Race In Frantz Fanon's The Fact Of Blackness

The worth and importance of human beings in this world has been narrowed down to one factor: race. Race has aided in the development of the Human and it is a construct whose sole reason of existing is to oppress one group, while giving another power. There are numerous authors who have studied the meaning of race and how it affects what it means to be human, and each of these individuals have deconstructed the implication of race as what makes a person human while challenging every notion of white superiority over black people.

The two races that were created to be in opposition to one another are white and black, and this divide has been able to prosper due to the establishment of reason by white individuals who wanted power. In Denise Da

This use of power by white people over black individuals has caused numerous black individuals to view themselves as trapped in their own skin, which is a concept Fanon defines as “blackness”. In Frantz Fanon’s article, The Fact of Blackness, he speaks about how black people do not feel the weight of their “blackness” until they are under the scrutiny of white counterparts and viewed as objects. Fanon states, “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence. Sin is Negro as virtue is white. All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I am no good,” and this quote shows the feelings of inhumanity black people have endured and the violence that has been inflicted on them (Fanon, 1952: 334). Also, black people

Black women were exploited and they could not refuse any advance, so they were never given the right to consent which also plays into the argument that sexuality and gender as a whole were not applicable to the enslaved community. Black people have been attempting ever since the end of slavery to reclaim the humanity, gender, sexuality, etc. that was stripped from them. In Outer Worlds by Zakiyyah Jackson, she states, “Movement beyond the human’ may very well entail a shift of view away from ‘the human’s’ direction; however, accomplishing this effort will require an anamorphic view of humanity, a queering of perspective and stance that mutates the racialized terms of Man’s praxis of humanism, if it is to be a movement at all,” which explains that the act of white humanity moving forward from the inhumanity of slavery and oppression (moving “beyond the human”) is possible (Jackson, Outer Worlds: 217). However, in order to do so people will have to question the state of inhumanity in which Blackness has been left so that black people can move forward with humanity