Episode 210: Frantz Fanon’s Black Existentialism (Part Two)

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Continuing on Black Skin White Masks (1952) with guest Lawrence Ware.

We've reached the most influential chapter (five), "The Fact of Blackness" (also translated as "The Lived Experience of the Black Man"), where Fanon describes how negative images of blackness in society fix the identity of black folks, trapping them in perpetual self-consciousness, and how Fanon himself felt about and reacted to this. He describes successive coping strategies that include the desire to become invisible, the attempt to assimilate (to become white), the violent rejection of the white gaze, the embrace of negritude, etc. These are all to be overcome eventually, but are they necessary steps, i.e., steps that should be encouraged to obtain psychological freedom from this social caste, or just what Fanon happened to experience, and other people would be better advised to cut to the end point where people are just people (i.e., humanism)?

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End song: "Malaika" by John Etheridge and Vimala Rowe; hear John interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music #85.

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