Black Skin, White Masks - Revision history

Lynntastic: /* Psychonalysis of being the Black Man */

2018-10-24T22:44:12Z

‎Psychonalysis of being the Black Man

Lynntastic: /* The Black Man in Modern Times */

2018-10-24T22:39:27Z

‎The Black Man in Modern Times

Lynntastic at 22:38, 24 October 2018

2018-10-24T22:38:42Z

Lynntastic: /* The Black Man in Modern Times */

2018-10-23T21:32:15Z

‎The Black Man in Modern Times

Lynntastic: /* Psychonalysis of being the Black Man */

2018-10-23T21:31:00Z

‎Psychonalysis of being the Black Man

Lynntastic at 22:35, 22 October 2018

2018-10-22T22:35:51Z

Lynntastic at 22:30, 22 October 2018

2018-10-22T22:30:27Z

Lynntastic at 22:29, 22 October 2018

2018-10-22T22:29:45Z

Lynntastic at 22:28, 22 October 2018

2018-10-22T22:28:42Z

Lynntastic: Created page with "{{Infobox book | name = Black Man, White Masks | author = Frantz Fanon, foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah, translated from original French by Richard Philcox | publis..."

2018-10-22T22:25:01Z

Created page with "{{Infobox book | name = Black Man, White Masks | author = Frantz Fanon, foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah, translated from original French by Richard Philcox | publis..."

New page

{{Infobox book
| name = Black Man, White Masks
| author = Frantz Fanon, foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah, translated from original French by Richard Philcox
| publisher = Grove Press
| pub_date = 2008
| pages = 206
| isbn = 978-0-8223-3072-1
| image = [[File:Black Skin_White Masks.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}

Black Skin, White Masks ((French: Peau noire, masques blancs) is a 1952 book on the experience of the Black man and woman as they exist in a White dominate world (much of the book is written using “man” but context insists he prescribes this to both sexes). Here Frantz Fanon explores the psychological antecedents that inform the way Blacks negotiate their surroundings. In the English translation by Richard Philcox, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s foreword adds context to Fanon’s decidedly terse view of Blackness in the colonized world. Poetry, prose, speeches, and historical analyses are employed tactics to create a multi-layered call-to-action for both colonizer and colonized to open communication for real change.

Through this book, Fanon uses his lived experience as a politically activated person in both colonized and uncolonized locales as well as his academic background as a doctor of psychology. He noted lay breaks his book into two sections: perception and phenomenology.

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:44, 24 October 2018
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	“To have a phobia about Black men is to be afraid of the biological, for the black is nothing but biological” (143). Seeking to understand the behavior of this group, Fanon apples psychoanalysis and finds where the world reveals itself to a White child, the Black child experiences the opposite and must additionally learn a new world when it steps out of its family group. The child must then feign whiteness to lessen his “abnormality” (122). The Black man does not immediately know he is black until he moves into the white arena and then, quite instinctually, he takes on the practices and behavior of the majority to cleanse himself of the burden of his Blackness. To this, Fanon argues, “the black man is, in every sense of the word, a victim of white civilization… [he] lives in ambiguity” (169).		“To have a phobia about Black men is to be afraid of the biological, for the black is nothing but biological” (143). Seeking to understand the behavior of this group, Fanon apples psychoanalysis and finds where the world reveals itself to a White child, the Black child experiences the opposite and must additionally learn a new world when it steps out of its family group. The child must then feign whiteness to lessen his “abnormality” (122). The Black man does not immediately know he is black until he moves into the white arena and then, quite instinctually, he takes on the practices and behavior of the majority to cleanse himself of the burden of his Blackness. To this, Fanon argues, “the black man is, in every sense of the word, a victim of white civilization… [he] lives in ambiguity” (169).

−	Rising above this constructed identity and internal repression of what is essentially Black or Blackness is to meet at a place where human is the understood commonality. Fanon here shows his ultimate desire to make irrelevant the social constructs of Black and white, colonizer and colonized. He instructs readers to drop the ego and ~~the~~ pride of self and make action to change the outlook of Black and White relations.	+	Rising above this constructed identity and internal repression of what is essentially Black or Blackness is to meet at a place where human is the understood commonality. Fanon here shows his ultimate desire to make irrelevant the social constructs of Black and white, colonizer and colonized. He instructs readers to drop the ego and pride of self and make action to change the outlook of Black and White relations.

