reality in itself for itself can be achieved only through conflict and through the risk that conflict implies. This risk means that we go beyond life toward a supreme good that is the transformation of subjective certainty of my own worth into a universally valid objective truth. There are times when the black man is locked into his body.

“for a being who has acquired consciousness of himself and

of his body, who has attained to the dialectic of subject and object,

the body is no longer a cause of the structure of consciousness,

it has become an object of consciousness.”

The discovery of the existence of a Negro civilization in the fifteenth century confers no patent of humanity on Fanon.  Fanon firmly says, like it or not, the past can in no way guide me in the present moment.

What is the most interesting about Fanon is, he raises questions in his conclusion of Black Skin, White Mask. These are quite interesting and we all need to ponder upon this, even today. I too like to complete my discussion on Fanon’s text Black Skin, Whit Mask with his questions are:

Have I no other purpose on earth, then, but to avenge the Negro

of the seventeenth century?

In this world, which is already trying to disappear, do I have

to pose the problem of black truth?

Do I have to be limited to the justification of a facial

conformation?

No, I do not have the right to go and cry out my hatred at the

white man.

My life is caught in the lasso of existence. My freedom turns me

back on myself. No, I do not have the right to be a Negro.

I do not have the duty to be this or that. . . .

If the white man challenges my humanity, I will impose my

whole weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not

that.

Thank you.