Black Skin
...Readers of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks often disagree about whether or not Fanon is arguing for or against the perpetuation of racial categories.[1] One interpretation suggests that Fanon’s sociogenic analysis demonstrates the inevitability, if not the necessity, of racial categories. These readers, namely Kathryn Gines in “Fanon and Sartre 50 Years Later: To Retain or Reject the Concept of Race”[2] focus on Chapter Five, “The Lived Experience of the Black.” Originally published as a response to Sartre’s “Black Orpheus,” Fanon’s essay introduced Léopold Senghor’s anthology of négritude poetry. In “Black Orpheus” Sartre claims that the négritude movement is essential for a new kind of humanism that will free us from racist thinking, free us from a world divided by race:
The unity which will come eventually, bringing all oppressed peoples together in the same struggle, must be preceded in the colonies by what I shall call the moment of separation or negativity: this anti-racist racism is the only road that will lead to the abolition of racial differences.[3]
Fanon’s response is direct: “Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. … I needed not to know. This struggle, this new decline had to take on an aspect of completeness.”[4] Sartre’s declaring an end to racialism undermines the power of experiencing blackness positively; rendering it as a temporary move on the way to universal humanism makes it almost powerless. To succeed, négritude has to be able to be experienced as absolute.
The other interpretation suggests that Fanon, although giving an amazing and important description of “the lived experience of the black,” ends Black Skin, White Masks by moving away from racialism and toward seeing each man as only a man, not seeing color at all. The close of the book, it is argued, suggests exactly this. When Fanon concludes...
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