This book should really be called ‘The Second Race And Its Discontents’, because I’m seeing a lot of Beauvoirisms and Freudisms, though perhaps Fanon was just trying to appeal to the adolescent boy market with all those references to genitalia.
Here’s some Second Sex quotes that could easily be applied to ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, just replace women with ‘Blacks’ and men with ‘Whites’.
“Woman has to be compared with man in her becoming”
“It is very difficult to give a generally valid description of the notion of female”
“Woman is her body … but her body is something other than her”
“Woman’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness”
I find it interesting how it mentions that language can be used as a mask, especially after learning in Psychology how our language affects our perception of colour and time, and leaning in Anthropology how vital it is to learn the language of whatever culture you are studying, in order to become more immersed. The fact that colonised countries are still speaking English, French, and Spanish is an ugly reminder of Europe’s past; Europeans took these countries’ languages away from them, and they won’t be getting them back.
Saying that having black skin is only a surface level thing and not symbolic of any black identity sounds quite controversial. It reminded me almost immediately of the 1969 White Paper, which proposed to eliminate the legal status of ‘Indian’. It caused quite a bit of controversy, mainly because the Aboriginal community wanted to keep their identity, as assimilation would’ve meant the destruction of their culture.
Still, it makes me glad that this book was written over 50 years ago, and now racism is gone forever.
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Wait, it’s not? Darn.
