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Welcome on my blog. This blog related to the " Black Skin white Masks."
☆ About Franz Fanon:
Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. During World War II Fanon enlisted in the French army and was initially sent with allied forces to Casablanca, Morocco, yet was transferred to France where he fought and was wounded in the battle at Colmar, in northern France. After the war Fanon studied medicine in France, where he specialized in psychiatry. It was while studying in France that Fanon wrote his first book, entitled Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a study of the black subjugation in the western white world.
☆ Introduction about " Black Skin ,white Masks " :
"Black Skin, White Masks" is a 1952 book by Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and intellectual from Martinique. The book is written in the style of auto-theory. in which Fanon shares his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche. There is a double process that is economic and internalized through the epidermalization of inferiority.Few modern voices have had as profound an impact on the black identity and critical race theory as Frantz Fanon’s, and Black Skin, White Masks represents some of his most important work. Fanon’s masterwork is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers.
☆ Thoughts on " Black Skin white Masks" :
"There is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white."
This sentence give the social and psychological pressures on "the black man." What the statement means is that the only path through life for black men is that laid out by white culture and society. Black men either submit to this "one destiny" or they suffer. The word "destiny" strongly implies inevitability. It is not a situation that can be easily resisted. Throughout, Fanon identifies his subject of study primarily as male. This is partly because he is drawing heavily on his own experience. Example like Nigro people. Nigro people always struggle for his skin.
"All colonized people ... position themselves in relation to the civilizing language."
Language is a subject of central importance in Fanon's account of colonialism."the civilizing language." To speak French correctly was to be civilized and to gain access to the culture of the French establishment. To do otherwise was to be excluded. But the colonized have an active role. They "position themselves" by accepting or rejecting the colonizer's language. For Fanon, the colonized are victims, but they are not passive, and the colonizer can be resisted.
"One is white, so one is rich, so one is handsome, so one is intelligent."
People do not really understand how devastating systemic racism is in this country. We know racism exist. Even those who constantly deny it know very well that it exist. They simply refuse to be honest and acknowledge that their country is flawed. We need to understand more clearly the impacts of systemic racism on our psyches. We need to understand what racism does in preventing the true human potential of people of color from being used .
Fanon here describes a central factor in how racism shapes perception. Skin color stands in for a set of assumptions about culture, personality, and social status. To be white is to be viewed as handsome, rich, and intelligent. These may not be evident in all individual cases, but they are part of the definition of what it means "to be white." To be black is to be the opposite. Fanon is interested in racism as a psychological phenomenon. This is a fundamental idea about how racism functions that he develops further in subsequent chapters.racism also connected with colonialism. Example of Mard movie.
Frantz Fanon, the famous psychiatrist wrote about the mind of those who live in an oppressive society. He spoke about alienation and the role it plays in people feeling or not feeling welcomed and appreciated and valued in the society they live in. He studied the existence of oppression in settler colonial settings like the Island of Martinique where he was born and reared. He did not clearly understand colonialism until he moved to Paris for medical school and saw the true nature of oppression and the impacts it has on the lived outcomes of oppressed people versus those in the oppressing group.
Fanon looked at alienation as a result of people being oppressed and how they reacted to that oppression. He explored alienation in several different ways and manifestations. One of these was alienation from your culture. One way this manifest itself is in how we master or don’t master a language. In America, Blacks are criticized and made to feel inferior because we don’t always articulate the Queen’s English well.
Fanon wrote in his famous book Black Skin, White Masks about language and why it matters in oppressive societies.
“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool the language is. In the case of the Martinquean, the culture and language imposed were French. One took pains to speak ‘the French of France, the Frenchman’s French, French French,’ all the while avoiding Creole, except to give orders to servants. The fact of having to speak nothing but the other’s language when this other was the conqueror, ruler, and oppressor was at once an affirmation of him, his worldview, and his values; a concession to his framework, and an estrangement from one’s history, values and outlook.”
"The eye is not only a mirror, but a correcting mirror."
Right saying Fanon.When Fanon refers to "the eye," he refers to the act of seeing, categorizing, and judging. In this passage he points out that what we "see" when we see people of color is not an objective fact, but a series of assumptions, judgments, fantasies, and dreams. To see a person with one skin color or another is to judge them for this fact, according to the viewer's beliefs about what that skin color means. This is why the eye is a "correcting mirror." The way people see things can be changed, as can the judgments that "seeing" imparts.
"O my body, always make me a man who questions! "
Ending of the Fanon's book are this "prayer." Previously Fanon had identified the stability and decay of bourgeois society as what he stands against. In its place, he wishes to be "a man who questions," always. In the place of bourgeois solidity, he wants people who will think about the world and reshape it. He feels that if he stops "questioning," then his work will have ceased completely, because he will have stopped trying to move forward in understanding the world.
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