My Goodreads Review of Black Skin, White Masks by Franz Fanon

I have been so focused on working on my film criticism/review game (I'm on Letterboxd, if you wish to follow me) that I have been neglecting my book reading and anime watching (not even reading manga lately). On the flipside I do have some Goodreads reviews that I have not published here yet—this review being one of them. I had posted this back in February of last year and I feel it may be one of my most controversial reviews I have done on Goodreads at the time as I did not partake in the Fanon worship as other's in my old Goodreads circle have (something that made me hype to read the book). One unexpectedly positive thing about the review is that it got the attention of the rapper Noname and that was an unexpectedly cool surprise. 

 Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"There are three intertwined themes in Fanon’s writing: a critique of ethnopsychiatry (which aimed to provide an account of the mental life, in sickness and in health, of colonized peoples) and of the Eurocentrism of psychoanalysis; a dialogue with Negritude, then the dominant system of thought among black francophone intellectuals, in which he challenges its account of the mental life of black people; and the development of a political philosophy for decolonization that starts with an account of the psychological harm that colonialism had produced." - from the introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah


So this was an interesting read. I don't read as much psychology as I do philosophy so the book is a bit of a change-up for me. This book is the landmark text to explain the effects that colonization has on the colonizer and the colonized. He is basing this from his experience as a Black Martinican in France and the people he treats and reads about as psychologist. The books reputation had long preceded it and I decided to give it a read this year to kick-off a series of reads that I plan to read. He speaks a lot in the royal "we", but is talking from his point-of-view and that of the people he reads around him. There is a lot to get through with this book and I am going to do my best to give my impressions, both good and bad.

Let me start with the good. I think this book really brought a lot of necessarily uncomfortable looks at the mind of white supremacy using psychoanalyses. I think he really does a good job in the first and most of the fourth chapter of the book in talking about this book. I like how he goes so hard in stating how absurd the approval of white people had in the life of Black Francophones.

All colonized people—in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave—position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become. In the colonial army, and particularly in the regiments of Senegalese soldiers, the “native” officers are mainly interpreters. They serve to convey to their fellow soldiers the master’s orders, and they themselves enjoy a certain status.

It is clear that while he is greatly influenced by people like W.E.B. Du Bois and his high school teacher Aimé Césaire (some of the best quotes of the book are from Césaire). But the three dominate men of this book are Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and, while least referenced the most important and where I'll be tearing into him from, Richard Wright.

While I think this book takes-off well, when it gets in-flight the journey is shaky and I do not think it sticks the landing. The criticism of Black consciousness (in the form of the Négritude movement) is a key part of the book. Fanon is one of these "color-blind" leftist at the end of the day. He wants the post-racial society that so many folks foolishly triumphed after the election of Barack Obama. This is what really holds back the book for me (I will mention that yes, he does not do justice to Black women in this book and his zealous adherence to classical Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalyzes greatly influenced his views on homosexuality. Others have done much to cover his misogynoir and homophobia so I am focusing on the whitewashing "universalizing" of Black culture). I have no problem with having a humanist approach to the world, but I don't think that I should have to sacrifice my culture and history for it. Black people tend to always be the one to have to give up their history for the current struggle, but no one else. I say no to this.

I am an African-American, I am not a Martinican or French West Indian (who Fanon calls Antilleans in this book) or an Afro-French/Black Francophone at all. This book looks at a lot of different people, but it is focused on Black Francophones. The idea of the post-racial society is very seductive in the way that most idealistic schools of thought are. Alas, such is wasted on me and I may well be one of the scumbags that Fanon talks about. I agree with Fanon that using reductive-stereotypes against an antagonist is unrealistic, but I think that Fanon does risk over-correcting in order to create a perfect Marxist-humanist utopia. There is a lot to criticize about different forms of cultural and historical movements. I think Fanon makes the same mistakes that James Baldwin criticizes Richard Wright for in Notes of a Native Son & Nobody Knows My Name. One can acknowledge that they are a man without having to justify it with the past, but having a past is still a good thing. Human rights are human rights, but we don't have to go and reject our past however noble or painful to justify are present.

This book was a lot, both interesting and frustrating in turns. I may add more to this review later, but this is what I have so far. Read this book, but read it critically! Fanon is not a saint, but a human being like you and me.

View all my reviews