Black Skin, White Masks.
This week, I’m reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks for school, and it’s wild because it’s this like classic book of Black philosophy but it’s also incredibly unhinged. Fanon is a psychologist, but he uses fictional examples to prove his points sometimes. Sometimes he uses hypothetical experiments instead of real ones and sometimes he quotes at length from books of poetry to make his argument without explaining why or what he means. He says (essentially) about Black women, “I don’t know her,” and says some pretty terrible things about women in general. It’s a mess and it’s experimental and he was in his twenties when he wrote it and we should probably take the entire thing with an enormous grain of salt.
One interesting thing about the book though is how Fanon is caught in Whiteness’s perception of what Blackness is, and you see him struggling to get out, you see him not really believing the racist things people think about him, but also wanting to prove the inevitability of being caught up in all of that anyway. What is Blackness—he seems to ask—but everything Whiteness doesn’t want to be? And if I’m Black, what can I be then but their shadow? He talks about culture and rhythm and the glitch between what Whiteness sees when it looks at him and how he sees himself.
There’s a whole contemporary school of thought that orbits around Fanon called Afropessimism. It takes what he might’ve been saying somewhat ironically and makes it literal. Black people are not human. They will always be marked by death because the world cannot exist if Black people are alive and free. We are slaves still. We are nothing. Some Afropessimists go so far as to say that Black women shouldn’t be mothers because what would be the point? Why give birth when it can only lead to death and more death? I don’t know everything about Afropessimism, but from what I’ve read, it feels like kind of a flimsy way to look at the world, especially because, as academics, there is often a buffer between your body and the violence of racism and poverty. It seems easier to declare yourself nothing when no one is actually going to treat you that way, easier to encourage others to say they’re not human when you likely won’t get the brunt of anything too inhumane. I appreciate the audacity to intellectually and creatively explore Blackness however we want though, and I still think it’s interesting: all of the ways that we orbit around race as a people.
For my work, I’ve been thinking a lot about Whiteness, especially Whiteness as separate from White people, as an idea that is formed on a fear of difference and that can only exist as long as that fear is alive. Whiteness asks to be served, to be given something by Others to consume, if it’s not going to become terrified and, with all of its power, crush those Others. It justifies the crushing by projecting: If I didn’t crush you, wouldn’t you—of course you would—eventually crush me? It cannot imagine relationships without violence.
I’ve been thinking of Whiteness as this monster, as this supervillain, and it doesn’t mean that White people are all monsters and villains, but that you become monstrous (regardless of your race) the more you invest in the values and fears of Whiteness. The more you are afraid of people who are different than you, the more you threaten their lives just because they’re not serving you, the more invested in Whiteness you are, and it will only protect you as long as you continue to serve it, and sometimes (often) not even then.
It’s been cool this year to just read all of this Black philosophy and all of this Black literature that is also more philosophy: Invisible Man (another unhinged book I’m reading this week), Beloved, Black No More (about an invention that turns Black people White, wreaking havoc on what it means to be either). It’s refreshing to see how many ways there are to bend and fold and stretch this made-up idea of race. Not ethnicity, where you’re from, but race: what you look like and what we’ve decided it means. Maybe race is not as fixed as we have come to consider it. Maybe we can, like Fanon, say almost everything at once, quoting poetry, getting caught up and then, after the struggle, snipping the net open somehow, tumbling into some other place we have yet to fully land on, to see.
