The following is based on the eighth and last chapter of Frantz Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952): “By Way of Conclusion”:
Frantz Fanon does not want to be a black man, he wants to be a man, plain and simple.
The trouble with blacks and whites is that both have become prisoners of their pasts:
Both have to move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born…
Superiority? Inferiority?
Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?
So Fanon is not much interested in black history, reparations, making whites feel guilty or shouting his hatred at them. All those things are a reaction against racism, which means you are still a prisoner of racism, still a prisoner of your past and your colour.
I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future.
Let the dead bury the dead:
I am my own foundation.
Besides, history is not everything. For example, do we need to understand history to understand the war in Indo-China? No. We only need to understand that the Indo-Chinese were not put on this earth to become the houseboys and cheap women of white men:
When we recall how the old colonial hands in 1938 described Indochina as the land of piastres and rickshaws, of houseboys and cheap women, we understand only too well the fury of the Vietminh’s struggle.
That war, by the way, later became what Americans know as the Vietnam War when they took over the fighting from the French. Even back in 1952 Fanon said that war made the Second World War look like child’s play.
Is Toussaint L’Ouverture a part of Fanon’s history? Of course. But so is anyone else who fights for human freedom and dignity:
Every time a man has brought victory to the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to enslave his fellow man, I have felt a sense of solidarity with his act.
These are not empty words for him. Fanon himself would later help fight for the independence of Algeria from white rule. Not as an Algerian – he is from Martinique – but as a man. Just as he had earlier fought to free France from Nazi Germany.
Likewise all the so-called “white” inventions and the wars of the Greeks are part of his history too. Because before anything else he is a man – even if white people keep wanting to put him in a box to dehumanize him, to make him less than the man that he is.
Fanon says he has only one right and one duty:
- The right to demand human behaviour from the other.
- The duty to never let his decisions renounce his freedom.
And one last prayer:
O my body, always make me a man who questions!
See also:
The final chapter in full
Click to access Fanon-BSWM-Conclusion.pdf
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Here is an interesting analysis:
“Readers of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks often disagree about whether or not Fanon is arguing for or against the perpetuation of racial categories These readers, namely Kathryn Gines in “Fanon and Sartre 50 Years Later: To Retain or Reject the Concept of Race” focus on Chapter Five, “The Lived Experience of the Black.”Originally published as a response to Sartre’s “Black Orpheus,” Fanon’s essay introduced Léopold Senghor’s anthology of négritude poetry.
The other interpretation suggests that Fanon, although giving an amazing and important description of “the lived experience of the black,” ends Black Skin, White Masks by moving away from racialism and toward seeing each man as only a man, not seeing color at all. The
close of the book, it is argued, suggests exactly this”.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:gLW98h50jnsJ:ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/ameriquests/include/getdoc.php%3Fid%3D515%26article%3D53%26mode%3Dpdf+fanon+recognition&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiYwNpxB7Yo8PP7_bd3tv2-QhAzA5sAAMIProH4Qk0sHpjzhs8i3GeedRn57Ai6W8cCVJmFkDB-YpkcwV7puzOk8lw7mis2ES8fnxyGhhk9jrR4b04LfLGqC2Xb5ueObcJ-Tlov&sig=AHIEtbSDJwWQ7mcJevsKS41OqE_heeQi_w
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Personally, and I will re-read the chapter again.
I do not think Fanon is doing away with ‘race categories’.
Firstly, and I think he is right in this respect, but the world is not at (t)/his level of consciousness that race and/or culture cannot define the worth of a ‘human being’. Irrespective of how many pyramids etc that may or may not be built in the past. And conversely even no matter how ‘savage’ a group of people maybe.
Humanity (in an existential sense) is the criteria, and not what humans may be culturally and or do physically
So it is in this context, viz ‘a future projection’ that race would become ‘unimportant’.
The problem with race as a category, or more specifically that which is/was formed within the last 500 years is that it ‘distorts’, even when one attempts to remove oneself from its influence.
In a profound way, I think, Fanon (at this stage of his life) is trying in an ‘enlightened way’ to think outside of the box of racism without it alienating him or his worldviews.
