“The Fact of Blackness” Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Franz Fanon

Fanon’s text gives a personal and theoretical account of what it is like to be an individual under colonial rule. Specifically, he theorizes his experiences as a black man under white French rule on the Caribbean island of Martinique. In “The Fact of Blackness,” Fanon draws on Marxist, Hegelian, Existentialist and psychoanalytic ideas in order to account for the specific forces which operate in the colonial space. The most pressing question of the chapter concerns how the black subject thinks about himself. To answer this, Fanon draws extensively on psychoanalytic theory. His important innovation in this respect is that instead of conducting his analysis on the individual level, he considers how wider social structures affect the psyches of black individuals.

 

“The Fact of Blackness” is fragmentary and unruly. Sometimes described as a stream of consciousness, the text both narrates Fanon’s intellectual journey and recounts scenes presumably from his life. Many of the latter involve casual, subtle or overt racism. He gives us snippets of conversations which are placed alongside quotations from philosophers and theorists. The text also includes poetry, mostly from Fanon’s teacher Aimé Césaire. We should note that one of the themes of the text is the way in which rationality has been used as a tool of racism. The text is, therefore, an explicit rejection of rationality and rational forms of argument. We note this by way of a warning – what follows is an attempt to impose an organization onto the text. More than other summaries here, it is partial and fails to give a sense of the vitality and anger of the original text. It is designed to help students access Fanon’s chapter, but is in no way a substitute for reading the original.

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The self in the colonial setting

In the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon states that he is composing “a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem.” Fanon argues that the colonial space is pathological. That is, it prevents the healthy psychological development of black individuals. 

 

Fanon’s theory centers on the idea of subjectivity and draws from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Fanon agrees that individuals do not become subjects by themselves. Instead, subjects are formed socially through interactions with other humans. Individuals become subjects once they see that other people see them as subjects.

 

In the colonial setting, however, the only valid subject position is reserved for white men. Black people are simply not seen as subjects. This explains why Fanon writes: “At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.” He means that in the colony, black people are not considered subjects and therefore do not have the status of being fully human. Instead, they are seen as objects: “I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”

 

In the dichotomous world of the colony, white subjectivity is formed in opposition to black objectivity. The black man “must be black in relation to the white man.” As Fanon notes, “the Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly.” In other words, black people are the opposite of whites. If whites are humans, then blacks are animals. If whites are good, then blacks are bad etc. In this way, black people have the function of securing the subjectivity of white people as decent and civilized.

 

So, instead of being seen as people, black men are understood through a series of racist narratives. Fanon notes that he has been “woven [...] out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.” The results of this process are brought to light as Fanon recounts an episode where a white child sees him on a train and exclaims “Look! A Negro!” The child proceeds to say “I’m frightened” before “throw[ing] himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me.” The child reveals to Fanon how he is viewed by French society. Even if it is not generally said out loud, Fanon is read according to his skin color and interpreted through racist tropes.

 

In light of this incident, Fanon realizes that he exists in three ways: “I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race and for my ancestors.” Expanding on this, he adds: “I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.” In stating that he discovers his blackness, Fanon means that the episode reveals to him what blackness means. It is not up to him to define his race since it has already been forcefully defined for him. Its meaning is violently imposed on him and comprises the defects discussed above as well as popular mythology concerning African ancestry. 

 

The reference to “Sho’ good eatin’” is an attempt to translate the French phrase “Y’a bon Banania” which was an advertising slogan. The advert was accompanied with the image of a smiling black infantryman and the use of pidgin French implies the inferiority of the speaker. Fanon here points to the ways in which mass produced, everyday racism renders him an object of fear and ridicule.

 

White Masks

Since subjects must be white, black men have no choice but to wear what the title of the book refers to as a white mask. This means speaking French, adopting white forms of behavior and dress, getting a French education and training for a prestigious profession. These are all things that Fanon does. He attends medical school and becomes a psychiatrist. In short, he does exactly what the French colonists want him to do.

 

Yet he discovers that wearing a white mask is not a solution. On a straightforward level, no matter what he does, he is always first and foremost, black. This is apparent even when people, perhaps friends and colleagues, are not trying to be racist: “Oh, I want you to meet my black friend.” Furthermore, he discovers that the status of being a respected professional is always fragile and provisional. As a doctor, for example, he notes that “if the physician made a mistake it would be the end of him and all those who came after him.” In this example, the black doctor does not just represent himself, but all black doctors.

 

On a more sophisticated level, Fanon notes that wearing a white mask is pathological since it leads to alienation. Ultimately, this sort of subjectivity is unsustainable causing total fragmentation: “I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.” In the end, the split between being black and identifying as white is unsustainable. In one of the most quoted passages of the text, Fanon presents the experience of seeing himself through the eyes of a white man:

 

And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema. It does not impose itself on me; it is, rather, a definitive structuring of the self and of the world—definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world.

 

Here, Fanon narrates the deeply alienating effects of being seen, and hence seeing himself as an other. The passage reads like an out of body experience, where Fanon is dislocated from his own body and hence unable to perform a simple action. Not only is there a dislocation between Fanon’s conscious self and his body, but between his body and the world. This detachment is the cumulative effect of being seen and understood specifically through his skin color which is encoded with the pure negativity discussed above. It is impossible for Fanon to reconcile this racist set of meanings with his own sense of himself. Ordinarily, it is through our bodies that we access and experience the world and other people. But the absolute rejection of the black body does not allow Fanon to do this.

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Négritude

Since wearing a white mask does not help, Fanon searches for other ways to assert his subjectivity. Making himself known as a black man does not work since, as we have seen, black men have already been defined through racist narratives. On the other hand, there is no option of being anonymous or invisible; his identity is written on his skin.

 

Turning away from the white world, Fanon considers contemporary black cultural movements. Quoting the poetry of Aimé Césaire, he looks to the artistic movement called Négritude which promotes black consciousness by celebrating black history and culture. In particular, Négritude explores and celebrates the cultural achievements of African civilizations. 

 

But ultimately, Fanon, is dissatisfied with this approach. This is because it cannot escape racist discourse. He notes that: “the white man explained to me that, genetically, I represented a stage of development: ‘Your properties have been exhausted by us.’” In other words, even if there is something to be celebrated in black culture, white culture still sees itself as inherently superior and more advanced. Fanon is also disappointed to note that Jean-Paul Sartre, the Existentialist philosopher, dismisses Négritude as a reaction to racism and thus as a temporary step towards the next stage in human development.

 

Fanon sums up his despair:

 

Every hand was a losing hand for me. I analyzed my heredity. I made a complete audit of my ailment. I wanted to be typically Negro—it was no longer possible. I wanted to be white—that was a joke. And, when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me.

 

The chapter ends on an ambiguous note. While refusing to accept his “amputation,” Fanon acknowledges his inability to escape his situation. Unable to act, the final words are “I begin to weep.”