“Black Skin, White Masks” Frantz Fanon (1952) Review | Racism and its complexity

★★★★★ What does it mean to have black skin and live as if you were a white? Or better, live wanting to be white, eternally? Today the racism is regarded with contempt. But are we free?

🔽 log 🔽
Black skin white masks
Frantz Fanon, 1952
Peau noire, masques blancs
224 pages
Read in 2020.05

🔽 Book review and notes 🔽

The classic on postcolonial psychology.
What does it mean to have black skin and live as if you were a white? 
Or better, live wanting to be white, eternally?

Fanon is a psychiatrist, he deals with unconscious, that is, a suppressed desire, that is, sexual desire /fear. 
A black person becomes black only when he encounters the white world and the white world equals the colonisation. 
The black will always have to live in denial or at best reactionary. And the white will always have to live in fear of the image they collectively created - primitive black, who is always more sexually potent. 
Because any phobia is actually an anxious fear, he suggests that a racist person has, deep inside, a desire to be invaded.

Another interesting point was that he talks of French only, for the slaves did not win their freedom through struggles with their blood, it was given by the kind white masters. 

To a certain extent it can be said to people of other ethnicity, that as long as we live in the West we are conscious of the colour of skin, and the white remains the absolute superiority. 
But, Japan was not colonised by the white. 
The colour of our skin doesn't immediately remind them of sin. 

The colour black constantly appears in the white culture as evil, and it's thus collectively imagined as evil. 

He concludes saying that he would refuse to be colonised by the colonisation, and the black must be free from the inferior complex and the white from the superior complex, it must be both ways. 

It was written over 70 years ago. 
Today the inter-racial communications and relationships have become normal, and the racism is regarded with contempt. 
But are we free? 
Fanon was fully aware, that his intellectual discoveries will not make the life of 8 year old boy in cane field any easier. 
For there are issues in different levels, those of middle class living in the West, and those who are facing the very survival.

It's complex, we might not find a way to truly free ourselves. But we should not look down, keep questioning, and reading this book is a path.
 

🔽 Related pages 🔽
Orientalism

🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽

●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●

Black Skin, White Masks 

●●● Amazon.co.uk (UK) ●●●
Black Skin, White Masks (Penguin Modern Classics)

●●● Amazon.it (Italy) ●●●
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