Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks:
A Primary Text of Post-Colonial Jive
Part 3

2,820 words

Part 3 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

The Negro and Psychopathology

This one is the longest chapter, about double the size of most of the others. Fortunately, it’s actually a bit relatable here and there; not entirely bitching and moaning. It begins by explaining that neurosis comes from bad upbringing — your basic Freud 101. Thus, normal families will produce normal children, and they’ll later model their relation to the state in terms of what their family life was like:

But — and this is a most important point — we observe the opposite in the man of color. A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world.

I’m not going to collapse into a puddle of guilt upon reading this. Instead, I’ll say it’s as fine a reason as any to separate.

He goes on that pop culture for youth, such as comic books, often depicted whites as protagonists defeating Indians and blacks. He says this tends to demoralize non-white youth and cause them to identify with whites. Okay, I’ll entertain the thought. He proposes that there should be magazines, songs, and history books specifically for black children. This does bring up an interesting point. I’ll concur that, ideally, ethnic groups should maintain their own cultural traditions regarding literature and the arts.

Unfortunately, that’s become rather difficult in recent times, given that mass culture has a way of crowding out authentic culture. Worse, it’s a product of the mass media: six enormous conglomerates owned and operated by Zionists, with a toxically Leftist corporate hive-mind except for the neocon conglomerate. They gave us the recent blackwashing trend, racially miscasting white roles. This isn’t “inclusion”; it’s to insult us and write us out of our own culture. They just can’t leave anything well enough alone. Anyone who believes Fanon had a point about black youths having a lack of role models must, in the name of consistency, recognize that it’s also pernicious for the mainstream media to erase our culture.

Even if the mass media didn’t have an obsession with spitting on their main audience, however, mass culture can’t be all things to all people. Moreover, most of it sucks, anyway; even the Frankfurt School had something sensible to say about that. At least for now, creative arts by and for specific cultures will tend to be niche markets. India is doing a pretty good job of it, and is perhaps a model to be emulated.

After that, the author returns to the chapter’s major theme: the previously unexplored topic of differences in black and white psychology. (Obviously, discussing racial differences lately would be fraught with peril for any white observer!) This is probably part of what Ziauddin Sardar meant when discussing Fanon’s rejection of universalism — that is, whenever he wasn’t invoking universalist principles. For one thing:

Like it or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes . . . [I]t would be relatively easy for me to show that in the French Antilles 97 per cent of the families cannot produce one Oedipal neurosis. This incapacity is one on which we heartily congratulate ourselves.

That’s all well and good, of course, though I’d have to say in general that the Freudians overdid that shtick. There’s a lot more to Freud than the Oedipus Complex, but he nearly made himself out to be a one-trick pony, at least in the popular consciousness. This is a rare trait anywhere. I’ve known a lot of people with rather Epicurean sexual inclinations, to put it very politely, but I’ve never met anyone who confessed to having the hots for his mother. Supposing I were to discover that 3% of Americans wanted to bang Mom; I’d be much more disturbed than self-congratulatory. I don’t even get why that squickiness would be any fun; it’s just not my brand of degeneracy.

Then immediately after the about-face away from universalism, there’s a curious return to Rousseau 101:

With the exception of a few misfits within the closed environment, we can say that every neurosis, every abnormal manifestation, every affective erethism in an Antillean is the product of his cultural situation. In other words, there is a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly — with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio — work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one belongs. In the Antilles that view of the world is white because no black voice exists.

Again, he laments the scarcity of black arts and media. What he’s getting at is thus the lack of positive role models for black youth. It’s obviously a stretch to ascribe every mental problem to dysfunctional culture caused by the mass media. Still, there’s a decent argument to be made that there are certain harmful effects. This would be even more so if, for example, the problem involved a decades-long saturation of demoralization propaganda. We could estimate the harmful effects by comparing the cultural state of the late 1950s, when the media was behaving itself far better, with today’s Clown World society. In that case, whoever’s running the mainstream media certainly has a lot to answer for! It seems that Fanon’s statement didn’t age well . . .

Then there’s a discussion essentially of xenophobia applied to blacks. After the previous moment of clarity are some disgraceful passages, unfortunately. Invoking Freudian Kafka-logic, he alleges that white women who fear black men secretly desire them:

The behavior of these women is clearly understandable from the standpoint of imagination. That is because the Negrophobic woman is in fact nothing but a putative sexual partner — just as the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.

