Black Skin, White Masks is Frantz Fanon’s study of the psychology of colonialism, first published in French in 1952 and translated into English by Charles Lam Markmann. Fanon, a Martinican-born psychiatrist who worked in Algeria during its war of independence, wrote it as a clinical and philosophical examination of what racism does to the inner life of the colonized. The book moves through eight chapters — on language, on interracial desire, on the so-called dependency complex of colonized peoples, on the lived fact of blackness, on psychopathology, and on recognition — before closing with a conclusion that refuses consolation.
“The explosion will not happen today.”
The Core Argument
Fanon’s central claim is that the black man under colonialism is not simply oppressed from outside but damaged from within. The inferiority complex he carries is not innate; it is the outcome of a double process, first economic, then internalized — or, in Fanon’s word, epidermalized. Society manufactures the complex and then draws stability from perpetuating it. Because of this, no purely psychological cure will do. Fanon insists that effective disalienation requires immediate recognition of social and economic realities, and that beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny — the social dimension that psychoanalysis alone cannot supply. The black man must wage war on both levels at once; any unilateral liberation is incomplete, and to believe the two levels will automatically correct each other would be the gravest mistake.
What follows from this is a refusal of the false choice between assimilation and withdrawal. Fanon describes the black man who wants to be white, and the white man who slaves to reach a human level, as equally sick. The man who adores the Negro is as disordered as the man who abominates him. Against both, Fanon sets a demand for dignity — not equality with the white man, but being true to oneself — and a universalism that does not yet exist and cannot emerge from the dominant discourse. His stated purpose in analyzing Western universalism is blunt: “I hope by analyzing it to destroy it.” He is not against universality as such, only against a particular kind of universalism built on the notion of superiority and projected as though it belonged to everyone. The world is not human, he writes; appeals to reason and respect for human dignity will not alter reality. If you want a different world, you have to change the one you have.
Inside the Book
The 2008 Foreword: Fanon’s Anger and the Zone of Non-Being
Ziauddin Sardar opens the 2008 edition by seizing on Fanon’s first move: the explosion will not happen today. He gathers the book’s maxims — that Fanon brings no timeless truths, that fervor is the weapon of the impotent, that the black man wants to be white while the white man slaves to reach a human level — and locates their source in a zone of non-being where black is not a man. This anger, Sardar insists, is not spontaneous. It is historically situated and still contemporary, echoing the poor of Africa, the marginalized of Asia and Latin America, anti-Empire demonstrators, and the victims of the War on Terror. It is born of experience, self-analysis, and reflection, and it aims at dignity — not equality with the white man but fidelity to one’s own Self.
Sardar then sketches the life. Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, to a father descended from slaves and a mother of mixed French parentage. He studied under Aimé Césaire at the Lycée Schoelcher, agitated against the Vichy regime, traveled to Dominica, joined the French resistance, endured daily racism, was wounded, and received the Croix de Guerre. After the war he took up medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, married José Dublé in 1952, and had one son. He absorbed Sartre, befriended Octave Mannoni, and in 1953 became head of psychiatry at Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algiers. Sardar notes Malek Bennabi’s 1954 Vocation de l’Islam and its idea of “colonisibility.” Fanon secretly backed the revolution, resigned in 1956, joined the FLN, moved to Tunis, founded Moudjahid, served as ambassador to Ghana, was diagnosed with leukemia, and died in Washington on 6 December 1961. Sardar tracks The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s fall from celebrity, and his revival through postcolonial studies.
Black Skin, White Masks, Sardar argues, was the first book to investigate the psychology of colonialism — the internalization of inferiority and the emulation of oppressors — a line later carried by Ashis Nandy and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He notes Fanon’s use of Freud, Adler, and Jung, the text’s discontinuities and contradictions, and “The Fact of Blackness” as stream of consciousness. He addresses charges of sexism, citing Bart Moore-Gilbert, and Fanon’s contextual use of European humanism. Finally Sardar asks what the black man wants, working through epidermalization, whiteness as purity, blackness as ugliness, the thesaurus synonyms, the idealized Negro as a white construction, self-loathing, and the need to say no and reach for the universal. Language and culture, France’s influence, “white” as European civilization and “black” as the non-West, and racism embedded in anthropology, political science, and comics all come under his eye.