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 ==Contents==
 ===The Black Man in Modern Times===
-Black Skin, White Masks was written at the time of the height of Eurocentrism and new Black thought, by an African author under French rule. This must be considered as the analysis he gives his firmly rooted in the experiential foundation of mid-20th century colonialism. In this, the text acts almost as a history book taking the reader back in terms of Existing within this framework Fanon’s concept of meaning-making in identity creation. Here he states clearly, the Black man suffers from a desire to be White and the White man the tendency to exert control over others. Whites and whiteness are synonymous with pure and just while Black is directly opposite, coarse and savage. This fragile relationship is where decisive study of the peculiarity of Blacks under French control develops.
+Black Skin, White Masks was written at the time of the height of Eurocentrism and new Black thought, by an African author under French rule. This must be considered as the analysis he gives his firmly rooted in the experiential foundation of mid-20th century colonialism. In this, the text acts almost as a history book taking the reader back in terms of existing within this framework Fanon’s concept of meaning-making in identity creation. Here he states clearly, the Black man suffers from a desire to be White and the White man the tendency to exert control over others. Whites and whiteness are synonymous with pure and just while Black is directly opposite, coarse and savage. This fragile relationship is where decisive study of the peculiarity of Blacks under French control develops.
 The first chapters of the book ask readers to consider two stories: a man who has left his home for the city and has returned and the other a man who exists only in his small town/island. The former has become improved somehow and “radically transformed” almost by transmutation. The latter has been devalued as a “country bumpkin” in comparison. How does existing in the White dominated land of city’s like Paris, even for a short period of time, add to the Black man? Fanon suggests, the mythos of the uneducated, savage, Black African and his propensity towards correctness in the watchful eye of Whites has much to do with the change.

@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 Black Skin, White Masks (French: Peau noire, masques blancs) is a 1952 book on the experience of the Black man and woman as they exist in a White dominate world (much of the book is written using “man” but context insists he prescribes this to both sexes). Here Frantz Fanon explores the psychological antecedents that inform the way Blacks negotiate their surroundings. In the English translation by Richard Philcox,  Kwame Anthony Appiah’s foreword adds context to Fanon’s decidedly terse view of Blackness in the colonized world. Poetry, prose, speeches, and historical analyses are employed tactics to create a multi-layered call-to-action for both colonizer and colonized to open communication for real change.
-Through this book, Fanon uses his lived experience as a politically activated person in both colonized and uncolonized locales as well as his academic background as a doctor of psychology. He noted lay breaks his book into two sections: perception and phenomenology.
+Through this book, Fanon uses his lived experience as a politically activated person in both colonized and uncolonized locales as well as his academic background as a doctor of psychology. He breaks his book into two sections: perception and phenomenology.
 ==Contents==

