In European societies, Fanon argues, the only cultural representations of Black people are in ways that make them seem animalistic. In Chapter 6, Fanon provides more specificity for what it means to be reduced to one’s race. In other words, people are reduced to their race, instead of seen as unique human individuals. It is also constantly reinforced in everyday life in racist societies, because Black people are constantly reminded they are Black first and people second. When Black people internalize their oppression as a personal failure, this is when an inferiority complex arises. Rather, this feeling is created by racism, which says whites are superior to Blacks and gives whites more economic advantages. For Fanon, it is important to realize that Black people do not naturally feel they are inferior. In Chapters 4 and 5, Fanon develops this analysis of the inferiority complex of Black people and the impossibility of leaving behind the fact of being Black. This leads to a loss of a sense of self and in turn a loss of agency to act in the world. But because Black people can never leave behind the fact of their Blackness, fleeing from their race is also fleeing from themselves.
Similarly, Black men may consider white women gatekeepers to culture, and marrying a white woman provides a feeling of having married all the beauty, education, and wealth that whiteness stands for in racist societies. Fanon observes that Black women may take a white lover in order to get access to a white culture that has more advantages and privileges. This desire to become white is explored in Chapters 2 and 3, which are about interracial relationships between Black and white people. As one consequence, Black people who have been told they are inferior may develop a kind of inferiority complex and want to become “superior” by becoming white. In this way, language is used to make Black people feel they are uncivilized and without a history. Moreover, they are told they do not have a civilized language of their own, unlike people from other white European countries like Germany or Russia. But when Black people speak French, they are always reminded they can never be fully French. For Fanon, language provides entry into a culture, so when someone speaks French, they are taking on the French culture. In Chapter 1, Fanon explores the relationship between race, language, and culture. He explores how these people are encouraged by a racist society to want to become white, but then experience serious psychological problems because they aren't able to do so.
He is especially interested in the experience of Black people from French-colonized islands in the Caribbean, like himself, who have come to live in France themselves. Drawing on Clare Hemmings’s notion of recitation, I read theologically Fanon’s and Beauvoir’s respective turns to liberation and as such consider the critical-constructive possibilities for black and feminist futures in viewing these works of Beauvoir and Fanon as kindred texts.In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon combines autobiography, case study, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory in order to describe and analyze the experience of Black men and women in white-controlled societies. Through this analysis I point out the question of Fanon’s voicing of the self toward the white male intellectual figured through Jean-Paul Sartre, which marks the question of citational practice as particular to feminist and critical race concerns, particularly in addressing the black woman. Via close reading, I address the long-standing citational elision of Beauvoir from Fanon’s analysis of alienation, with particular address to the famous “Look! A Negro!” scene. This essay argues for the intertextuality of The Second Sex and Black Skin, White Masks as inextricably bound discourses on subject formation and the other.
While Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon are icons of the French existential movement-each being the influential progenitors of feminist theory and postcolonial studies, respectively-their names, lives, and works are rarely examined in concert.
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