Black Skin, White Masks

Black Skin, White Masks came out in 1952 and is one of the most cited books of the twentieth century on racism. Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, born in Martinique, a Caribbean island then under French colonialism, a colonialism that shaped language, schooling, and desires, and he wrote the text the way one makes a diagnosis of one's own world. The question that organizes everything is unsettling: what does racism do to the mind of a Black person in a society that takes whiteness as the model of what a human being is?

The book blends medicine, philosophy, literature, and personal testimony. Fanon does not write like someone observing from a distance. He speaks from within, and warns right away that he has no intention of sitting on the fence: he wants to describe the psychic suffering produced by colonization and open a way out of it.

Fanon grew up in a society where the ideal of culture, beauty, and intelligence came from France. At school, the Black children of Martinique learned the history of a European country as if it were their own and learned to identify with white heroes. When he went to study medicine in Lyon, he discovered that, to the French, he was simply a Black man, not the cultivated Frenchman he imagined himself to be.

That shock lies at the foundation of the book. He shows that the suffering is not born from individual weakness, but from a social relationship in which the Black body is read before the person speaks. It is an observation that American readers will recognize easily: how many times is a young Black man seen as a suspect before he even opens his mouth?

The first chapter deals with language. For Fanon, to speak a language is to take on a world and a culture. The Antillean who masters French, and hides his accent, feels that he rises in rank before others. The closer to the colonizer's language, the closer to being accepted as a full person.

This creates a split. Inside the home, the local language is the language of intimacy, but on the street one must display command of the cultivated form. Fanon describes the effort of someone who rehearses every word, and the pride of the one who returns from France speaking with the accent of that place, looking down on his own countrymen.

In the United States, the parallel shows up in the weight given to speaking properly and to accent, which mark class and race at the same time. A person learns early that the way they speak opens or closes doors, and that a grammatical slip can cost them a job.