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FOR THE BLACK MAN,
THERE IS ONLY
ONE DESTINY
AND IT IS WHITE
FRANTZ FANON (1925–1961)
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophyAPPROACH
ExistentialismBEFORE
4th century BCE Aristotle
argues in the Nicomachean
Ethics that slavery is a
natural state.19th century Africa is
partitioned and colonized
by European countries.1930s The French négritude
movement calls for a unified
black consciousness.AFTER
1977 Steve Biko, an anti-
apartheid activist inspired
by Fanon, dies in police
custody in South Africa.1978 Edward Said, influenced
by Fanon’s work, writes
Orientalism, a post-colonial
study of Western perspectives
on the Middle East in the
19th century.P
hilosopher and psychiatrist
Frantz Fanon first published
his psychoanalytic study of
colonialism and racism, Black Skin,
White Masks, in 1952. In the book
Fanon attempts to explore the
psychological and social legacy
of colonialism among non-white
communities around the world.
In saying that “for the black
man, there is only one destiny”,
and this destiny is white, Fanon is
saying at least two things. First,
he says that “the black man wants
to be like the white man”; that is,
the aspirations of many colonizedpeoples have been formed by
the dominant colonial culture.
European colonial cultures tended
to equate “blackness” with
impurity, which shaped the self-
view of those who were subject
to colonial rule, so that they came
to see the color of their skin as
a sign of inferiority.
The only way out of this
predicament seems to be an
aspiration to achieve a “white
existence”; but this will always fail,
because the fact of having dark
skin will always mean that one will
fail to be accepted as white. ForFor the black man
there is only one
destiny. And it is white.White colonial cultures
equate “blackness”
with inferiority.Colonized people want
to escape from this
“inferior” position.Colonized people start
to take on the assumed
superiority of colonial cultures.The only escape is
to reject “blackness.”