The liberation of black people as subjects hinged on the recovery of a sense of selfhood and dignity that has been robbed from them by the “white gaze.” Taking pride in the racial attributes denigrated by society in people of color would be a crucial way of challenging the naturalization of social relations that underpins racism.įanon developed this perspective through a critical engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As Sylvia Wynter summarizes Fanon’s novel position: “A solution will have to be supplied both at the objective level of the socioeconomic, as well as at the level of subjective experience, of consciousness, and therefore, of ‘identity.’” From Object to Subjectįor Fanon, the positive affirmation of identity was a critical moment in the development of self-consciousness. For this reason, despite his firm opposition to capitalism, Fanon never associated with any existing Marxist tendency. Unfortunately, that “mistake” characterized the dominant forms of Marxism in Fanon’s time: they saw racism as (at best) a secondary consideration, while failing to produce a credible Marxist theory of racialization. Any “unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic.” Fanon therefore insisted that “the black man must wage the struggle on two levels,” objective and subjective. Racism takes on a life of its own and defines the mental horizons of individuals long after some of its economic imperatives have faded from the scene. A phenomenon is not exclusively defined by its origin. However, this did not mean that race is secondary to class, or that the struggle against racism was subordinate to the fight against capitalism. ![]() The true disalienation of the black man implies a brutal awareness of the social and economic realities … the Black problem is not just about Blacks living among whites, but about Blacks exploited, enslaved, and despised by colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white. What might those relations be? Fanon insists that they are economic: If race is socially constructed, it follows that specific social relations are responsible for its birth and perpetuation. In recent decades, the “social construction of race” has become such a cliché that the radical implications of Fanon’s theoretical breakthrough are easy to miss. For Fanon, such mystification cannot be stripped away by mere enlightened critique since it is deeply rooted in objective social realities and must be challenged at that level. This phenomenon is so pervasive that race and racism come to appear as “natural,” transhistorical phenomena. Skin color may be biologically determined, but the way that we see and interpret it is conditioned by social forces which are outside of our control. This led to his first book, published in 1952 when Fanon was only twenty-six: Black Skin, White Masks.įanon’s great breakthrough in Black Skin, White Masks was to analyze racism in sociogenic terms, denying it any natural basis. At the same time, he absorbed the latest European intellectual developments such as phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. Returning to France in the late 1940s, Fanon immersed himself in the literature of Négritude, a French-speaking black pride movement. The experience brought the racism of French “civilization” painfully home to him. He originally thought of himself - as was true of many others at the time - as French and not “Black.” That began to change when he enlisted as a soldier in the Free French Forces during World War II. Denaturalizing Racismīorn in 1925, Fanon grew up in French-ruled Martinique in the Lesser Antilles. However, the recent publication of over six hundred pages of Fanon’s previously unavailable writings on literature, psychiatry, and politics makes this a fitting moment to reexamine his thought anew. Some of Fanon’s key works have been available in English translation for many years. He played an active role in the Algerian revolutionary movement that struggled for independence in the 1950s, but he warned that independent African states would simply replace the colonial system with a national bourgeoisie unless they followed the path of social revolution. ![]() Few thinkers speak more directly to such issues than Frantz Fanon, the Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary who is widely considered one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers on race and racism.įanon had direct experience of French colonial rule, from the Caribbean to North Africa, and brought that experience to bear on his intellectual work. ![]() The renewed protests against racism and police brutality over the last year have supplied a fresh impetus for thinking about the nature of capitalism, its relationship to racism, and the construction of alternatives to both.
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