@@ Line 19: / Line 19: @@
 The first chapters of the book ask readers to consider two stories: a man who has left his home for the city and has returned and the other a man who exists only in his small town/island. The former has become improved somehow and “radically transformed” almost by transmutation. The latter has been devalued as a “country bumpkin” in comparison. How does existing in the White dominated land of city’s like Paris, even for a short period of time, add to the Black man? Fanon suggests, the mythos of the uneducated, savage, Black African and his propensity towards correctness in the watchful eye of Whites has much to do with the change.
-The Black man, as Fanon suggests, “possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites” (1). The straddling of this delicate line, often occurring simultaneously in public spaces, is a constant source of material for Fanon. The Black man is altered in White spaces because his history is firmly rooted in the idealization of positions of power and influence which are almost always inhabited by a White man. Here as Fanon states, “a spell is cast from afar” and the Black man insists that his experience is lacking and what must be achieved is separation from his enslaved history to stand equal to his counterpart. The Black man’s subjugation under white rule, even in cases of the former’s mental superiority challenges his parallel identity as a male which lends to his desire to be in control. Fanon uses the story of a black medical student who in his supposed “psychosis” joins a military medical auxiliary unit to have White people underneath him. He through this, according to Fanon, could “make Whites adopt a black attitude toward him.” No longer black slave and white master, this doctor could like others in similar mental states could reverse the trauma of being sub-human. This is described as a created “historical-racial scheme” not boy one’s own feelings and understandings of the world through lived experience, but through the mythical storyline constructed by White men for their own categorization.
+The Black man, as Fanon suggests, “possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites” (1). The straddling of this delicate line, often occurring simultaneously in public spaces, is a constant source of material for Fanon. The Black man is altered in White spaces because his history is firmly rooted in the idealization of positions of power and influence which are almost always inhabited by a White man. Here as Fanon states, “a spell is cast from afar” and the Black man insists that his experience is lacking and what must be achieved is separation from his enslaved history to stand equal to his counterpart. The Black man’s subjugation under white rule, even in cases of the former’s mental superiority challenges his parallel identity as a male which lends to his desire to be in control. Fanon uses the story of a black medical student who in his supposed “psychosis” joins a military medical auxiliary unit to have White people underneath him. He through this, according to Fanon, could “make Whites adopt a black attitude toward him”— the ''imago''. No longer black slave and white master, this doctor could like others in similar mental states could reverse the trauma of being sub-human. This is described as a created “historical-racial scheme” not by one’s own feelings and understandings of the world through lived experience, but through the mythical storyline constructed by White men for their own categorization.
 ===Psychonalysis of ''being'' the Black Man===

← Older revision		Revision as of 21:31, 23 October 2018
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	===Psychonalysis of ''being'' the Black Man===		===Psychonalysis of ''being'' the Black Man===
		+	Fanon argues, the lived experience of the Black man is relative only to his white superior. He is “typed” and this is the only image offered of him in the mainstream. To be a Black man is to have one’s identity uniquely controlled and example is found for Fanon in the American films and their tendency to portray Black men in one uneducated way. On this, he says “the Negro is the symbol of sin” kept in their place by conceptualizing the trauma and continuous terror of existing as a subject of White men and not their equal. This universally recognized position, understood by both parties, is the basis of their eternal subjugation. From a play, he quotes a prisoner named Juan who laments, “his appearance undermines and invalidates all his actions” and in the end must prove his whiteness in order to exist as a fully realized person; one he is unable to be as an “inferior” race (189).
		+
		+	“To have a phobia about Black men is to be afraid of the biological, for the black is nothing but biological” (143). Seeking to understand the behavior of this group, Fanon apples psychoanalysis and finds where the world reveals itself to a White child, the Black child experiences the opposite and must additionally learn a new world when it steps out of its family group. The child must then feign whiteness to lessen his “abnormality” (122). The Black man does not immediately know he is black until he moves into the white arena and then, quite instinctually, he takes on the practices and behavior of the majority to cleanse himself of the burden of his Blackness. To this, Fanon argues, “the black man is, in every sense of the word, a victim of white civilization… [he] lives in ambiguity” (169).
		+
		+	Rising above this constructed identity and internal repression of what is essentially Black or Blackness is to meet at a place where human is the understood commonality. Fanon here shows his ultimate desire to make irrelevant the social constructs of Black and white, colonizer and colonized. He instructs readers to drop the ego and the pride of self and make action to change the outlook of Black and White relations.

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 {{Infobox book
-| name		 = Black Man, White Masks
+| name		 = Black Skin, White Masks
 | author         = Frantz Fanon, foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah, translated from original French by Richard Philcox
 | publisher      = Grove Press