Universalism, Dominance, and the Single Fanon
The dominance of western culture, globalized through dominance, must not be confused with universalism. A discourse accepted worldwide is not thereby universally valid, Sardar writes, any more than burgers and coke are universally embraced, healthy, or acceptable food; their global presence shows the power of the culture that produced them. Fanon’s universalism lies elsewhere. Some postcolonial theorists see two Fanons: Nicolas Harrison proposes reconciling an anti-universal and a pro-universal strain by historicizing them, while another approach treats his claims as rhetorical or strategic gestures. But Fanon is not anti-universal per se — only against a universalism built on superiority and projected as universal discourse. His purpose is plain: “I hope by analyzing it to destroy it.” There are not two contradictory positions but one unified one. Fanon has no patience for postmodern ambiguity, given the colonizer’s total deafness to the colonized’s political condition.
His universalism rests on dignity, equality, and equity — a concrete and ever-new understanding of man that does not yet exist, cannot emerge from the dominant discourse, and cannot be a grand narrative privileging one culture. It is the universalism we must struggle for and build. Fanon is not content with knowledge and criticism; he wants the universal person to be actional. Having thought, we must prepare to act. Our prime task is to preserve respect for the basic values that constitute a human world. The world is not human. Appeals to reason or respect for human dignity will not alter reality; if you want a different world, you have to change the one you have.
“What Matters Is Not to Know the World but to Change It”
Fanon was no postmodern theorist. His ideas emerged in the crucible of colonial experience, were put into practice, and served the anti-colonial struggle. By the time he wrote Black Skin, White Masks he had fought for the French resistance in the Caribbean and against the Germans in France; he had lived in a racist society and felt its dark side. Jenny Sharpe notes that Fanon and other anti-colonial writers — C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Albert Memmi — were geographically and historically removed from the institutional development of postcolonial studies, a First World academic discourse of the eighties and nineties. Fanon had no luxury for theorizing for its own sake. Black Skin, White Masks is not a technical manual full of esoteric jargon but a text of passion, argument, analysis, and anecdote. Action does not follow automatically from understanding; it requires aspiration and desire, and that is what Fanon seeks to promote.
Much has changed since his time, yet the underlying structures of oppression and injustice remain.
The Antilles Negro and the French Language
Fanon opens with a warning that the language problem is too fundamental to treat exhaustively here. He leans on Piaget’s stages of language mastery and on Gelb and Goldstein’s demonstration that language function breaks into discrete periods and steps, then narrows his focus to one case: the black man confronting French, and the Antilles Negro’s peculiar love of speaking it. Sartre, in Orphée Noir, predicted the black poet would turn against French; Fanon, siding with Michel Leiris, says this simply does not hold in the Antilles. Leiris argued that Creole is destined to become a relic once public education reaches the disinherited classes, held back only by scarce schools, little reading matter, and low living standards. The Antillean poets, he added, do not deliberately revive a dead language as the Provençal poets did; they assert the integrity of their personalities against prejudiced white men.
