{"id":175913,"date":"2020-12-28T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2020-12-28T12:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=175913"},"modified":"2020-12-27T08:55:26","modified_gmt":"2020-12-27T08:55:26","slug":"the-revolutionary-humanism-of-frantz-fanon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/12\/the-revolutionary-humanism-of-frantz-fanon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Revolutionary Humanism of Frantz Fanon"},"content":{"rendered":"

The philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary militant Frantz Fanon was a key figure in the struggle against European colonialism. Fanon\u2019s innovative thinking on racism and its relationship to class oppression still speaks vividly to the present.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Frantz Fanon is a Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary who wrote on race and racism. (Frantz Fanon Archives)<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Dec 2020 – <\/em>The renewed protests against racism and police brutality over the last year have supplied a fresh impetus for thinking about the nature of capitalism, its relationship to racism, and the construction of alternatives to both. Few thinkers speak more directly to such issues than Frantz Fanon, the Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary who is widely considered one of the twentieth century\u2019s foremost thinkers on race and racism.<\/p>\n

Fanon had direct experience of French colonial rule, from the Caribbean to North Africa, and brought that experience to bear on his intellectual work. He played an active role in the Algerian revolutionary movement that struggled for independence in the 1950s, but he warned that independent African states would simply replace the colonial system with a national bourgeoisie unless they followed the path of social revolution.Some of Fanon\u2019s key works have been available in English translation for many years. However, the recent publication of over six hundred pages of Fanon\u2019s previously unavailable writings on literature, psychiatry, and politics makes this a fitting moment to reexamine his thought anew.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n
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Denaturalizing Racism<\/h3>\n

Born in 1925, Fanon grew up in French-ruled Martinique in the Lesser Antilles. He originally thought of himself \u2014 as was true of many others at the time \u2014 as French and not \u201cBlack.\u201d That began to change when he enlisted as a soldier in the Free French Forces during World War II. The experience brought the racism of French \u201ccivilization\u201d painfully home to him.<\/p>\n

Returning to France in the late 1940s, Fanon immersed himself in the literature of N\u00e9gritude, a French-speaking black pride movement. At the same time, he absorbed the latest European intellectual developments such as phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. This led to his first book, published in 1952 when Fanon was only twenty-six: Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s great breakthrough in Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> was to analyze racism in sociogenic<\/a> terms, denying it any natural basis. Skin color may be biologically determined, but the way that we see and interpret it is conditioned by social forces which are outside of our control.<\/p>\n

This phenomenon is so pervasive that race and racism come to appear as \u201cnatural,\u201d transhistorical phenomena. For Fanon, such mystification cannot be stripped away by mere enlightened critique since it is deeply rooted in objective social realities and must be challenged at that level.<\/p>\n

In recent decades, the \u201csocial construction of race\u201d has become such a clich\u00e9 that the radical implications of Fanon\u2019s theoretical breakthrough are easy to miss. If race is socially constructed, it follows that specific social relations are responsible for its birth and perpetuation. What might those relations be? Fanon insists that they are economic:<\/p>\n

The true disalienation of the black man implies a brutal awareness of the social and economic realities \u2026 the Black problem is not just about Blacks living among whites, but about Blacks exploited, enslaved, and despised by colonialist and capitalist society that happens to be white.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, this did not mean that race is secondary to class, or that the struggle against racism was subordinate to the fight against capitalism. A phenomenon is not exclusively defined by its origin. Racism takes on a life of its own and defines the mental horizons of individuals long after some of its economic imperatives have faded from the scene. Fanon therefore insisted that \u201cthe black man must wage the struggle on two levels,\u201d objective and subjective. Any \u201cunilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, that \u201cmistake\u201d characterized the dominant forms of Marxism in Fanon\u2019s time: they saw racism as (at best) a secondary consideration, while failing to produce a credible Marxist theory of racialization. For this reason, despite his firm opposition to capitalism, Fanon never associated with any existing Marxist tendency. As Sylvia Wynter summarizes Fanon\u2019s novel position: \u201cA solution will have to be supplied both at the objective level of the socioeconomic, as well as at the level of subjective experience, <\/em>of consciousness, and therefore, of \u2018identity.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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From Object to Subject<\/h3>\n

For Fanon, the positive affirmation of identity was a critical moment in the development of self-consciousness. The liberation of black people as subjects hinged on the recovery of a sense of selfhood and dignity that has been robbed from them by the \u201cwhite gaze.\u201d Taking pride in the racial attributes denigrated by society in people of color would be a crucial way of challenging the naturalization of social relations that underpins racism.<\/p>\n

Fanon developed this perspective through a critical engagement with Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology of Spirit<\/i>. He argued that mutual recognition was impossible in a society defined by the racial gaze, since it meant that people of color were viewed as things: \u201cI found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was the central issue for Fanon: racism does not merely deprive its victims of economic resources and social status. It also dehumanizes and depersonalizes them, leaving Blacks to \u201cinhabit a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge.\u201d This produced an inferiority complex, a sense of lesser human worth. Those he called the \u201cwretched of the earth\u201d could transcend this only by securing recognition of their humanity, based on a positive affirmation of their racial or national characteristics.<\/p>\n