Fanon's Anti-Black Racism

According to Fanon, the Black man is a creation of the White man. The former internalizes the negative images and character traits White people inscribe on him. Moreover, as the negative image of Blackness is perpetually contrasted with the “purity,” the positive traits that are commonly ascribed to Whiteness, Black people increasingly identify with the aggressor and aspire to become White. Thus, victims of racism suffer from the internalized self-hate and the frustration that grows out of the desire for the unattainable – White people’s recognition. In Fanon’s view, Whites are not able to see past the dehumanizing image that they themselves have created, because they relegate Blacks and other oppressed minorities into a zone of non-being.

Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness,” Fanon asserts that the Black people’s psyches are deformed by Whites’ anti-Black racism. The defamation of blackness, as it is set forth in the colonial structure, constitutes a cumulative trauma that severely affects the self. It is a “projective” racial identity that ascribes all negative and inferior aspects onto the Black skin. In order to escape the zone of nonbeing, into which Black people are forced by White projections, Black people often try to escape that lot by acting White, aspiring to live up to standards that are impossible to achieve, turning the internalized self-hatred against themselves and other people of color. This alienation from self and one’s heritage needs to be reversed. The process of disalienation is long and painful; it is a constant struggle. While Fanon’s assessment of the situation in Black Skin, White Masks left entailed the hope that reconciliation and healing between Blacks and Whites was achievable, he later changed his outlook in so far that he realized that the colonizers’ psychological warfare would forever impede it, and along with it, the natives’ chance to reclaim their

In both of his major works, Fanon describes the active involvement in this process as an essential part of the liberation of the self; as in his view, agency was central to self-actualization. However, in Fanon’s model, violence, which could plausibly be manifested on a symbolic rather than physical level, is only the beginning; the first step of a painful and lifelong struggle to overcome the psychological damage inflicted by the colonial aggressor. Hence, violence is not a release of accumulated tension, but rather a reclaiming of subjectivity that moves the colonized from a zone of nonbeing to the zone of being through an act of active self-assertion. Fanon does not promote violence for its own sake. For him violence in never a Selbstzweck; it is a last resort to eliminate a system created and maintained through violence. Moreover, Fanon makes clear that this use of violence could negatively affect the colonized. In the final part of the book, in which he describes the psychological long-term effects violence has on both victims and