THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 71
one thing and that is to breed counter-
violence,” Mandela said. Fanon presented
counterviolence as a kind of therapy for
dehumanized natives: “As you and your
fellow men are cut down like dogs,” he
wrote, “there is no other solution but to
use every means available to reestablish
your weight as a human being.”
In Fanon’s view, the Western bour-
geoisie was “fundamentally racist” and
its “bourgeois ideology” of equality and
dignity was merely a cover for capital-
ist-imperialist rapacity. In this, he antic-
ipated the contemporary critique, fre-
quently derided as “woke,” that holds
that the West’s material and ideological
foundations lie in white supremacy. Eu-
ropean imperialists had, he charged, “be-
haved like real war criminals in the un-
derdeveloped world” for centuries, using
“deportation, massacres, forced labor, and
slavery” to accumulate wealth. Among
their “most heinous” crimes were the rup-
turing of the Black man’s identity, the
destruction of his culture and commu-
nity, and the poisoning of his inner life
with a sense of inferiority. European
thought, Fanon wrote, was marked by “a
permanent dialogue with itself, an in-
creasingly obnoxious narcissism.”
At the same time, Fanon urged the
colonized to “stop accusing” their white
masters, and to do what the latter had
so conspicuously failed to do: start a
“new history of man” that advanced “uni-
versalizing values.” In his view, anti-
colonial nationalism was only the first
step toward a new radical humanism “for
Europe, for ourselves and for humanity.”
He had already distanced himself from
claims to a racially defined identity and
culture. The “great white error” of racial
arrogance, he had written, ought not to
be replaced by the “great black mirage.”
“In no way do I have to dedicate myself
to reviving a black civilization unjustly
ignored,” he wrote in his first book,
“Black Skin, White Masks” (1952). “I will
not make myself the man of any past.”
He also saw no point in trying to shame
people through exposure to the grisly
facts of slavery and imperialism. “Am I
going to ask today’s white men to answer
for the slave traders of the seventeenth
century?” he asked. In “The Wretched
of the Earth,” he warned the dispos-
sessed against adopting a “psychology
dominated by an exaggerated sensibil-
ity, sensitivity, and susceptibility.”
As Western imperialists ended their
long occupation of Asia and Africa,
Fanon became obsessed with the “curse
of independence”: the possibility that
nationhood in the Global South, though
inevitable, could become an “empty
shell,” a receptacle for ethnic and tribal
antagonisms, ultranationalism, chauvin-
ism, and racism. Certainly, writers of
the sixties inspired by “The Wretched
of the Earth”—the African novelists
Nadine Gordimer, Ayi Kwei Armah,
and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Caribbean
poet Édouard Glissant, the Guyanese
critic Walter Rodney—saw in the book
not an incitement to kill white people
but a chillingly acute diagnosis of the
post-colonial condition: how the West
would seek to maintain the iniquitous
international order that had made it rich
and powerful, and how new ruling classes
in post-colonial nations would fail to
devise a viable system of their own. One
measure of Fanon’s clairvoyance—and
the glacial pace of progress—is that, in
its sixtieth year, “The Wretched of the
Earth” remains a vital guide both to the
tenacity of white supremacy in the West
and to the moral and intellectual fail-
ures of the “darker nations.”F
anon’s suspicions about the Global
South’s élites came from his own
tormented experience as a Westernized
Black man who grew up oblivious of
his Blackness. Born into a middle-class
family in Martinique in 1925, Fanon had
been a proud citizen of the French Re-
public. He grew up reading Montes-
quieu and Voltaire, and, like many Black
men from French colonies, fought with
the Allied forces during the Second
World War. Wounded in Alsace, he was
awarded the Croix de Guerre.
It was only in postwar France, where
he went, in 1946, to study psychiatry, that
he discovered he was little more than a
“dirty nigger” in the eyes of whites—a
“savage” of the kind he had previously
assumed lived only in Africa. In “Black
Skin, White Masks,” he narrates his ex-
perience of a formative trauma common
to many anti-colonial leaders and think-
ers. In his case, it was a little girl in Lyon
exclaiming, “Maman, look, a Negro; I’m
scared!” Being “overdetermined from
without,” as he described it, shocked him
out of any complacent assumptions about
equality, liberty, and fraternity. “I wantedquite simply to be a man among men,”
Fanon wrote, but the “white gaze, the
only valid one,” had “fixed” him, forcing
him to become shamefully aware of his
Black body, and of debasing white as-
sumptions about his history, defined by
“cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism,
racial stigmas, slave traders.”
Although Fanon understood the po-
litical and economic realities that reduced
Black men to “crushing objecthood,” his
psychiatric training made him sensitive
to the psychological power of the im-
ages imposed by enslavers on the en-
slaved. Fanon knew that Black men who
internalized these images would find it
impossible to escape their colonized selves
in a world made by and for white men.
White men had not merely conquered
vast territories, radically reorganizing so-
cieties and exploiting populations. They
also claimed to represent a humane civ-
ilization devoted to personal liberty and
equipped with the superior tools of sci-
ence, reason, and individual enterprise.
“The Europeans wanted gold and slaves,
like everybody else,” the African narra-
tor of V. S. Naipaul’s novel “A Bend in
the River” remarks. “But at the same time
they wanted statues put up to themselves
as people who had done good things for
the slaves.” Naturally, “they got both the
slaves and the statues.”
Fanon wrote about how the Black
man, cowed by the colonists’ unprece-
dented mixture of greed, righteousness,
and military efficacy, tended to internal-
ize the demoralizing judgment delivered
on him by the white gaze. “I start suf-
fering from not being a white man,”
Fanon wrote. “So I will try quite simply
to make myself white.” But mimicry
could be a cure worse than the disease,
since it reinforced the existing racial hi-
erarchy, thereby further devastating the
Black man’s self-esteem. Inspired by Sar-
tre, who had argued that the anti-Sem-
ite’s gaze created the Jew, Fanon con-
cluded that Blackness was another
constructed and imposed identity. “The
black man is not,” he wrote in the clos-
ing pages of “Black Skin, White Masks.”
“No more than the white man.”
This argument also underpins the po-
litical programs that Fanon proposes in
“The Wretched of the Earth,” in which
he argues that, because colonialism is “a
systematized negation of the other,” it
“forces the colonized to constantly ask