Nick Perzacki’s Reviews > Black Skin, White Masks > Status Update

A bit more Marxism seems to be creeping in - Quote from Pierre Naville: “To speak of society’s dreams as one speaks of an individual’s dreams… is once again to reverse the natural order of things, since, on the contrary, it is the economic and social conditions of the class struggle that explain and determine the actual conditions [on] which… the contents of an individual’s dreams depends.”

The fourth chapter is focused on dispelling the myth of inherent dependency or insubordination of colonized people (and, in general, “inferiorized” people) - it is not something inherent to these groups, but something imposed on them (feels obvious in modern context, but it’s much more extensive in-book and was written in the ‘50s). Sartre - “It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.”

Fanon begins the third chapter discussing the self-imposed nature of the alienation the black Frenchman experiences, and their own dependence on relationships with white women to assert their equality.

Pulls a terribly sad poem snippet from a novel by René Maran:
“When you fall in love, you must never say so,
Better to keep it a secret from oneself.”

Fanon does a great job building out why racial alienation affects both ends of the colonial black-white conflict: social inferiority alienates black people while social superiority alienates white people. This even impacts “mixed-race” people, whose proximity to whiteness leaves their identity almost more fragile, with any connection to being black seen as an affront against the (social) whiteness they pursue

“One is white if one has a certain amount of money.”
“I am white… I embody the beauty and virtue which have never been black… I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos”, which the white man is incapable of.
“Unable to blacken or negrify the world, [Mayotte Capécias] endeavors to whiten it in her body and mind.”

The use of pidgin to reinforce the colonized’s inferior status - “Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him” - the colonized must recognize their reality, in order to be able to change it. Lack of this recognition furthers alienation of the colonized, and within them between those who strive to learn the colonizers language and those who reject it.

It’s been a while since I read Wretched so I had lowkey forgotten, Fanon is just so damn interesting to read. He’s sarcastic and a little flippant, giving an informal feel, but demonstrates an extensive understanding of what he speaks on. Found it interesting to start with studying the psychological causes and effects of colonized subjects seeking out the language of their colonizers to assert their own humanity.