Analysis Of Black Skin White Mask By Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon: Race, Discrimination and Violence

For centuries, race has played an important role in historically shaping identity and preconceived notions due to slavery. African history has been suppressed, which has resulted in the agony and discrimination of colored people. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist, crossed disciplines in his life and his writings, always striving to make connections between his insights into the effects of racism and the concrete political steps that poor people needed to take to bring about change. He explained that the people of Algeria needed to use “violence” during The Algerian War to fight for their independence against the French. For Fanon, the rise of corruption, ethnic division, racism, and economic dependence

He deplored a European culture that was imperialistic in its economic, social, and psychological relations with the colonized people of the world, and expressed solidarity with the anti-colonial strivings of these people whose political movements liquidated the “stultifying inertia” of the pre WWII era (Wright 19). Black Skin, White Mask is a book about the mindset or psychology of racism by Frantz Fanon. He repeatedly tells the story of young people leaving Martinique to study in France with the expectation of being assimilated to White Society, only to discover upon arrival that they were perceived as black. The book basically looks at what goes through the minds of blacks and whites under the conditions of white rule and the strange effects that it has, especially on black people. It is broken up into a few chapters: the black man and language (if you do not learn the white man’s language perfectly, you are unintelligent but if you do learn it perfectly, you have washed your brain in their universe of racist ideas), the woman of color and the white man (these women look down on their own race and deep down want to be white), the man of color and the white woman (these men want to be white too or at least prove they are equal to whites), the so-called dependency complex of the colonized (argues that people of color have a deep desire for white rule, that those

Embittered by his experience in the French Army, where Africans and Arabs answered to white superiors and West Indians occupied an ambiguous middle ground, he gravitated to radical politics, Sartrean existentialism and the philosophy of black consciousness known as négritude (Djemai). Négritude is the affirmation or consciousness of the value of black or African culture, heritage, and identity (dictionary). Fanon also fell under the influence of Tosquelles, an innovative practitioner of group therapy. Applying Tosquelles 's methods at a hospital in a suburb of Algiers, where Fanon arrived in 1953, he earned the trust of Arab patients whom French psychiatrists had treated with a mixture of pity and contempt (Macey). In Fanon 's new home, Macey reminds us, one million Europeans ruled over some nine million Arabs and Berbers, largely illiterate and cruelly exploited. After the Algerian National Liberation Front launched a revolution in 1954, the French Army used Gestapo tactics to restore order. Suspects were given electric shocks to the testicles, raped with bottles and often beaten to death. Entire villages were destroyed in retaliation for the death of a single soldier. While secretly aiding the rebels, Fanon cared for victims and perpetrators alike, producing case notes that shed invaluable light on the psychic traumas of colonial war