Once and for all I will state this principle: A given society is racist or it is not. In particular, the kinds of obsessive behavior and inferiority complexes he sees in Black people are a result of a racist society that produces an impossible situation, or double bind, in which Black people want to become white but cannot possible do so.
When an entire class or race of people exhibit certain neurotic symptoms, the problem isn’t just individual it’s social.
Throughout Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon is careful to say that the neuroses he discusses are not just individual neuroses. The neurotic structure of an individual is simply the elaboration, the formation, the eruption within the ego, of conflictual clusters arising in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely personal way in which that individual reacts to these influences. The quest to be white is also a quest to lose one’s self. However, this obsession is also a neurosis because running away from Blackness is running away from one’s self.
This is what makes their behavior “obsessive”: it has to be done over and over again, because one never actually arrives at whiteness. But because he is Black, the Black person has to work very hard, all the time, to run away from this fact. The Black person wants to be white, according to Fanon, because whiteness stands for everything that is good and powerful in society. This quote has some technical language drawing from Fanon’s psychoanalytic training, but it is also a succinct summary of the condition he sees in Black people living in racist societies. In the man of color there is a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence. The Negro’s behavior makes him akin to an obsessive neurotic type, or, if one prefers, he puts himself into a complete situational neurosis. The difficulty of interracial love in a racist society should not be grounds for eliminating interracial love, but for changing society in order to make it possible or easier. In other words, the critique he is about to provide is coming from his own desire for a better world. In this quote opening Fanon’s discussion of interracial romance in Chapters 2 and 3, Fanon is clear to state he is, in the end, a romantic. Today I believe in the possibility of love that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions. Language has this much power to police the borders of who is part of a culture and who is not. France makes Black people feel inferior by claiming their French is bad, for instance, and therefore saying that Black people can never be French or civilized like the French are. Fanon says it is through language that we develop a sense of ourselves as well as a sense of social hierarchy. This quote is from Fanon’s chapter on language. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is. To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. Thus, the white man, whose sin against humanity is the enslavement of others, himself slaves to become human. But white people are also dehumanized in this situation, because to dehumanize others is to dehumanize one’s self. As a result, Black people want to be white, because whiteness stands for power. Fanon says that in a racist society, whites have more advantage than Blacks, and this creates a situation in which white people seem to be superior to Black people. This quote, also early in Black Skin, White Masks, is an effective summary of the analysis Fanon provides in the first few chapters of his book. The white man slaves to reach a human level. That’s what it means to say “the black is not a man.” Black people don’t even get to be considered human in racist societies.
He is saying that black and white are not just a hierarchy within the human species, or “man.” Rather, in racist society, only white people are human and people of color are instead Other to human, or beasts and animals. In this provocative quote on the opening page of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon summarizes his analysis of white-Black relations. At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.
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