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The Racial Gaze: Black Slave, White Master

For my part, I refuse to consider the problem from the standpoint of either-or . what is all this talk of a black people of a Black nationality. I am a Frenchman. I am interested in French culture, French civilization, the French people. We refuse to be considered "outsiders," we are fully part of the French drama.

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

When Frantz Fanon arrived in France in 1947 the nation was in flux; shaken by the war, it now faced radical movements for change, including a new "Third World" struggling for independence, as well as the solidifying of the Cold War into spheres of influence. Two years after the end of World War Two French radical critics, no longer outsiders, were becoming a dominant group among the literati and public opinion.1 The participants in Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's master/slave dialectic of the late 1930s (Aron, Bataille, Breton, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, among others) were part of this emergent intelligentsia, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty's Les Temps Modernes was the journal of discussion2 and Présence Africaine, founded in 1947,3 expressed the bringing of the African presence into the very center of French civilization.4 The African "presence," putting Western civilization on trial, represented a new kind of postwar anticolonial militancy, while Paris "became one of the theaters in which the political and cultural future of Africa was being prepared."5 In the French constitution of 1946 colonialism disappeared, replaced by a new union of citizenship and parliamentary representation supposedly ending forced labor and the colonial education. Yet the reality of this union was made clear in Madagascar a year later when 100,000 Malagasy were slaughtered.

Black Skin was written in this context. Published in 1952, with references to philosophy, politics, literature, psychoanalysis, film, and popular culture, combined with what seems like an authorial and autobiographical "I," it can create in the reader a certain uneasiness. Nevertheless, the book represents Fanon's profound ability to both synthesize and critically engage phenomenological and psychoanalytic theory through the prism of race.6 In fact, Fanon's methodology in Black Skin is fairly straightforward; race becomes the lens through which social relations and theories of the time are judged. The honesty of his approach is illustrated in his description of the "lived experience" of the Black who "has two dimensions," two ways of being, "one with his fellows, the other with the White man." In other words, Blacks behave differently among Whites than among Blacks. This behavior is not ontological but a product of colonial relations. Among Whites, the Black experiences no intersubjectivity, no reciprocity. The Black is simply an object among other objects. Why is this? How does it happen? These are two questions Fanon tries to ask and which express his quest for reciprocal human relations.7

The specific subject of Black Skin is the disalienation of the Antillean who, mired in a "dependency complex," wishes to turn White. Fanon's conceptualization of alienation is essentially medical, a neurosis (see BS, 204), but he employs it in a social context so that donning a White mask is equated with a false self, an inauthentic self in Sartre's terms, or a false consciousness in Marxian terms. Establishing a process of "disalienation" moves Fanon away from a medical model toward a radical social conception of praxis, which is based on a belief that human beings are reflective and actional, beings of praxis. Black Skin can be seen as a painstaking examination leading in myriad ways to the same conclusion, namely the necessity of uprooting the conditions that cause alienation. Disalienation calls for a nihilation, the ripping away of the masks and a reintegration of the human being's presence:

I have been led to consider their alienation in terms of psychoanalytical classifications. The Black's behavior makes him akin to an obsessive neurotic type, or, if one prefers, he puts himself into a complete situational neurosis. In the man of color there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence. (BS, 60, emphasis added)

Because the Black needs White approval, it is impossible to defend against the lack of reciprocity through ego withdrawal. Consequently the Black's behavior - which is not necessarily neurotic - appears neurotic.

Fanon's attempt to get out of the bind of the inferiority complex is at first psychoanalytic, but then he immediately declares that because the Black's alienation is not an individual question, his approach will be "sociodiagnostic," entailing "immediate recognition of social and economic realities" (BS, 11). Thus, diagnostically and proscriptively, the analysis shifts from the individual to the social realm. Thus we begin with Fanon's engagement with the phenomenologies of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and especially Hegel's master/slave dialectic before moving to psychoanalytic theories.

The Black is a "crucified person," maintains Fanon, who "has no culture, no civilization, 'no long historical past.'" Thus stripped, the existence and Being of the Black is an inferiority complex (BS, 216, 34). Such a complex is created in every people experiencing the death of their own local cultural originality (BS, 18). Civilization is solely French and the Antillean's culture is French.8 On the scale of humanity, those who write and speak proper French are more civilized. In Paris the Martinican is at the top of the Black pecking order, but it is a Black pecking order. The Antillean is seen as Black but the intradistinction of the Antillean pecking order means that the Guadeloupan tries to "pass" as Martinican. The Senegalese is at the bottom and on the other side is the White, the transcendental Other.

Speaking "proper" French is a symbol of authority. Dialect not only places one geographically and socially, but it is a way of thinking. The problem was exemplified by the Martinican in France. Here was a group of people who had grown up speaking, thinking, and looking French. How could Antilleans look French? Because they believed they were, having fully internalized French culture. They had grown up reading Tarzan stories and talking about "our ancestors the Gaul," identifying themselves not only "with the exploiter and the bringer of civilization," but with "an all-white truth" (BS, 146-7). At school in Martinique children wrote essays like little Parisians: "I like vacations because then I can run through the fields, breathe fresh air, and come home with rosy cheeks" (BS, 162 n25). The young educated Martinicans considered themselves White and dream themselves as White. Though Lacan's "Mirror Stage" is clearly suggestive here, it was Sartre's analysis of The Anti-Semite and the few that provided an important beginning for Fanon's thinking through of this problem. What attracted Fanon to Sartre's work was both his phenomenological descriptions and his call for action. Authenticity is manifested in revolt, not by accepting the objectification of oneself by others.9

The Jew and Black Consciousness

The Jew is a Jew because the Jew is determined by the Other, argues Sartre: "the Jew has a personality like the rest of us, and on top of that he is Jewish. It amounts to a doubling of the fundamental relationship with the Other. The Jew is over-determined."10 For Fanon this spoke directly to the problematic of the Black.

Fanon found resonances with the types plotted in The Anti-Semite and the Jew. He drew out similarities between the anti-Semite and the racist as a Manichean, irrational type and he explicated the French democrat's insistence that the Jew should assimilate in terms of racism. He found equally important Sartre's description of the Jew's attempted flight from others and himself. Alienated from his own body, and "his emotional life has been cut in two," the Jew pursues "the impossible dream of universal brotherhood in a world that rejects him."11 Sartre argued that Jewish authenticity could not mean assimilation. Assimilation would amount to inauthenticity because it cannot be realized as long as there is anti-Semitism. The same could be said of the goal of assimilation of the educated Black, the évolué, into a racist society. It leads to the inferiority complexes analyzed in Black Skin.12 The assimilation proposed by the White liberal (Sartre's democrat) is, as Steve Biko put it, like "expecting the slave to work together with the slave-master's son to remove all the conditions leading to the former's enslavement."13 A nonracial approach pretends that racism doesn't exist and ignores its denigrating and derisive psychological effects. In contrast to assimilation, authenticity means realizing one's condition and asserting one's being as "untouchable, scorned, proscribed" and standing apart.

Sartre's claim that the Jew...