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:29, 22 October 2018
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	The Black man, as Fanon suggests, “possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites” (1). The straddling of this delicate line, often occurring simultaneously in public spaces, is a constant source of material for Fanon. The Black man is altered in White spaces because his history is firmly rooted in the idealization of positions of power and influence which are almost always inhabited by a White man. Here as Fanon states, “a spell is cast from afar” and the Black man insists that his experience is lacking and what must be achieved is separation from his enslaved history to stand equal to his counterpart. The Black man’s subjugation under white rule, even in cases of the former’s mental superiority challenges his parallel identity as a male which lends to his desire to be in control. Fanon uses the story of a black medical student who in his supposed “psychosis” joins a military medical auxiliary unit to have White people underneath him. He through this, according to Fanon, could “make Whites adopt a black attitude toward him.” No longer black slave and white master, this doctor could like others in similar mental states could reverse the trauma of being sub-human. This is described as a created “historical-racial scheme” not boy one’s own feelings and understandings of the world through lived experience, but through the mythical storyline constructed by White men for their own categorization.		The Black man, as Fanon suggests, “possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites” (1). The straddling of this delicate line, often occurring simultaneously in public spaces, is a constant source of material for Fanon. The Black man is altered in White spaces because his history is firmly rooted in the idealization of positions of power and influence which are almost always inhabited by a White man. Here as Fanon states, “a spell is cast from afar” and the Black man insists that his experience is lacking and what must be achieved is separation from his enslaved history to stand equal to his counterpart. The Black man’s subjugation under white rule, even in cases of the former’s mental superiority challenges his parallel identity as a male which lends to his desire to be in control. Fanon uses the story of a black medical student who in his supposed “psychosis” joins a military medical auxiliary unit to have White people underneath him. He through this, according to Fanon, could “make Whites adopt a black attitude toward him.” No longer black slave and white master, this doctor could like others in similar mental states could reverse the trauma of being sub-human. This is described as a created “historical-racial scheme” not boy one’s own feelings and understandings of the world through lived experience, but through the mythical storyline constructed by White men for their own categorization.
		+
		+	===Psychonalysis of ''being'' the Black Man===

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:28, 22 October 2018
Line 12:		Line 12:

	Through this book, Fanon uses his lived experience as a politically activated person in both colonized and uncolonized locales as well as his academic background as a doctor of psychology. He noted lay breaks his book into two sections: perception and phenomenology.		Through this book, Fanon uses his lived experience as a politically activated person in both colonized and uncolonized locales as well as his academic background as a doctor of psychology. He noted lay breaks his book into two sections: perception and phenomenology.
		+
		+	==Contents==
		+	===The Black Man in Modern Times===
		+	Black Skin, White Masks was written at the time of the height of Eurocentrism and new Black thought, by an African author under French rule. This must be considered as the analysis he gives his firmly rooted in the experiential foundation of mid-20th century colonialism. In this, the text acts almost as a history book taking the reader back in terms of Existing within this framework Fanon’s concept of meaning-making in identity creation. Here he states clearly, the Black man suffers from a desire to be White and the White man the tendency to exert control over others. Whites and whiteness are synonymous with pure and just while Black is directly opposite, coarse and savage. This fragile relationship is where decisive study of the peculiarity of Blacks under French control develops.
		+
		+	The first chapters of the book ask readers to consider two stories: a man who has left his home for the city and has returned and the other a man who exists only in his small town/island. The former has become improved somehow and “radically transformed” almost by transmutation. The latter has been devalued as a “country bumpkin” in comparison. How does existing in the White dominated land of city’s like Paris, even for a short period of time, add to the Black man? Fanon suggests, the mythos of the uneducated, savage, Black African and his propensity towards correctness in the watchful eye of Whites has much to do with the change.
		+
		+	The Black man, as Fanon suggests, “possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites” (1). The straddling of this delicate line, often occurring simultaneously in public spaces, is a constant source of material for Fanon. The Black man is altered in White spaces because his history is firmly rooted in the idealization of positions of power and influence which are almost always inhabited by a White man. Here as Fanon states, “a spell is cast from afar” and the Black man insists that his experience is lacking and what must be achieved is separation from his enslaved history to stand equal to his counterpart. The Black man’s subjugation under white rule, even in cases of the former’s mental superiority challenges his parallel identity as a male which lends to his desire to be in control. Fanon uses the story of a black medical student who in his supposed “psychosis” joins a military medical auxiliary unit to have White people underneath him. He through this, according to Fanon, could “make Whites adopt a black attitude toward him.” No longer black slave and white master, this doctor could like others in similar mental states could reverse the trauma of being sub-human. This is described as a created “historical-racial scheme” not boy one’s own feelings and understandings of the world through lived experience, but through the mythical storyline constructed by White men for their own categorization.