so firstly id like to say that i highly disagree with fanons assessment of white women who 'desire to be raped', be it because of his own misogyny or because he looks at white womens behavior through the lens of freudian psychology, but i think that has absolutely no place in any leftist's worldview regardless of race. plus, its just wrong. im not an expert on psychology but the idea that womens neuroses are a result of psychological concerns and not material ones is unmarxist but most of all fundamentally misogynist. so i entirely reject that.

secondly i think hes far harsher on black women than he could ever hope to be with black men, even black men who desire white women for their own selfish gains. if a black man wants to be white, thats understandable, but a black woman who wants to be white? unforgivable. stone her to death, the harpy. i believe its because fanon sees the black woman as choosing to whiten the race by deciding to marry and have children with white men, which has some pretty nasty connotations. but again, fanon doesnt seem to want to explore this idea. he doesnt seem to care that black women in every society are denigrated and kept in lower social statuses the darker they are. he doesnt care about the oppression of black women as much as he cares about the oppression of black men, so he chooses to view them as traitors to the whole race who produce mulatos and mulatas who someday go on to become white.....but everything the black man does is entirely understandable. i find that hard to swallow!

he is also less than charitable about gay men and 'crossdressers' (which im not qualified to classify as one thing or another) of either race and at one point says he would be 'nauseated' if he found another man sexy. this mulato says fuck you, monsieur.

so now that ive gotten my issues with the book out of the way....black skin, white masks is a masterwork. it is a must-read. the fact of the matter is, fanon is right about so many things that there is no way you cannot read it. this is a book specifically for black people to read and understand that no matter how hard we try, we will not justify our existence and blackness to those who wish to, quite simply, exterminate us.

fanons compares and contrasts several important things: antiblackness and antisemitism; relationships between a black man with a white woman and a white man with a black woman; and the difference between the racism experienced by the black intellectual and the black worker.

this is also a surprisingly funny book despite everything, and the humor is very necessary. despite being a quick read, black skin white masks can be trying at times, and fanon doesnt pull punches. he makes it quite clear that hes not interested in making anyone comfortable with his worldview from the onset--in fact he knows fellow black readers will take great issue with the premise of the book itself (that the white man seeks to be human and the black man seeks to be white).

at the end of it all...there is this sense of relief and fortification of the self, where you realize that indeed, there is no point in justifying yourself to the white man, and that you are complete as you are. while i didnt really see a solution to the question of antiblackness in this book, the solution is made quite clear in wretched of the earth.....and that is, of course, national liberation through armed revolution.

in short, there is no reason to not read everything fanon has ever written. the issues you will take with fanon are important to set aside and analyse because other, later writers expand upon his ideas in a more coherent and relevent way, like patricia hill collins. i still believe fanon helped set the groundwork for anti colonial and anti imperial studies and remains of vital importance to the black diaspora.

3.5/5

What is there to say? Purely and simply this: When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the ground of his color, I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.

This book is to [b:The Wretched of the Earth|66933|The Wretched of the Earth|Frantz Fanon|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394575490s/66933.jpg|865773] for me as [b:The Mandarins|19528|The Mandarins|Simone de Beauvoir|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348080972s/19528.jpg|20761] is to [b:The Second Sex|457264|The Second Sex|Simone de Beauvoir|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327978178s/457264.jpg|879666], meaning I came looking for brilliance and left with more cringe than awe. I'm giving this one more of a benefit of a doubt because it was never written with me, a white woman, in mind, as well as the simple fact that Fanon is worth reading period. For every contemptuous generalization and psychoanalytic obsession there is pure, inspiring, snarky genius that is as applicable to these Ferguson times as they were when they were written, and I won't hesitate to utilize all I can get my hands on, intended audience or no.

Once and for all I will state this principle: A given society is racist or it is not.

One thing Fanon does exceedingly well in this work is take all the defensive subjectivity that bigotry has been imbued with and give it back to those affected. However, his stating that he is not using the story of one to generalize for all doesn't help when every black woman is stripped of agency and every homosexual is defined as a mental illness. It is these particular aspects that, among others, show the triumphs and failures of the conversational style Fanon wrote this work in. When he is good, he stirs the heart and opens the future and lets the powers of mind and soul run free; when he is bad, he invokes the sort of internalized misogyny/cisnormativity that makes hooks and co's' criticism not only understandable, but amazing in its lack of kick-you-in-the-face. I know, I know, the angry black woman is a trope, but if this didn't result in anger, I'd be concerned.

To these objections I reply that the subject of our study is the dupes and those who dupe them, the alienated, and that if there are white men who behave naturally when they meet Negroes, they certainly do not fall within the scope of our examination. If my patient’s liver is functioning as it should, I am not going to take it for granted that his kidneys are sound.

Beyond the clitoral-vaginal-I don't even know what else was being thrown around to explain psychological development (which falls apart when confronted with the statistic that one/two in 1000 get surgery after birth to "normalize" genital appearance so good luck with your binary approach in a spectrum), there's a serious acknowledgement of history and culture and all the other things many black people the world do not have as firm an entitlement to as most folks of European descent. There's also a pointing out of "Yes, representation is good, but the people who are dying because of this shit get first priority," which bears reiterating in any neoliberal context. So, intersectionality. Ish. The prose is great, at any rate.

I wonder sometimes whether school inspectors and government functionaries are aware of the role they play in the colonies. For twenty years they poured every effort into programs that would make the Negro a white man. In the end, they dropped him and told him, "You have an indisputable complex of dependence on the white man."

It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because “quite simply” it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe.

P.S. I cannot wait to get my hands on [b:Notebook of a Return to the Native Land|32649|Notebook of a Return to the Native Land|Aimé Césaire|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348208863s/32649.jpg|1085514] because of all of Fanon's glorious quotebombing. It was much like a Goodreads Review in that respect, which was interesting while it lasted.

I'm still digesting Fanon's ideas in this book and I probably need to reread it to do this better- However, what stood out for me was the way in which black women are depicted only as sites for the black man's struggle to be recognised as fully human- and not as fully human themselves. The way in which Mayotte Capecia is infantilised and dissected is quite offputting.