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Cornerstone Readings: Frantz Fanon
Reading 1: Black Skin, White Masks, “The Fact of Blackness” by Frantz Fanon, published in 1952
In this text, Fanon describes the science behind the impact of negative stereotypes on black people. He describes the ways that white people have created a narrative about black people’s physicality, psychology, and culture. In this excerpt from his text, he begins by identifying some of the ways that white people have created this narrative, then moves to his realization of the narrative, and finally his rejection of the narrative. Many civil rights leaders were familiar with his work and used it to help spur their own thinking, ideas, and movements.
Directions: Write the answers to the questions below using evidence from the text in your responses.
For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. Overnight the Negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. His metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.
[…]
And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.
[…]
For several years certain laboratories have been trying to produce a serum for “denegrification”; with all the earnestness in the world, laboratories have sterilized their test tubes, checked their scales, and embarked on researches that might make it possible for the miserable Negro to whiten himself and thus to throw off the burden of that corporeal malediction. Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,” but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more.
[…]
[Some may say,] “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!”
Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.
I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity, which I had learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema.
[…]
I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down to tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.”
On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. […] All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together.
[…]
All around me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns me…
I sit down at the fire and I become aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly, I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is?
While I was forgetting, forgiving, and wanting only to love, my message was flung back in my face like a slap. The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation. A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man – or at least like a ni[**]er. I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy. I was told to stay within bounds, to go back where I belonged.
They would see, then! I had warned them, anyway. Slavery? It was no longer even mentioned, that unpleasant memory. My supposed inferiority? A hoax that it was better to laugh at. I forgot at all, but only on condition that the world not protect itself against me any longer.
What! When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known.
[…]
I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason. It was up to the white man to be more irrational than I. Out of the necessities of my struggle I had chosen the method of regression, but the fact remained that it was an unfamiliar weapon; here I am home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Up to the neck in the irrational.
[…]
So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, “standing before the bar,” ruling the world with his intuition, the Negro recognized, set on his feet again, sought after, taken up, and he is a Negro – no, he is not a Negro but the Negro, exciting the fecund antennae of the world, placed in the foreground of the world, raining his poetic power on the world, “open to all the breaths of the world,” I embrace the world! I am the world!
The white man has never understood this magic substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world. He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms. Like a magician, I robbed the white man of “a certain world,” forever after lost to him and his. When that happened, the white man must have been rocked backward by a force that he could not identify, so little used as he is to such reactions. Somewhere beyond the objective world of farms and banana trees and rubber trees, I had subtly brought the real world into being.
[…]
I put the white man back into his place; growing bolder, I jostled him and told him point-blank, “Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.”
Ontological: the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence or reality
Schema: a conception of what is common to all members of a class
Serum: blood serum is taken from immunized people and given to others to transfer immunity
Corporeal
Malediction – a curse or negative statement about one’s body – in this case, black men
Historico-racial schema: a narrative created by white men that suggests white men as superior and black men as inferior
Historicity – historical authenticity
Racial epidermal schema – the internalized feelings of inferiority black people may develop living in an anti-black world
Lithe- agile
Fecund - bountiful
Reread the underlined sentence. What point is Fanon making?
According to Fanon, what two states of existence do black men live in?
Reread the underlined phrase. Who imposed the unknown civilization onto black men?
What is the unfamiliar weight?
Think about Fanon’s experience before and after the encounter with the “white man’s eyes.”
Based on this paragraph, what is a consequence that occurs because of the narratives white men make about black skin?
Based on the context of the sentence and paragraph, what would the serum do?
Reread the underlined sentence. How does the white man create this narrative about black men?
As Fanon thinks through the process of how white people have come to feel about people of color, how do their feelings impact Fanon? Cite evidence from the text.
What replaced Fanon’s own beliefs about his body? Explain the significance of this shift.
As Fanon discovers his blackness, what does he come to understand about the narrative white men have created about all black men? Cite evidence.
Reread the underlined phrase. How did white men’s narratives about black men make black men into objects?
Reread these underlined phrases. How does Fanon feel? What is the tone? Cite evidence in your response.
Based on the context of this paragraph, what is the “uniform” that Fanon refers to?
Reread the underlined sentences. Explain Fanon’s purpose for using these lines, paying particular attention to the words he chooses to use.
Reread these underlined phrases. What is the tone? Cite evidence in your response.
Reread the underlined sentence. Explain Fanon’s reasoning and conclusion.
What hypocrisy does Fanon point out in the underlined sentence?
What is Fanon’s resolution? Cite evidence.
Reread the underlined words. What is Fanon’s point?
Fanon’s point is that judgment based on skin color is an unreasonable action, and that white men who judge based on skin color are themselves unreasonable.
What can happen when black men reject the narrative told by white men?
According to Fanon, what beliefs do white men have about themselves?
How does Fanon begin to change the narrative about black men?
How has Fanon’s tone shifted throughout this excerpt?