Gilbert Gratiant writes in dialect, but he is a rarity and the poetic merit of such work is dubious. Real art, by contrast, gets translated out of Peul and Wolof in Senegal—Fanon followed Sheik Anta Diop’s linguistic studies closely. In the Antilles nothing comparable exists: the official language is French, and teachers watch children to stamp out Creole. Unlike the Bretons, the Antilleans do consider themselves inferior to the French, having been “civilized” by the white man. An attitude of rupture, Fanon insists, never saved anyone; throwing off a strangler is purely physiological, and grafting a psychological element onto respiration is unsound. A bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles who refuses certification over color proves only that philosophy never saved anyone; proving black intelligence equals white proves intelligence never saved anyone—both have justified the extermination of men. He distinguishes alienated blacks, who are duped, from alienated whites, who dupe and are duped; a Sartre or a Cardinal Verdier calling the color problem an outrage occupies a normal position. Quoting Sartre’s opening, Fanon says whoever looks into his eyes for anything but a perpetual question will lose his sight; there is no black problem, or it concerns whites only accidentally.
Pidgin, Patronage, and the Livery of the White Man
Dr. H. L. Gordon of Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi claimed in 1943 that examination of a hundred normal Native brains revealed inherent inferiority amounting to 14.8 percent—a figure Fanon cites from Sir Alan Burns’s Colour Prejudice, where Burns himself concludes that the black man’s inherent inferiority is not scientifically proved. The Negro is called the link between monkey and man, meaning white man; the Bible’s separation of races is said to continue in heaven, “We are the chosen people.” Fanon’s purpose is to help the black man free himself of the complexes bred by the colonial environment. He recalls M. Achille of the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, a Catholic on a student pilgrimage, asked by a priest, “You go ‘way big Savannah what for and come ‘long us?” Achille answered truthfully; everyone laughed; the pilgrimage proceeded.
Whites addressing Negroes behave like adults with children—smirking, patronizing—and Fanon has watched physicians, policemen, and employers do it. His study concerns dupes and dupers; normal whites fall outside it, as a healthy liver leaves the kidneys to the examiner. Pidgin angers the Negro because it makes him a pidgin-nigger-talker: the absence of wish, the indifference, the automatic classification, the primitivizing and decivilizing. Fanon confesses he once slipped into talking down to a seventy-three-year-old demented farm woman—a dereliction in relations with others. He always speaks normal French to “bicots” and is understood. A black man saying “I am in no sense your boy, Monsieur” is something new. In a Rouen or Strasbourg bar, an old drunk sits down: “You—Africa? Dakar, Rufisque, whorehouse, dames, cafe, mangoes, bananas…” Leaving brings abuse: “You didn’t play big shot like that in your jungle, you dirty nigger!” Mannoni described the Prospero complex; to talk pidgin-nigger means “You’d better keep your place.” A Russian or German speaking bad French is still presumed to have a country, a profession; the Negro has no culture, no civilization, no long historical past—perhaps explaining the contemporary Negro’s striving to prove a black civilization. The Negro must wear the livery the white man sewed: children’s magazines, films dubbed in French, the servant in Duel in the Sun. A black man quoting Montesquieu had better be watched. When a Negro talks of Marx: “We have brought you up to our level and now you turn against your benefactors.” The plantation owner’s argument: our enemy is the teacher. The European has a fixed concept of the Negro, and the exasperating question—”How long have you been in France? You speak French so well”—closes the black man off, injecting dangerous foreign bodies. A properly speaking black man puts on the white world.
Mayotte Capecia and the Dream of Lactification
Fanon turns to Mayotte Capecia’s Je suis Martiniquaise, quoting her wish to marry a white man because a woman of color is never fully respectable in a white man’s eyes. He calls the book cut-rate merchandise, a sermon in praise of corruption, and its enthusiastic reception forces analysis. Mayotte submits to a white man as her lord, asking only “a bit of whiteness.” Fanon reorders her sentence about loving him for blue eyes, blond hair, and light skin to show she loved him because of these traits—Antilleans say blue eyes frighten the Negro—and connects this to his earlier claim that inferiority is felt economically.
