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Recommended: Racism in the 1800s
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon looks at the effects of both racism and the process of colonization on the colonized. Even though Fanon’s work targets a French audience, it holds a universal message which is significant to anyone who is exposed to racism and/or colonialism whether they are the oppressor or the oppressed. While Black Skins, White Masks was written over half a century ago, is Fanon’s work still relevant today? In this short paper I will look at some of the themes of racism, colonization and the complex relationships they create among various groups as well as the inner turmoil which may be created within the subjugated group. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon begins by discussing the dual nature of the black man, as …show more content…
In Fanon’s case this refers to the colonization efforts of France, however, this same ideology can be applied to other colonized parts of the world both in settlement colonies, those which were established to maintain and develop a presence or permanent residency and those areas colonized for the purpose or exploiting the resources of the colonized area for the benefit of and exportation to the home country. Either way, I believe the process of colonization, if effect, results in the same type of oppressor/oppressed dichotomy in which the colonizer becomes the dominant or master class. This can still be seen even within modern life such as gentrification projects in major cities established to allow wealthier more desirable people, predominantly white middle to upper class, to ‘colonize’ poorer areas uprooting the original inhabitants, usually poor minority groups, and then claiming the land for themselves. Basically this is another way of the dominant group to continue to maintain their power and authority over …show more content…
That is the first truth. He is comparison in the sense that his is constantly preoccupied with self-assertion and the ego idea. Whenever he is in the presence of someone else, there is always the question of worth and merit. The Antillean does not possess a personal value of his own and is always dependent on the presence of “the Other”. The question is always whether he is less intelligent than I, blacker than I, or less good than I. Every self-positioning or self-fixation maintains a relationship of dependency on the collapse of the other. It’s on the ruins of my entourage that I build my virility. (Fanon 2008,
Césaire states that “colonization works to decline the colonizer, to brutalize him in the truest sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism” (Césaire, 173). This can be seen
In the course of Colonization, the world was divided into binary categories of the colonizer and colonized. These binary groups were based on a division of class, gender, race, ethnicity and the oppression of cultural traditions. Traditions of language, religion, labor, and social values were based on theologies of the colonizers, enforced upon the colonized. These binaries can be associated with the Manichean binaries discussed by Frantz Fanon in his book entitled The Wretched of the Earth. In Post-Coloniality, societies gain independence either through diplomatic political transitions or violent revolutions against the occupying force. Regardless of how independence is achieved, these societies undergo a multitude of socio-cultural changes. The colonized populations struggle to rebuild their communities, individual identities and national identities. The process of this decolonization is a long-term and strenuous procedure that varies from one culture to the next. Periods of colonial oppression have negative repercussions on social structures and prohibit certain cultural growth. It is the nationalism that bonds individuals together in creating a national identity, rebuilding the state while imagining the community and representing it in the traditional cultural affiliations of the indigenous populations.
After a journey into the dark history of Europe and Africa with Sven Lindqvist, I found myself shocked. It’s earth shattering. Ideas and historical events are presented through a journal/proposal of his unique view on racism. Lindqvist raises questions as to where racism was spurred and why what happened in late 1800’s and early 1900’s lead to the holocaust. Including religion, personal human values, advanced warfare and even societies’ impact as a whole. His travels through the Sahara and Africa in the early chapters show a more current day view of society over seas. The description of the desolate continent and harsh conditions paints a picture of what previous civilization lived through. He explains that part of the reason he has traveled to the desert is to feel the space all around him, a definite emptiness if you will. As his travels progress he introduces his own family life that pertains to the human emotion, which is also a big focus point in this book. Childhood beatings over taking the lord’s name in vain, dropped calls from his daughter that leave him torn and sad. He does an excellent job on taking the reader on a personal journey with him through his current day traveling and even his early life. Linking these personal experiences and tying in histories misconceptions of “right and wrong” is what makes this book so valuable. Lindqvist gives a relevant and educated answer to the question of how racism became such a terrible tribulation in all parts of the world.
Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness,” Fanon asserts that the Black people’s psyches are deformed by Whites’ anti-Black racism. As he states, the Black man is an invention of the White man. Blackness, as it is set forth in the colonial or other oppressive structures, is a cumulative trauma that severely affects the self, a 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 BSWM left room for some hope that reconciliation and healing between Blacks and Whites was achievable, he later changed his outlook in so far that he realized that the colonizer’s psychological warfare would forever impede it and along with it the native’s healing process. Violence, as an act of self-assertion is meant to be the start of a long-term process, in which the danger of resignation, of falling back into the trap of self-loathing, is ever present. His time in Algeria, first as a psychiatrist who treated both torture victims and their torturers,
The colony is not only a possibility in the geographical; it is a mental dominance that can imperialize the entire self. Entire continents have be domineered, resources completely dried, and at colonialism’s usual worst, the mental devastation of the indigenous culture has left a people hollow. Indigenous culture is no longer that. In the globalized world, no culture is autonomous; culture cannot breathe without new ideas and new perspectives, perspectives that have traditionally come from the people who have lived within the culture. But, the imposition of dominant cultures has certainly benefited from culture’s own vulnerability, as global similarities now exist throughout most different, yet not separate cultures. Postcolonialism is imperialism with a mask on, nothing less. As Franz Fanon puts it “that imperialism which today is fighting against a s true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our land and our spirits.”