Repressed homosexual, is it? Takes one to know one! Freud right back at you, pillow-biter . . . After that, the author carries on with this psychosexual stuff in a similar tenor, generally not his most dignified writing. Then he brings Jews into the discussion. (Did I mention that surely this dude was the life of the party?) The discussion turns into an embarrassingly long and tiresome ramble, to the effect that blacks are seen as sex machines. It’s hard to overstate that angle, with several sound bites such as “[t]he Negro is taken as a terrifying penis.” Presumably he’s not including black ladies in such descriptions. This is one of the places in the book that he validates the very stereotype he’s complaining about.

Although I’m aware of certain such stereotypes, some so old that they’re found in the Talmud, it seems he’s playing it up quite a bit. Perhaps it’s even wishful thinking on his part. Moreover, much of this is based upon observable behavior. Since Fanon disliked these stereotypes, he should’ve taken care not to live down to them, and instead been the change he sought in the world.

Mercifully, the discussion eventually goes back to literature:

In the United States, for example, even if he does not live in the South, where he naturally encounters Negroes concretely, the white child is introduced to them through the myth of Uncle Remus. (In France there is the parallel of La Case de l’Oncle Tom — Uncle Tom’s Cabin.)

I’ll add that both texts are strongly pro-black. Despite that, Fanon complains a lot about Joel Chandler Harris, even quoting an opinion alleging that he was a psychopath. He hardly deserved that. Harris was a mild-mannered guy who compiled these early African-American folktales that were presented positively, and they otherwise would’ve been long forgotten if not for his efforts.

Unfortunately, the literary discussion was just a brief respite, and then it was back to the sex talk. A brief excerpt:

From a heuristic point of view, without attributing any reality to it, I should like to propose an explanation of the fantasy: A Negro is raping me. From the work of Helene Deutsch and Marie Bonaparte, both of whom took up and in a way carried to their ultimate conclusions Freud’s ideas on female sexuality, we have learned that, alternatively clitoral and clitoral-vaginal and finally purely vaginal, a woman — having retained, more or less commingled, her libido in a passive conception and her aggression, having surmounted her double Oedipus complex — proceeds through her biological and psychological growth and arrives at the assumption of her role, which is achieved by neuropsychic integration. We cannot, however, ignore certain failures or certain fixations.

Did I mention that this gets tiresome – or is that even the right word for it? As a side note, Freud had some odd theories about orgasms. I’ll have to differ here; whether a woman gets to the finish line by the magic bean, the G-spot, or both, it’s all good and there’s no point quibbling about what’s mature or immature.

More Freudian psychobabble continues along the previous lines, some of it too disgusting to repeat. What a sicko! By comparison, he makes Wilhelm Reich seem a lot more like just an ordinary dude. Speaking of Jews, Fanon brings up his Hebrew homies again. He sees them as another perennial target for nasty stereotypes, though different ones. Surely this stuff was a lot fresher before they became the group that nobody must criticize, accumulated unprecedented power, and their neurotic “elites” did a fine wrecking job thanks to their hubris and paranoia. Then there’s a long quote about how terrible things are for Bantus in South Africa. This stuff was doubtless a lot fresher before black rule turned the formerly prosperous and orderly country into a Third World hellhole.

The next step is racializing Jung’s shadow-self theory:

In the remotest depth of the European unconscious an inordinately black hollow has been made in which the most immoral impulses, the most shameful desires lie dormant. And as every man climbs up toward whiteness and light, the European has tried to repudiate this uncivilized self, which has attempted to defend itself. When European civilization came into contact with the black world, with those savage peoples, everyone agreed: Those Negroes were the principle of evil.

If his point is that blacks are atavistic, well, he said it. That leads into the idea that Antilleans, being culturally assimilated and thus identifying as white, had a self-hatred complex. We can be fairly sure that Fanon was speaking for himself, at least. Then this:

If in like manner one allows M. Hesnard his scientific conception of the moral life, and if the world of moral sickness is to be understood by starting from Fault and Guilt, a normal person will be one who has freed himself of this guilt, or who in any case has managed not to submit to it.