The Racial Distribution of Guilt
Fanon presses his case against Mannoni by turning to South Africa, where Oswin Magrath reports that poor whites make up half the European population and most South Africans feel a physical revulsion at anything raising a native to their level. Mannoni had argued that economic exclusion springs from fear of competition and the wish to keep the poor-white class from sinking further, and that colonial exploitation and colonial racism are unlike any other. Fanon refuses the distinction. All exploitation resembles all other exploitation, each seeks cover in some Biblical edict, and all are identical because all are aimed at the same object: man. To examine exploitation in the abstract is to turn one’s back on the basic problem of restoring man to his proper place.
Colonial racism, then, is no different from any other racism. Anti-Semitism strikes Fanon head-on, enraging him and stripping him of the possibility of being a man; he cannot separate himself from his brother’s future. Every act commits him as a man, every silence and cowardice reveals him as one. He quotes Césaire: on hearing of lynched Negroes, insulted Jews, or forced labor legalized in Africa, one must conclude that Hitler is not dead. European civilization and its best representatives bear responsibility for colonial racism—the same middle class that was surprised by the Gestapos and torturers had been an accomplice to Nazism while it was employed only against non-European peoples.
Fanon recalls being stopped by policemen who took him for an Arab, then apologized obsequiously once they learned he was Martinican, insisting a Martinican differs from an Arab. He cites Francis Jeanson: every citizen is responsible for actions committed in the nation’s name. South Africa has a racist structure, he says, and goes further—Europe has one too. Mannoni claims France is among the least racialist-minded countries; Fanon retorts that France is racist, the myth of the bad nigger lodged in the collective unconscious.
The Racist Creates His Inferior
Mannoni holds that an inferiority complex tied to skin color appears only among minorities living within another-colored group, and rarely among homogeneous Malagasies. Fanon objects: a white man in a colony never feels inferior, and the colonial, though a minority, does not either. In Martinique two hundred whites consider themselves superior to three hundred thousand people of color; in South Africa two million whites stand against nearly thirteen million natives. Adler and Kuenkel explain some neurotic behavior but cannot yield laws for problems this complex. The colonized’s feeling of inferiority correlates to the European’s feeling of superiority: the racist creates his inferior, just as Sartre said the anti-Semite makes the Jew.
Mannoni’s exceptional cases are educated Negroes rejected by a civilization they assimilated, and he leaves the Malagasy no choice save inferiority or dependence. Fanon faults him for sealing the Malagasy into his customs and applying conclusions to a bilateral totality, ignoring that since Gallieni the Malagasy has ceased to exist. What Fanon wanted was an explanation of the colonial situation, which Mannoni overlooked. Citing Balandier on Kardiner and Linton, and Kardiner on teaching Christianity to Alor, he argues that understanding something new requires preparation. It is Utopian to expect the Negro or Arab to absorb abstract values while lacking food—as ridiculous as expecting a Berliet worker to study Hindu lyricism. Nothing stands in the way except lack of opportunities. He quotes Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal on the wretched hut and the call to “start the end of the world.”
Mannoni forgot that the Malagasy exists with the European; the white man’s arrival shattered Madagascar’s horizons and psychological mechanisms. Alterity for the black man is the white man. Mannoni says petty kings sought possession of a white man—something new had come into being. The landing inflicted immeasurable injury, and the consequences were not psychological alone, since consciousness and social context are interrelated. Colonization itself must be brought to trial.
The Dependency Complex Interrogated
Mannoni writes that the Malagasy can bear not being white but suffers on discovering men are divided into whites and blacks; the equality he seeks proves inadequate, leading from psychological dependence to inferiority. Fanon counters that a Malagasy lives his Malagasyhood; he suffers from not being white to the degree the white man imposes discrimination, robs him of worth, calls him a parasite and a brute beast. The Malagasy then tries to make himself white, compelling acknowledgment of his humanity—but Mannoni answers that a dependency complex exists. Only peoples experiencing the need for dependency can be colonized, he claims, and the Europeans’ coming was unconsciously expected and desired, with legends foretelling strangers bearing gifts. The white man acts on an authority complex, the Malagasy obeys a dependency complex.
