The following is based on Chapter 7 of Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “The Black Man and Recognition”:
Frantz Fanon was not a big believer of Adler and Hegel, but nonetheless he used their ideas as a jumping off point to understand the blacks from his home island of Martinique.
In Martinique black people put each other down to feel good about themselves. So mistakes in your French or at your work are remembered and repeated – not because they are so terrible in themselves but because it allows others to put you down so they can feel better about themselves.
I am Narcissus, and I want to see reflected in the eyes of the other an image of myself that satisfies me.
If you find something unpleasant in those eyes, then the person must be “a real idiot”, someone who has to be put in his place by having his mistake recounted. Something you do not do to those who like you, your “courtiers”.
The Martinicans are hungry for reassurance. They want their wishful thinking to be recognized…. Each and every one of them constitutes an isolated, arid, assertive atom… Each of them wants to be, wants to flaunt himself.
What drives this is an inferiority complex. Quoting from an old Spanish play by Andres de Claramonte that sounds like it was written yesterday, Fanon shows that it goes back 400 years. The fault is not in the souls of black people but comes from white rule, which forces blacks to live in a world where their human worth is questioned. But since blacks are not in a position to put down white people, they prove their worth by putting down each other.
Hegel says that our sense of self worth and even reality comes from others, particularly from how they react to our actions.
So blacks in America, having had to fight for equal rights against whites, have a firm sense of themselves. Seeing the hatred in the eyes of white people and hearing the names they were called and knowing the body count, they fought for an equal place in society.
The blacks in Martinique were not so fortunate. They never fought for anything – except for the white man in wars overseas. Whites freed the slaves on their own. And instead of mean looks and mean words and bodies hanging from trees like in America, whites in Martinique show “nothing but indifference or paternalistic curiosity” – while looking down on blacks all the same.
In place of honest hatred was a false smile. Which gave blacks nothing to fight against. All they could do was bite their tongue and smile back. Giving them a weaker sense of themselves while still remaining unequal.
See also:
You caught me off guard here Abagond, now I will quickly have to read the chapter, learn about Adlerian psychology, and also some aspects of Hegelian thought in a very short space of time.
It will be interesting to see what Fanon says about Hegel:
1. For Hegel, as Edward Said has pointed out, Asia and Africa were “static, despotic, and irrelevant to world history
2. Hegel wrote, for example, “universal history goes from East to West. Europe is absolutely the end of universal history. Asia is the beginning.”
3. It is characteristic of the blacks that their consciousness has not yet even arrived at the intuition of any objectivity, as for example, of God or the law, in which humanity relates to the world and intuits its essence. …He [the black person] is a human being in the rough.”
http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/h_es/h_es_malho_euro_frameset.htm
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I wonder If Hegel would have come to the same conclusion, had the Silk Road gone through Africa in order to reach Europe.
Martinicans and guadelupeans did not get their freedom handed over as an act of white leniency.
I think Fanon also felt dwarfed by the numerous accomplishment of his american brothers and that is what has driven his personal inferiority complex.
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Here is a scholarly analysis of the chapter
Click to access 11CFanonNegroandRecognition.pdf
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However, I prefer this analysis that applies itself us today in our everyday lives – even though it is/was used in U.S. academia :
Exploring the Anti-Black Mindset
http://www.asetbooks.com/Us/AsetU/Courses/BlackPsychology101/BPsych5.html
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And again reading this chapter had me thinking how hard it is for an oppressed group of people on every single level, to break free of that oppression and to create a culture based on ‘humanity’ without being affected in a negative way by the culture oppressed them??
Or another example, how does the victim of child abuse etc, manage to create a world/life for himself on an individual level that is ‘normal’ without any ‘detriment’ to himself and others??
Hmmmm!!
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A good precis too Abagond btw
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From my perspective, and it is proven, the psychology of blacks here in America is not that much different from those in Martinique. We have been (and still are) programmed to think that in some way, shape, or form that our sense of worth either means very little or is completely null.
We’ve been programmed in some way, shape or form to believe and even act on the black inferiority campaign. Some of us focus on anything negative when it comes to our people, and that has a lot to do with the white supremacist programming.
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I agree with Will.
I still see blacks in America living out this same type of self-hatred and relentless scrutiny of other blacks, while simultaneously thinking the white man’s ice is colder.
Its not just the rented Negros. I often hear blacks say “why cant we just get it together” as if all blacks are unsure, lazy, childlike people.
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I started to read this book along with Said’s but lost track I will go back and try to catch up!
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This thought-provoking book was a requirement for us in social work school so we could see another perspective, a black one, on psychology and social ills.
I don’t know a thing about the people or history of Martinique, but I agree with your analysis about black Americans: “having had to fight for equal rights against whites, have a firm sense of themselves.” I see so much more dignity now than I did growing up, although many of us still have a long way to go.
By the way, Abagond, I don’t know if you read other blogs much, come check out my current post, Heal or Die: The Challenge To That Diseased Place On The Map.
I think you’ll like it, and given your world view, I’d like to know what you think of it.
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Hi Kit!!
I had a look at your site very interesting, and especially the piece on Henry Louis Gates.
In my opinion he is a cariacture of the ‘Black Skin White Masks’ Fanon alludes to and in a perverse way no different to the African kings etc he criticises in his article.
The ‘Sons of Malcolm’ seems to be vindicated that his arrest by the police is the best thing that could have happened to him ha ha ha ha
Hmmm!!
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