Black Skin, White Masks

This is one of the first books that “blew my mind” when I was a young university student: it remains the one I constantly return to because it seeks to understand the psychoanalytic foundations of racism under French colonialism.

Fanon was only 27 when his book was first published in 1952, but his reflections provide a stunningly passionate and layered view on how anti-Black racism (de)forms the subjectivity of both white and Black people, locking them into constructions of whiteness/blackness that require constant questioning.

His arguments on the psychoanalytic and political underpinnings of racism remain as relevant today as they… show more.

This classic study, first published in French in 1952, is one of the most important philosophical discussions of the problem of race and racism ever written.

Drawing from an array of sources in economics, history, psychology, politics, philosophy, and literature, Fanon delineates how race is an arbitrary social construction that takes on a life of its own and distorts the very being of what it means to be human. It focuses on the battle for recognition by those subjected to racial discrimination and elucidates how such anti-racist struggles can help bring forth a “New Humanism” that transcends the dehumanization that… show more.

Although not as well known as Fanon’s later critique of colonialism, The Wretched of the Earth, this book (first published in 1952) brilliantly captures the postwar turmoil when questions of race, oppression, national and personal identity were suddenly ripe for re-examination and reinvention – as, in many ways, they are again now. Fanon’s revolutionary call to resist being defined by others and determine our own destinies speaks directly to our Black Lives Matter moment. But it also speaks to anyone who has been displaced (as my family was during World War Two), or refuses to be pigeon-holed and characterized… show more.

Frantz Fanon was born in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, lived in France itself, and worked as a psychiatrist in the French colony of Algeria. Thus, he saw French colonialism from multiple angles. Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952, brings his psychoanalytic training to bear on the psychic damage to colonised and Black people under racist and colonial regimes. A powerful analysis of how racism warped subjectivity, the book explores the wounded masculinity of Black men. While I admire Fanon’s writings and his insights into how racism works are essential reading, his interest in Black women’s damaged… show more.