Fanon asks why the European was called vazaba, the honorable stranger, and welcomed, rather than explained through humanity, good will, and courtesy—what Césaire calls “the old courtly civilizations.” Scholars attribute it to “fateful hieroglyphics” in the unconscious making the white man the awaited master. Fanon warns against extrapolation, relating a Negro patient’s dream of becoming white. Analyzing it, he concludes the patient suffers an inferiority complex and wishes to be white because society makes that complex possible and derives stability from perpetuating it. He calls for combined action on the individual and the group.
Three Dreams and the Socius
Mannoni reports three dreams. Elphine, thirteen or fourteen, dreams a fierce black ox with long, sharp horns and a head almost mottled with white chases her; the path narrows, she perches in a mango tree, the ox rends its trunk, she falls into bushes, and it presses its horns into her so her stomach falls out and it devours it. Raza dreams he hears at school that the Senegalese are coming, goes out to see them, runs home, but finds their house dispersed by them.
The Myth of the “Bad Injun” and the Antillean Schoolboy
Fanon opens with G. Legman’s claim that by 1938 the average American six-year-old had absorbed some eighteen thousand scenes of torture and violence. Legman argues that Americans, like the Boers, drove an indigenous population off its soil within living memory and soothed their conscience by inventing the “Bad Injun,” later replaced by the Noble Redskin defending his lands against invaders armed with rifles and Bibles. Punishment is averted by denying responsibility and blaming the victim. Whether this fixation substitutes for forbidden sexuality or channels aggression against the social structure, the root perversion remains, so attacks on comic books are futile. A footnote adds that the Caribs met the same fate at French and Spanish hands.
The Antillean schoolboy recites “our ancestors, the Gauls,” identifying with the white explorer bringing an all-white truth to savages. He adopts the white man’s attitude, investing the white hero with his own aggression. Reading stories of savages told by whites, he thinks of the Senegalese—not of himself, for he is Antillean, and the Negro lives in Africa. Subjectively he conducts himself as white, learning he is a Negro only in Europe. Fanon calls the imposition of the same “Evil Spirits” on white and black a major educational error, and demands children’s magazines, songs, and history texts made especially for Negroes, since the traumatism occurs in those years. The white family is the workshop shaping one for society; among his own people the little black follows nearly the white child’s course, but in Europe he must reappraise his lot. The Negro is made inferior, not self-made inferior. The Antillean family has no link to the French national structure, so the individual climbing into white society tends to reject his black family, casting family structure back into the id. When the Negro recognizes the unreality of his adopted beliefs, his real apprenticeship begins.
The Negro and Psychopathology
Fanon answers the objection that he merely describes universal adaptation: the Negro faces a solidly established myth, unaware until the first encounter with a white man oppresses him with his blackness. The racial drama is played in the open, so the black man has no time to make it unconscious; he lacks the affective amnesia of the typical neurotic. Reading psychoanalytic works and talking with European patients, Fanon is struck by the disparity between schemas and Negro reality. The Negro is a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety. Distrusting applications of psychoanalysis, he titles the chapter “The Negro and Psychopathology,” noting Freud, Adler, and Jung did not think of the Negro—rightly, since the Oedipus complex is far from arising among Negroes. Malinowski blames matriarchal structure, but Fanon says ninety-seven percent of French Antillean families cannot produce an Oedipal neurosis, an incapacity they congratulate themselves on. Nearly every neurosis in an Antillean is the product of his cultural situation—postulates entering via books, newspapers, schools, advertisements, films, radio, shaping a white worldview because no black voice exists. As late as 1940 no Antillean could think of himself as a Negro; only with Aimé Césaire did acceptance of negritude begin. When the Negro contacts the white world, sensitizing occurs; if psychic structure is weak, the ego collapses and his goal becomes the white man, who alone confers worth.