Personally I think it is impossible to be able to think completely and all the time ‘outside the box’ of a racist society, but that is another issue altogether,
Finally to suggest that Fanon would be against ‘reparation’ is misleading because Fanon died before such a movement was underway. However, much more importantly reparation is an issue that falls within ‘international law’, which is something completely different to the issue of say say ‘making Whites feel guilty’.
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Having a look at Ch 8 there were a number of poetic prose that struck me:
1. The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past – Marx
2. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future
3. As a man I undertake to face the possibility of annihilation in order that two or three truths may cast their eternal brilliance over the world.
4. I find myself in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behaviour from the other. One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom through my choices
5. I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it
6. The body of history does not determine a single of my actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of freedom
7. That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
8. At the beginning of his life a man is always clotted, he is drowned in contingency. The tragedy of the man is that he was once a child.
9. It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinise the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will b able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.
10. Was ‘my’ freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of ‘the you’
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And how could I miss:
11. The Black who works on a sugar plantation, there is only one solution : to fight. he will embark on this struggle, and he will pursue it, not as a result of a Marxist or idealistic analysis but quite simply because he cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation, misery and hunger
12. Intellectual alenation is a creation of ‘middle-class society. What I call middle-class society is ANY society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt.
And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in sense a revolutionary.
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And perhaps this is one of the reason why I think he did not ‘abandon’ the concept of ‘culture’. I am kind of reluctant to use ‘race’ but one can still use it:
“Let us be clearly understood, I am convinced that it would be of the greatest to be able to have contact with a Black literature or architecture of the 3rd century BC. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Black philosopher and Plato…”
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oops ha ha did anyone guess the missing word? ha ha ha
“Let us be clearly understood, I am convinced that it would be of the greatest INTEREST to be able to have contact with a Black literature or architecture of the 3rd century BC. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Black philosopher and Plato..”
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Great post Abagond.
Cue the drapto infestation, and the not usual variety. These will be those irritating MLK-quoting types, and the “thank you for not being so divisive today” types.
*shudders*
In other words, this post is going to go right over their heads.
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As Fanon apparently goes over yours, Ank.
Fanon comes right out and says PRECISELY what Paul Gilroy has been saying: there is no way, ultimately, to recover “black” without also recovering “white” and thus perpetuating racism.
You can’t have the one without the other. The system itself needs to be superceded. And yet the only way to do THAT is to correctly perceive black and white, which, of course tends to lead to their perpetuation as sociological categories.
Anti-racist tactics thus contradict anti-racist strategy. As a solution to this, Fanon grounds his particular struggle in humanism and open-minded skepticism, as well as a rejection of dogma.
Which is precisely where he and you part ways, Ank.
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With regard to:
“The system itself needs to be superceded. And yet the only way to do THAT is to correctly perceive black and white, which, of course tends to lead to their perpetuation as sociological categories”.
So does this mean there is no way out then??
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And I forgot to add though I have not read it in its entirety in ‘the Wretched of the World’, his other book. He intimates what you say here viz. of the bourgeoisie, who would take over from their colonial masters – and as we can see he was correct on this amongst other things
Click to access sharawi.pdf
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So does this mean there is no way out then??
Nope. I agree with Fanon and Gilroy: revolutionary rhetoric needs to be tempered with humnanism.
Fanon famously said that if the racially-based anti-colonial movement couldn’t transform itself into a humanist movement upon victory, colonialism and racism would be perpetuated, but with black faces in power.
I realize that this is a sweeping generalization and that there are many individualexceptions to it, but basically, that is indeed what has happened in much of post-colonial Africa.
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Cheers,
Not a sweeping generalisations at all ha ha
The only ‘problem’ with humanism is that it is a ‘social construct’ like any other in society that has to be constructed by people. And with people come prejudices etc.
So humanism is not this thing out there but rather and strangely something within the human, if you follow.
Hmmm!!
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And apparently my comment went over your head Thad.
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Not that a comment of mine going over your head is new or anything….
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ha ha ha Ankhesen Mie
Its funny your comments went over my head…until I went, a few seconds ago, and re-read it again more slowly
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Frantz Fanon Documentary – Black Skin, White Mask
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And apparently my comment went over your head Thad.
Oh, I get your comments alright, Ank. I just happen to think that you’re a whole lot less clever than you seem to feel you are.
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