Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon

Afro-pessimism

-A critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement including the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality -Argued that Black people are constitutively excluded from the category of the self-possessing, rights-bearing human being of modernity.

Things I disagree with

-Fanon considers the fact that many black men desire white women because they want to engage in the vengeful act of "dominating a European woman." -Why does he then argue that black women that desire to marry a white man is due to internalized racism?

Disembodiment

-Fanon describes sitting on the train and hearing a white child fearfully exclaim: "Look! A Negro!". -This interaction is deeply painful for Fanon, who feels an enormous sense of anger in response to the child's fear of him. -He describes how racism can engender a feeling of alienation from one's own body.

BAME

-Fanon examines the ways in which, even among people of color, different ethnicities, nationalities, and religions are encouraged to feel superior to one another. (chapter 4) -This ultimately helps to maintain the power structure of white supremacy.

The solution

-He points out that appealing to dignity and reason alone will never change the world—and in some cases, conflict will be necessary -But he will always be "a man who questions."

Culture before colonization

-He rejects Mannoni's claim that Malagasy people did not have a sense of their own identity prior to colonization, pointing out that instead colonization destroyed Malagasy people's existing culture and identity. -He concludes that Mannoni does not truly understand Malagasy culture or have any sense of what this culture could be like if liberated from colonial oppression.

Comic books

-Mental training of black children is effected with comic books and cartoons, which instil in the mind of the white child, the society's cultural representations of black people as villains. -When black children are exposed to such images of villainous black people, the children will experience a psychopathology (psychological trauma), which mental wound becomes a part of their personality.

Black Skin, White Masks

-The divided self-perception of a Black Subject who has lost his native cultural origin, and embraced the culture of the Mother Country, produces an inferior sense of self in the "Black Man." -They will try to appropriate and imitate the culture of the colonizer where such behavior is more readily evident in upwardly mobile, the white masks.

Négritude

Critiques the artistic movement known as Négritude, stating that the attempt to reimagine a mystical, precolonial black culture ultimately won't help black people in the present—and that certain aspects of Négritude also ironically confirm racist stereotypes about black people

Collective unconscious

Fanon affirms the existence of a "collective unconscious" of black people and argues that the only way for black people to be healed from the psychological damage of colonialism is through "collective catharsis."

Negrophobia

Fanon critiques the psychoanalytic idea that all phobias are necessarily caused by childhood traumas. In the case of negrophobia--fear or hatred of black people--the problem is actually rooted in racist colonial culture.

Science & racism

Fanon examines the history of how science was used to justify racism, arguing that "science should be ashamed of itself."

Can never escape blackness

Fanon points out that while Jewish people can downplay or renounce their Jewishness, black people can never escape their blackness.

Psychoanalytic theories

He argues that the family lives and early childhoods of white people are different from those of black people simply by virtue of racism and colonialism, and therefore many of the predominant psychoanalytic theories developed by white Europeans don't hold true for many people of color.

Psychological dynamic of master and slave

He considers the ways in which the psychological dynamic of master and slave still lingers today, even after slavery has been abolished. (chapter 7)

Social exclusion

Proposes the inability of black people to fit into the norms (social, cultural, racial) established by white society (the colonizer).

Fear of the educated black

White people fear well-educated black people, especially those who read revolutionary writing such as the work of Karl Marx.