Anti-Semitism and Negrophobia
Fanon contrasts anti-Semitism with Negrophobia, citing a young woman with “tactile delirium” who compulsively washed after a Jew was introduced to her. He credits Sartre with a masterful study of anti-Semitism and proposes to determine the constituents of Negrophobia, which he locates on an instinctual, biological level. At the extreme, the Negro’s body impedes the closing of the white man’s postural schema. Four athletic boys doing the high jump experience a “destructuration” when a fifth tops them—with the Negro, the cycle of the biological begins. A footnote invokes Lacan’s mirror stage: the real Other for the white man remains the black man, perceived as the unassimilable not-self. For the Antillean, the mirror hallucination is always neutral—asked their color, they reply “I had no color.”
No anti-Semite would conceive of castrating the Jew, who is attacked in his religious identity, history, and race. The Negro is attacked in his corporeality, lynched as a concrete personality. The Jewish menace is replaced by fear of the Negro’s sexual potency. Mannoni’s racialist argument about marrying one’s daughter to a negro disturbs incestuous feelings and turns to racialism as defence. Fanon recalls a Fort-de-France hotel, Monsieur B. said to be remarkably black, “blue” as Martinicans say, and jokes about families so black they became invisible at night. Why should incestuous tendencies emerge particularly regarding the Negro? Perhaps the father revolts because the Negro will introduce his daughter into a sexual universe for which the father lacks the key. Every intellectual gain requires a loss in sexual potential; the civilized white man longs for orgiastic scenes and projects these onto the Negro. The Jew is suspect for wanting wealth; the Negro is fixated at the genital. To suffer Negrophobia is to fear the biological. Mannoni links apes, Caliban, Negroes, and Jews with satyrs; Fanon agrees but says here the Negro is master: “Whoever says rape says Negro.”
Questioning some five hundred white people over three or four years, Fanon found almost sixty per cent of replies brought forth biology, penis, strong, athletic, potent, boxer, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Senegalese troops, savage, animal, devil, sin. One in fifty reacted with Nazi or SS. The Negro symbolizes the biological: puberty at nine, father at ten, hot-blooded. The Senegalese were called “our Black Devils” in the war. Sartre says “
The Myth of the Sensual Negro, Addressed to a Physician
Fanon turns directly to M. Salomon, reminding him that as a doctor he ought to steer clear of unscientific literary notions. The claim that Negroes are peculiarly sensual collapses the moment you compare them with the Japanese or Chinese, who are, he notes, ten times more prolific—does that make them sensual too? He admits his own revulsion at hearing any man described as “so sensual,” and confesses he does not even know what male sensuality is supposed to be. The Negro, he insists, radiates no sensuality through skin or hair; what has been imposed on Salomon across long days and nights is the image of the biological-sexual-sensual-genital-nigger. The eye, for Fanon, is no mere mirror but a correcting mirror capable of fixing cultural errors—not the crevice of the skull but a uniform light he locates in Van Gogh’s reds, in Tchaikovsky, in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” in Césaire’s writing.
He reframes the whole problem: it is not Negroes living among whites but Negroes exploited, enslaved, and despised by a colonialist, capitalist society that happens to be white only by accident. Answering Salomon’s question about the eight hundred thousand Negroes in France and the supposed “Black Peril,” he says the Martinican is a Frenchman who wants to remain in the French Union and live as a human being. He pictures himself lost in a white flood of men like Sartre or Aragon. Caution, he agrees, gains nothing; he denies abandoning his personality by marrying a European and makes no fool’s bargains. If his children are suspected or their fingernails inspected, that is society keeping its mythology intact. He refuses the either-or standpoint, rejects any talk of a black people or Negro nationality, and declares himself simply a Frenchman interested in French culture, civilization, and people—refusing outsider status and claiming his full part in the French drama. When deluded men invaded France, his place was at the heart of the problem; his interest lies in France’s future, not in a black empire.
