Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks

[Dave Monroe]

... well, seeing as nobody's exhibited any interest HERE (elsehwere, I'm
not so sure) ... selected selections from Black Skin, White Masks by
Frantz Fanon (Trans. Chris Lam Markham.  New York: Grove Press, 1967
[1952]) ...

    The explosion will not happen today.  It is too soon ... or too
late.
    I do not come with timeless truths.
    My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances.
    Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if
certain things were said.
    These things I am going to say, not shout.  For it is a long time
since shouting has gone out of my life.
    So very long ...
    Why write this book?  No one has asked me for it.
    Especially those to whom it is directed.
    Well?  Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in
this world.  And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.
    Toward a new humanism....
    Understanding among men....
    Our colored brothers....
    Mankind, I believe in you....
    Race prejudice....
    To understand and to love.... (7)

There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region,
an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. (8)

Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation.  If it is
true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see
that this trnscendence is haunted by the problems of love and
understanding. (9)

[... and, for the time being, skipping somewhat ahead ...]

I hope I may be forgiven for asking that those who take it on themselves
to describe colonialism remember one thing: that it is utopian to try to
ascertian in what ways one kind of inhuman behavior differs from another
kind of inhuman behavior.  (87)

    Colonial racism is no different from any other racism.
    Anti-Semitism hits me head-on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an
appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man.  I
cannot dissociate myself from the future that is proposed for my
brother.  Every one of my acts commits me as a man.  Every one of my
silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man.  (89) [in a
footnote here, Fanon cites Karl Jaspers, and paraphrases Carl Jung:
"Jung ... says that, confronted by an Asiatic or a Hindu, every European
has equally to answer for the crimes perpetrated by Nazi savagery."]

"When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in
America, i say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I
turn on my radio, when I learn that Jews have been insulted, mistreated,
persecuted, I say we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when,
finally, i turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has
been inaugurated and legalized, I say taht we have certainly been lied
to: Hitler is not dead" (90; Aime Cesaire, "quoted from memory")

It is the racist who creates his inferior. (93)

[... for starters ...]