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Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks

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“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 -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.” NB to reference your quote, even if you do attribute it in your next line. Excellent choice for opening. These are the words of Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer. He is most commonly known for his first book ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ in which he analyses and questions the identity of …show more content…

That constantly in his othering, he can no longer be amused by the words: “Mama, see the Negro. I’m frightened!” He is reduced to tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects and slave ships concealed under the euphemism that is “ethnicity, culture and history” (1952: 85). He carries the racial burdens and bigotry of his ancestors. Fanon shares his profound displacement when he says: “Completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that splattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help build it together” (1953: 85). He acknowledges that this is not a struggle of his own, but that of many black men, identified with their enslaved ancestors. On all corners of the earth, they are the face of the inferior: segregated in America; whipped in South America; cut down by machine-guns. In West Africa, he is just another animal. “The Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly” (1952: 86). The white world has the negro barred from privilege and …show more content…

He says: “Conscientization of the masses is seen even by socialist governments as a rival of its own programmes and perspectives.” (Mda, Z. 19). Conscientization refers to a critical consciousness and in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for an elevated perception and exposure to social and political contradictions. It allows for action to be taken against oppressive elements which are illuminated by understanding. Social governments can be viewed as the white man stifling the growth of the other- the progress of the inferior- communities in this particular instance. Similar to the ideas of Fanon, the understanding is that we do not and should not operate as individuals but a representation of the masses, for the

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To rebel against the government to defend their beliefs. As he said: ‘’Let every-man make known what government would command his respect, and that will be step towards obtaining it’’. Another point he points out is that treat their bodies as men and not as machines: ‘’The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies’’. The last example he used to influence his audience is that their treated as dirt. While the government is more of a major ruler like earth. ‘’

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He says that the White think that African Americans want to be them and have their skin color and riches. But he portrays that they think wrong. He says in his appeal that the African Americans do not want to be their color because they know that they could not do the same harm as the whites did as of beating as they slowly die in the inside. He says that they have so much anger towards the white that the first thing that they would do is murder each and every one of them for the suffering that they bought on to their families of their kind. He would like to see them suffer the same way before they would ever become a white person.

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He wrote this piece to express his important opinion about the effect of racism and how he’s viewed as a man of color. He talks about his first encounter of racism when he was young man in college and was assumed to be a mugger or killer just because of skin. “It was in echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into the ability to alter public space in ugly ways.” I feel that the author is trying to connect to his vast audience of people who don’t understand what it is like to a black man in society. Later he contemplated that he rejected or shunned by the white race collectively as a dangerous man.

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In the antebellum period, star subjugation strengths moved from safeguarding bondage as an essential malice to explaining it as a positive decent. Some demanded that African Americans were youngster like individuals needing insurance and that servitude gave an acculturating impact (Merino, 2009). Others contended that dark individuals were naturally sub-par compared to white individuals and were unequipped for acclimatizing in the free society. Still others guaranteed that slaves were important to keep up the advancement of white society. Southern Diaries of the prewar time were loaded with guidance for slaveholders.

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