Mounin, Dermenghem, Howlett, and Salomon all hunted for the myth’s origin, and all convinced him that an authentic grasp of Negro reality comes only at the expense of cultural crystallization. He recalls a children’s paper caption in which a black Boy Scout, showing off a Negro village, says, “This is the kettle where my ancestors cooked yours.” There are no more Negro cannibals, he concedes, but we should not forget—and the caption’s writer unknowingly did Negroes a service: the white child now pictures the Negro as having eaten the white man, not as eating him. Unquestionably progress.
Mlle. B. and the Circles of the Tom-Tom
Fanon then presents a case study from the women’s division of the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Ylie, thanking its medical director. Mlle. B., nineteen, entered in March. Dr. P.’s admission sheet certifies nervous disease with agitation, motor instability, tics, and spasms—conscious but uncontrollable—worsening and preventing normal social life, committed under the law of 1838. Twenty-four hours later the chief physician found neurotic tics beginning at ten, aggravated at puberty and when she began working away from home, with intermittent depressions and anxiety, obesity, and a request for treatment; she feels reassured in company, is assigned to an open ward, and should remain institutionalized. Family history was clean; puberty at sixteen; physical exam showed only adiposity and minimal epidermal signs of slight endocrine insufficiency; menstrual periods were regular.
An interview isolated the pattern: the tics came especially when she worked away from home, affecting eyes and forehead; she panted and yelped; she slept well without nightmares, ate well, and was untroubled during menstruation, though facial tics persisted in bed until sleep. The ward nurse observed the tics were worst when she was alone and less when talking with others or merely in company; the disturbance depended on activity. She tapped both feet, then raised feet, legs, arms, and shoulders symmetrically, uttering incomprehensible sounds that ended in loud inarticulate cries—cries that stopped the moment someone spoke to her.
The psychiatrist used waking-dream therapy. A preliminary interview revealed hallucinations of terrifying circles. In the first session, deep concentric circles expanded and contracted to the rhythm of a Negro tom-tom, which made her think of losing her parents, especially her mother. Told to make the sign of the cross, the circles did not disappear; told to rub them out with a cloth, they vanished. She turned toward the tom-tom, surrounded by half-naked dancing men and women; told not to fear joining, she did, and the dancers became a splendid party waltzing to “The Snow Star.” Told to go closer, she could no longer see the circles; told to think of them, they appeared broken; told to go through the opening, she said spontaneously that she was not completely surrounded and could get out. The circle broke into two, then several, then disappeared. Throat and eye tics occurred frequently while she talked; successive sessions would sedate the motor disturbance.
In another session, told to bring back the circles, she could not at first; then they came broken. She entered them; they broke, rose, then fell away into the void. Told to listen to the tom-tom, she did not hear it; she called to it and heard it on the left. Told an angel would accompany her, she wanted to go alone, but an angel came down smiling and took her close to the tom-tom. Only black men were there, dancing round a large fire, looking evil. The angel asked what they would do; she said they would burn a white man. She looked everywhere and could not see him, then saw him—a white man about fifty, half undressed. The angel negotiated.
Key Ideas
Several concepts carry the argument. Epidermalization names the process by which economic inferiority is written onto the skin, so that the black man’s alienation becomes a racial epidermal schema — the corporal schema crumbling and giving way to a “triple person.” Sociogeny is Fanon’s corrective to Freud: the insistence that the black man’s alienation is not an individual question, and that a sociodiagnostic is required alongside the psychoanalytic one. Lactification is his sardonic term for the dream of whitening the race, the logic he finds in Mayotte Capecia’s Je suis Martiniquaise, where a woman of color submits to a white man as her lord and asks only “a bit of whiteness.”
