301
See also: Aristotle 56–63 ■ Jean-Paul Sartre 268–71 ■ Maurice Merleau-Ponty 274–75 ■ Edward Said 321
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
Fanon, this aspiration to achieve
“a white existence” not only fails
to address racism and inequality,
but it also masks or even condones
these things by implying that there
is an “unarguable superiority” to
white existence.
At the same time, Fanon is
saying something more complex.
It might be thought that, given this
tendency to aspire to a kind of
“white existence”, the solution would
be to argue for an independent view
of what it means to be black. Yet
this, too, is subject to all kinds of
problems. Elsewhere in his book,
Fanon writes that “the black man’s
soul is a white man’s artefact.” In
other words, the idea of what it
means to be black is the creation
of patterns of fundamentally racist
European thought.
Here Fanon is, in part, responding
to what was known in France as
the négritude (or “blackness”)
movement. This was a movement of
French and French-speaking black
writers from the 1930s who wanted
to reject the racism and colonialism
of mainstream French culture, and
argued for an independent, shared
black culture. But Fanon believes
that this idea of négritude is one
that fails to truly address the
problems of racism that it seeks to
overcome, because the way that it
thinks about “blackness” simply
repeats the fantasies of mainstream
white culture.Human rights
In one sense, Fanon believes that
the solution can only come when
we move beyond racial thinking;
that if we remain trapped within
the idea of race we cannot everThe inferiority associated with being
black led many colonized people to
adopt the “mother country’s cultural
standards”, says Fanon, and even to
aspire to a “white existence.”There is a fact:
White men consider
themselves superior
to black men.
Frantz Fanonaddress these injustices. “I find
myself in the world and I recognize
that I have one right alone,” Fanon
writes at the end of his book; “that
of demanding human behavior from
the other.” Fanon’s thought has been
of widespread importance in anti-
colonial and anti-racist movements,
and has influenced social activists
such as anti-apartheid campaigner
Steve Biko and scholars such as
Edward Said. ■Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925
in Martinique, a Caribbean
island that was at that time a
French colony. He left Martinique
to fight with the Free French
Forces in World War II, after
which he studied both medicine
and psychiatry in Lyon, France.
He also attended lectures on
literature and philosophy,
including those given by the
philosopher Merleau-Ponty. The
young Fanon had thought of
himself as French, and the
racism he encountered on firstentering France surprised him. It
played a huge role in shaping his
philosophy, and one year after
qualifying as a psychiatrist in
1951, he published his book Black
Skin, White Masks.
In 1953 Fanon moved to
Algeria where he worked as a
hospital psychiatrist. After two
years of hearing his patients’
tales of the torture they endured
during the 1954–62 Algerian War
of Independence, he resigned his
government-funded post, moved
to Tunisia, and began working
for the Algerian independence
movement. In the late 1950s, hedeveloped leukemia. During his
illness, he wrote his final book,
The Wretched of the Earth,
arguing for a different world. It
was published in the year of his
death with a preface by Jean-
Paul Sartre, a friend who had
first influenced Fanon, then
been influenced by him.Key works1952 Black Skin, White Masks
1959 A Dying Colonialism
1961 The Wretched of the Earth
1969 Toward the African
Revolution (collected short works)