In Du Bois' "Forethought" to his essay collection, The Souls of Black Folk, he entreats the reader to receive his book in an attempt to understand the world of African Americans—in effect the "souls of black folk." Implicit in this appeal is the assumption that the author is capable of representing an entire "people." This presumption comes out of Du Bois' own dual nature as a black man who has lived in the South for a time, yet who is Harvard-educated and cultured in Europe. Du Bois illustrates the duality or "two-ness," which is the function of his central metaphor, the "veil" that hangs between white America and black; as an African American, he is by definition a participant in two worlds. The form of the text makes evident the author's duality: Du Bois shuttles between voices and media to express this quality of being divided, both for himself as an individual, and for his "people" as a whole. In relaying the story of African-American people, he relies on his own experience and voice and in so doing creates the narrative. Hence the work is as much the story of his soul as it is about the souls of all black folk. Du Bois epitomizes the inseparability of the personal and the political; through the text of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois straddles two worlds and narrates his own experience.
The black man is hence for white culture the “the burden of original sin” (Fanon 168). Racism in this way is essentially a kind of defense reaction, which, in a way, explains why racism so powerfully enforces and reaffirms relations of separation and distance – the white man wants as much distance
Hall, S. (1996), ‘The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?’ in Read, A. (ed.) The Fact of Blackness, Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 12-37.
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
After exploring the backgrounds of Joseph Conrad and Alan Paton, we realize the differences in their upbringings and how that may have had an effect on their outlooks of Africa. These authors grew up in completely different settings in completely different time periods; Joseph Conrad in a predominantly white area amongst those who would be the colonists of Africa in the future, and Alan Paton in the Africa itself amongst those who the colonization affected most greatly. These factors contribute to the different viewpoints that are apparent in their respective works. From analyzing the content of their writings, it is apparent that, although, both authors have the same overall opinion of colonialism, these opinions are due to two very different reasons.
In Fanon analysis of colonialism and decolonization Wretched of the Earth “On Violence”, the relationship between the phrases “possession” and “the colonist’s table” establish a sense of ownership of wealth, intellect, and independence. Obviously the colonists were the wealthy ones with a life of freedom, riches, and every possession they may owned gave them a sense of power. Sitting at the colonist’s table can have one to think they are a part of such great power and is reluctant to have a life of riches and valuable possessions, which the colonized wished they had.
He deplored a European culture that was imperialistic in its economic, social, and psychological relations with the colonized people of the world, and expressed solidarity with the anti-colonial strivings of these people whose political movements liquidated the “stultifying inertia” of the pre WWII era (Wright 19). Black Skin, White Mask is a book about the mindset or psychology of racism by Frantz Fanon. He repeatedly tells the story of young people leaving Martinique to study in France with the expectation of being assimilated to White Society, only to discover upon arrival that they were perceived as black. The book basically looks at what goes through the minds of blacks and whites under the conditions of white rule and the strange effects that it has, especially on black people. It is broken up into a few chapters: the black man and language (if you do not learn the white man’s language perfectly, you are unintelligent but if you do learn it perfectly, you have washed your brain in their universe of racist ideas), the woman of color and the white man (these women look down on their own race and deep down want to be white), the man of color and the white woman (these men want to be white too or at least prove they are equal to whites), the so-called dependency complex of the colonized (argues that people of color have a deep desire for white rule, that those
Her text, “Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks” critically assesses Fanon’s treatment of gender in his first book. She focuses primarily on his psychoanalytical approach and challenges the supposed discrepancy between psychoanalysis and the politics of racialization so common in the interpretation of Fanon’s work (75). For Bergner, “race and gender are mutually constitutive” as the “white gaze produces multiple subject positions.” She provides a comprehensive summary of Fanon’s contribution to psychoanalysis and shows how he reinterpreted some of Freud’s central assumptions to include race as an analytical category. She contends that Fanon’s approach largely excludes women, acknowledges their subjectivity only in their sexual relationships to men, who use the female body as a mediating object in their struggle for power (80). She contends that Fanon merely replicates Freud’s misogynistic model, with the difference that he assigns the feminine role to black men, thus creating a white men-black men binary, a male-centered model of liberation, which reinforces the colonial structure Fanon wants to overcome, at least with regard to gender (84). Bergner suggest that a synthesis of postcolonial and feminist psychoanalysis could remedy the shortcomings in Fanon’s approach
At the same time, the nature of European interest in Africa changed dramatically.************* Frantz Fanon’s 1959 book, A Dying Colonialism, offers an interesting look on the Algerian War of Independence. In spite of its often gruelling subject matter, this book remains strangely optimistic. As the title suggest, Fanon is describing the end of a system. It is important to note that Fanon is not arguing that colonialism has indeed ended already, but rather that the end is coming soon. Simply put his book is a convincing argument for how colonialism is in decline. How there cannot be a future that sees Algeria under colonial rule. How “colonialism has definitely lost out in Algeria” (Fanon,: 31). Fanon saw how the French had already lost the battle for controlling the Algerian psychology. They had lost the battle for ideas. In light of the work of Antonio Gramsci, they were not able to exercise hegemony in Algeria. They for instance tried to convince Algerian women that they were being oppressed (Fanon: 38). By doing this they hoped to gain power over men whilst simultaneously destroying Algerian culture (Fanon: 38). This was clearly an instance of what Gayatri Spivak refers to as the phenomenon of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Fanon: 33). Fanon sees this attempt by the French as an absolute failure. Even though they do indeed use the rhetoric that is so
Our world has been plagued by racism before biblical times. Two of the most inhumane outgrowths of racism are detribalization and slavery. During the nineteenth-century European Imperialism, racism led to many acts of inhumanity by Europeans, particularly in Africa. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness presents us with a fictional account of these inhumane acts in Africa illustrating that racism and its outgrowths are the most cruel examples of man's inhumanity to man.