The Prospero complex, borrowed from Octave Mannoni, describes the colonizer’s need to treat the colonized as a child; Fanon turns it against Mannoni’s own thesis. Mannoni claims the dependency complex of colonized peoples antedates colonization, that the European was unconsciously expected and desired. Fanon rejects this: the colonized’s feeling of inferiority correlates to the European’s feeling of superiority, because the racist creates his inferior, just as Sartre said the anti-Semite makes the Jew. The racial distribution of guilt is Fanon’s name for the way the white man sloughs off responsibility by setting the Arab against the Jew against the Negro, telling each that the other is the cause of his poverty. And negritude — the affirmation of black civilization and rhythm — Fanon both embraces and interrogates, especially after Sartre’s Orphée Noir recasts it as merely the antithetical moment in a dialectic, the minor term destined to be surpassed. Reading that, Fanon says he felt robbed of his last chance.
Themes
The book’s recurring subject is the zone of non-being — the place where, as Fanon puts it, black is not a man. From that zone come the maxims that open the work: that fervor is the weapon of the impotent, that the explosion will not happen today, that the black man wants to be white while the white man slaves to reach a human level. Fanon’s anger is not spontaneous; it is borne of experience, self-analysis, and reflection, and it is directed at dignity rather than at parity.
Language is the first arena of this struggle. To speak is to exist absolutely for the other, and to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. The Antillean Negro, Fanon argues, will be proportionately whiter — closer to being a real human being — in direct ratio to his mastery of French. Hence the anger at pidgin, at the white man who talks down to the Negro as though to a child, at the compliment “You speak French so well.” The black man is asked to wear the livery the white man sewed.
Desire and the family carry the theme further. Fanon reads the frantic women of color in quest of white men, the mulatto who moves from the class of slaves to that of masters by marrying a European, the black man whose first concern on arriving in France is to sleep with a white woman. He reads Jean Veneuse through Germaine Guex’s study of abandonment neurosis and concludes that Veneuse’s color is an attempt to explain his psychic structure — that his neurosis is a sham, and that the sexual myth of questing for white flesh must not be allowed to impede understanding. The Negro enslaved by his inferiority and the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.
Running beneath all of it is the question Fanon poses at the outset and never lets go: What does a man want? What does the black man want? The answer he refuses is the one that would make the black man merely a whiter version of himself. What he reaches for instead is a concrete and ever-new understanding of man — a universalism based on dignity, equality, and equity, one that must be struggled for and built rather than inherited. And he is not content with knowledge alone. Having thought, we must prepare to act; action does not follow automatically from understanding or theorizing, because action requires aspiration and desire.
Why It Matters
Black Skin, White Masks was the first book to investigate the psychology of colonialism, examining how the colonized internalize inferiority and emulate their oppressors. Fanon drew on Freud, Adler, and Jung, but the text is not a technical manual of theory; it is full of passion, argument, analysis, and anecdote, and “The Fact of Blackness” reads as stream of consciousness. Its discontinuities and contradictions are part of its method — dialectic required Fanon to adopt positions constantly, which is why he abandoned his plan to present it as a medical thesis.
The book has drawn criticism, including charges of sexism, and its use of European humanism is contextual rather than uncritical. But its influence has been durable and wide. It shaped postcolonial studies, though Fanon himself was geographically and historically removed from that First World academic discourse of the eighties and nineties; unlike the literature of decolonization, which was bound up with Third World national liberation movements, his ideas emerged in the crucible of colonial experience, were put into practice, and were used to aid the anti-colonial struggle. He had already fought for the French resistance in the Caribbean and against the Germans in France before he wrote it. He had lived in a racist society and felt its dark side.
Much has changed since his time, yet the underlying structures of oppression and injustice remain. Direct colonial rule has largely disappeared, but colonialism lives on in cultural, economic, political, and knowledge-based forms. Racism, both blatant and incipient, remains the foundation of Fortress Europe, visible in the re-emergence of the extreme right and in the discourse surrounding refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers, and Muslim populations. A new Empire has replaced the old European ones, and its “war on terror” has become a license to flout international law and human rights. Fanon’s voice, born in a zone of non-being and aimed at dignity, is as important now as it was when he wrote it.
