Black Skin Identity

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Recommended: Identity through race

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon examines the different socially, culturally and independently conceived aspects of his identity. Throughout the text, Fanon explains how living in a white supremacist world presents many obstacles on his journey towards finding his identity as a black man. Consequently, he examines various ways in which he can overcome these obstacles but also wonders if he should stop relating his self-identity to his blackness altogether. Fanon inwardly evaluates himself and in the last paragraph of Black Skin, White Masks he creates a synthesized bildungsroman of sorts. Sentence by sentence of this paragraph, more and is revealed about Fanon and his perception of himself. In this last paragraph, Fanon uses metaphor …show more content…

This is the moment where Fanon uses the sky to represent the world around him changing for the better, in a beautiful way. Throughout Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon encounters many obstacles in the journey towards finding his identity, and overcomes many of these aforementioned obstacles. Every time he overcomes one of these obstacles is when he sees the sky “turn upon itself” because overcoming this obstacle is the beginning of a new reality. However, the next sentence describes the feeling of a new obstacle replacing the one he has jut overcome: “I wanted to rise, but disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed” (Fanon 108). This metaphor depicting his culturally-forced silence as a bird with clipped wings is hugely significant of his lifelong struggle towards finding his identity outside of himself solely as a black man. It makes apparent Fanon’s frustration with the white supremacist culture in continuously trying to silence him in his venture to find his own identity. While his soul is more resilient than anything else, obstacles on such a large scale can becoming taxing to even the strongest of

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