In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes in first person, provides a historical critique stating the detrimental consequences of racism and colonialism in the psyche of the black man. In chapter five, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, he describes the ways in which black people are objectified and the ways in which he realized that he was just an object in the middle of other black objects. The black man’s identity would simply be reduced to a “dirty nigger” or “a Negro”. He goes on to explain how the very glance of the other fixes him in a predominantly white world. When the black man is amongst his own people, there is minimal scope for him to face any internal conflicts when he recognizes himself on the basis of his experience of being through others. However he argues that the Hegelian notion of “being for others”, does not exist in a white colonial civilized society.
In the world view of a colonized population there is a contamination, a fault that forbids any ontological reason. Some may critique by saying that this is the situation of every person, but such an opposition only hides an essential predicament. Ontology does not allow the understanding of the experience of being a black man. The black man is not only understood in terms of being black but also what he is with relation to the white man. There is hardly any scope for ontological resistance for the black man in the view of the white man. Therefore, the negro has to situate himself on the basis of the white man where