Black Skin, White Masks

Citation

Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.; forewords by Z. Sardar and H. K. Bhabha). Pluto Press. (Original work published 1952 as Peau noire, masques blancs.)

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

Fanon, a psychiatrist born in Martinique and trained in France, wrote the book as a study of the Black man's situation in a world organised by white norms. Its subject is the psychology of racism and colonial domination from the side of those who live under it: how a person raised in the French colonial world takes in white values, imitates them, and then finds that acceptance is refused. The "white masks" of the title are the attitudes and behaviours a colonised person adopts to gain recognition, and the book follows the strain they create. Fanon combines clinical psychiatry and psychoanalysis with philosophy, literature and his own experience, and the style moves between argument and personal testimony.

The Pluto edition opens with two forewords and an introduction, followed by eight chapters. The Grove edition translated by Richard Philcox uses somewhat different chapter titles, and where they differ the Philcox title is given in brackets below.

Introduction

Fanon states his purpose: to analyse the psychological and existential position of the Black man in colonial society, and to help the Black man free himself from the inferiority that has been imposed on him.

Chapter 1: The Negro and Language [The Black Man and Language]

The chapter treats language as a source of power and status. For the Antillean, mastering French is a way up, and it also brings a distance from his own origins. Speaking the colonial language well earns respect in the eyes of the white world and creates a split between the speaker and his background.

Chapter 2: The Woman of Color and the White Man

Fanon looks at relationships between women of colour and white men, using fiction by writers of his time, including Mayotte Capécia, as examples. He reads in them a desire for whiteness as virtue and beauty, and he shows how colonial stereotypes shape intimate life.

Chapter 3: The Man of Color and the White Woman

The mirror chapter takes up relationships between Black men and white women. Fanon argues that such relationships can be bound up with a wish for recognition and for a status that whiteness appears to give, and that racial prejudice runs through them.

Chapter 4: The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized Peoples [The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized]

Fanon contests the idea that colonised peoples are by nature dependent on their rulers. He argues that the dependence is produced by colonisation itself and serves to justify control.

Chapter 5: The Fact of Blackness [The Lived Experience of the Black Man]

The best-known chapter describes what it is to meet the white gaze. Fanon recounts how a Black person finds himself fixed by others' view of his body, and he introduces a "historical-racial schema" that reworks the phenomenologists' idea of the body schema to include the social and racial world in which a person lives. The chapter combines personal narrative with philosophical analysis.

Chapter 6: The Negro and Psychopathology [The Black Man and Psychopathology]

Fanon uses the language of psychoanalysis to ask how the Black man is made into a figure of fear and wrongness in white culture. He argues that associations of blackness with evil are absorbed from the surrounding culture from childhood, for example through comics and stories, and that this leads to conflict in Black children when they meet the white world. The chapter includes a section on Adler.

Chapter 7: The Negro and Recognition [The Black Man and Recognition]

The chapter takes up recognition, with a section on Hegel. Fanon examines Hegel's dialectic of recognition and questions whether a philosophy modelled on white experience can describe the position of the Black man, who sees himself through the eyes of a white world.

Chapter 8: By Way of Conclusion

The conclusion calls for the rejection of the inferiority complex imposed by the colonial situation. Fanon asks for a world in which people can be recognised as full human beings and are not shut inside the identity assigned to them.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4

• White masks: the behaviours and attitudes a colonised person adopts in order to be accepted in the white world.
• Alienation through language: the gap between a colonised speaker and his origins created by mastery of the colonial language.
• Desire for whiteness: the wish for recognition expressed through relations with white partners.
• Dependency complex: the supposed dependence of colonised peoples, which Fanon attributes to colonisation itself.

Chapters 5–8

• Historical-racial schema: the way the white gaze and the social world shape a Black person's experience of the body.
• Collective unconscious as cultural: the idea that associations of blackness with evil are learned from the culture, not inherited.
• Recognition: the demand to be acknowledged as a full human being.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Method that mixes disciplines. Fanon places psychiatric observation, psychoanalytic theory, philosophy and literary reading side by side, so the book repays readers from several fields.
• Experience as evidence. Chapter 5 shows how first-person description can serve as analysis, and it remains a standard text for discussions of racialised embodiment.
• A clear organising question. Each chapter asks how a particular aspect of life (language, love, dependency, the body, the unconscious, recognition) is shaped by colonial racism, which makes the argument easy to follow chapter by chapter.

Limitations

• Passages on women and sexuality. Critics have found some passages of the book on women and sexuality sexist or homophobic, and it is best read together with that critical discussion.
• Specific to a setting. The book is grounded in the French Antilles and the Black man in the French world, and the generalisation to other colonial situations needs care.
• Difficult style. The prose moves quickly between registers and assumes familiarity with psychoanalysis, phenomenology and Hegel, which may be a hurdle for a first-time reader.
• Translation matters. The Markmann and Philcox translations differ in titles and wording, so page references and quotations should be taken from one edition.

Where It Fits in the Course

In this course on postcolonial and decolonial thought, Black Skin, White Masks is a foundational primary text from the mid-twentieth century. Young's Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction gives a quick overview into which Fanon fits, and Bhambra and Holmwood's Colonialism and Modern Social Theory shows how colonialism shapes the sociological canon. Bhambra's Rethinking Modernity, Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies, Adébísí's Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge and Harrison's Decolonizing Anthropology are later and more specialised works in the same tradition, and Fanon is a good starting point for them.

How to Use This Book

The book can be read without specialist background, though a little knowledge of Freud and of Hegel's master-slave passage helps. A good first reading is the introduction and Chapter 5, then Chapter 1 for language, Chapters 2 and 3 for the work on desire, and Chapter 7 for recognition. Chapters 4 and 6 depend more on the psychoanalytic debates of Fanon's day and can be read with a commentary.

Read slowly, and pause after each chapter to note which concept from psychology or philosophy Fanon is using and where he departs from it. For coursework, decide which translation to cite, and keep to it. Fanon's later writing, especially The Wretched of the Earth, is a useful sequel for the political side of his thought.