Black Skin, White Masks

Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks is a psychological study of colonialism. According to Fanon, the encounter between white European colonizers and black slaves and their descendants creates a unique social and psychological situation with a characteristic set of psychopathologies. Black Skin, White Masks analyzes these psychopathologies, traces their roots in the colonial encounter, and suggests how healing might become possible.

Fanon works within a broadly existentialist and phenomenological framework, his project is psychoanalytic, and he is sympathetic to the Négritude movement. However, his way of thinking is not reducible to any of these schools of thought, or even to their sum; as he proceeds in his analysis, Fanon engages dialectically with each, revealing ways in which they fall short of comprehending the black experience and transforming them in order to theorize black experience and black psychology. When Fanon writes, “asdoomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him” (2), he is both describing an aspect of lived black experience and giving an indication of the basic trajectory of his book. Black Skin, White Masks can be thought of as a series of confrontations between the black subject seeking to theorize his condition and a set of ideas and tools that he eventually overcomes and discards or modifies to suit his purpose, with the ultimate goal of resolving (or rejecting) the contradiction within him.

Fanon does not limit himself to purely objective modes of argumentation and inquiry – alongside the more standard tools of psychological and philosophical writing, he also makes extensive useof quotations from poetry and deeply personal narratives, and frequently includes anecdotes drawn from his own professional experience as a physician. Part of Fanon's task is to describe the black subject's experience from the inside; since anti-black racism assigns black people the role of mere objects and denies the very possibility of black experience, reflecting the black reader's experience back to him is a key step in uncovering and treating the neuroses under discussion.

The Introduction sets out some of Fanon's basic premises and provides an overview of the chapters. The rest of the book can be divided into three parts: Chapters 1-3, Chapters 4-5, and Chapters 6-8.

Chapters 1-3 are a study of some basic attitudes held by black people in the white world. In Chapter 1 Fanon describes the relationship of the black subject to French; mastery of the language offers him a false promise—that of finally being recognized as human. Fanon argues that language, by reinforcing the racist social structure of France and its colonies, contributes to black alienation and a black inferiority complex.

Chapters 2 and 3 deal with black attitudes toward intimate relationships, particularly the black desire to win white love. In Chapter 2, Fanon examines romantic relationships between black women and white men, taking Mayotte Capécia's Je suis Martiniquaise and Aboudalye Sadji's Nini as case studies. He argues that these works provide evidence that some romantic relationships between black women and white men are rooted not in "authentic" love, but in black women's sense of inferiority and need for white approval.

In Chapter 3, Fanon argues that the black male protagonist of René Maran's Un homme pareil aux autres, who is in love with a white woman, is a black abandonment-neurotic who cannot lay claim to the authentic love he is offered without first seeking white male approval.

In Chapter 4, Fanon critiques Octave Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. According to Fanon, Mannoni's account disregards the role of systemic racism in creating black neuroses and essentializes, rather than explains, the psychological characteristics of colonized subjects. Demonstrating the flaws in Mannoni's account, which he regards as dangerous, allows Fanon to clear the way for his own diagnosis of the colonial condition.

In Chapter 5, Fanon presents a first-person account of lived black experience, from his first moment of racial self-consciousness, through the attempt to counter racism with rationality, to the embrace of a mystical black past. Ultimately Fanon rejects this focus on the past, arguing that one should live for the present and future. At each step, he illustrates the contradictions in the black subject's self-image.

Chapters 6 and 7 attempt to provide psychopathological and philosophical explanations of the colonial condition. In Chapter 6, Fanon shows that Freud's and Adler's psychological theories cannot fully explain black psychopathologies, and offers an alternative explanation. In Chapter 7, he argues that Adler's notion of recognition does not fully apply to the colonized subject's experience and suggests that black people might achieve full Hegelian self-consciousness by demanding recognition from white people.

Chapter 8 briefly summarizes some of the main points of Black Skin, White Masks and sets out Fanon's vision for the future. He encourages his fellow black men and women to shift their focus away from the past, refuse to accept the injustices of the present, and work to build a future in which all people can live without alienation and relate to one another authentically.