Hey, it’s about time we got some good stuff again! Remember, folks: Don’t let yourself be manipulated by a guilt complex! (It’s a nice start, although of course we’re not the intended audience.) After that tangent, Fanon quotes from some prose and poetry by Aimé Césaire, amidst it commenting:

One can understand why Sartre views the adoption of a Marxist position by black poets as the logical conclusion of Negrohood.

Enough of that Leftist drip! How could Tartre speak for blacks when he can’t even speak for whites? I’ll add that Aimé Césaire writes better than the wall-eyed graphomaniac from Innsmouth. Then, after much moaning, Fanon declares his allegiance to France:

What is all this talk of a black people, of a Negro nationality? I am a Frenchman. I am interested in French culture, French civilization, the French people. We refuse to be considered “outsiders,” we have full part in the French drama. When men who were not basically bad, only deluded, invaded France in order to subjugate her, my position as a Frenchman made it plain to me that my place was not outside but in the very heart of the problem. I am personally interested in the future of France, in French values, in the French nation. What have I to do with a black empire?

Despite his declaration here, he would soon take up arms against France on behalf of Algeria’s FLN terrorists. All I have to say is that this great patriot missed his chance to help Hitler hold back the Allied invasion.

Lastly, there’s a psychological case — in brief, a study of a young Frenchwoman suffering from nervous twitches. Guided visions produce imagery about Africans drumming and dancing. It’s a mercifully anticlimactic end to this miserable chapter. All told, there’s much to be said for the intersection of race and psychopathic personality. However, as much as I hate to admit it, Norman Mailer’s ravings covering approximately similar ground seem preferable to Fanon’s pronouncements informed by scholarly study. This is despite my strong suspicion that Mailer wrote the thing while tweaking on dumb dust.

The Negro and Recognition

This chapter begins discussing a point in Adlerian psychology – specifically, how it applies to blacks. As emphatic as Fanon was about it, though, the actual point is none too clear. This seems to be the core of it:

The Negro is comparison. There is the first truth. He is comparison: that is, he is constantly preoccupied with self-evaluation and with the ego-ideal. Whenever he comes into contact with someone else, the question of value, of merit, arises. The Antilleans have no inherent values of their own, they are always contingent on the presence of The Other. The question is always whether he is less intelligent than I, blacker than I, less respectable than I. Every position of one’s own, every effort at security, is based on relations of dependence, with the diminution of the other. It is the wreckage of what surrounds me that provides the foundation for my virility.

He goes into further detail about this Martinican characteristic. Then he blames white people for making them have this peculiarity. (Of course, right?) To demonstrate our bad attitudes, he cites someone else who in turn cites an early seventeenth-century Spanish play, El valiente negro en Flandes. The brave black protagonist overcomes the local prejudices, attitudes which are probably jazzed up for dramatic effect. The playwright was therefore delivering a universalist message. Moreover, perhaps the play doesn’t give a truly representative picture of Flemish anti-black sentiment during the Renaissance.[1] There Fanon goes again with the dodgy literary analysis, missing the point . . . It’s as if someone were to use Disney’s Pocahontas to prove a thesis about British attitudes regarding American Indians. More overblown blubbering follows:

The Martinican is a man crucified. The environment that has shaped him (but that he has not shaped) has horribly drawn and quartered him; and he feeds this cultural environment with his blood and his essences. Now, the blood of Negroes is a manure prized by experts.

I’ll agree with the bullshit part.

The chapter goes on to discuss a point in Hegelian philosophy, specifically how it applies to blacks. As emphatic as Fanon was about it, though, the actual point is none too clear. This seems to be the core of it:

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed.

This continues along similar lines, such as:

As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else. I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the creation of a human world — that is, of a world of reciprocal recognitions.

Roger that. More overblown blubbering follows:

But the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it. From time to time he has fought for Liberty and Justice, but these were always white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by his masters. The former slave, who can find in his memory no trace of the struggle for liberty or of that anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard speaks, sits unmoved before the young white man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence.

Dude, what’s eating you?

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Note

[1] Since the black population of Belgium was negligible at the time, in real life they probably would’ve regarded any African visitors as an exotic curiosity and no worse. For some odd reason, “prejudices” about blacks are proportional to proximity to them. This is why Southerners, in close proximity with masses of garden-variety blacks, take a dim view of them. Meanwhile, do-gooder liberals in lily-white parts of the Northeast are famous for lecturing people who have extensive experience with black behavior.