Black Skin, White Masks

Black Skin, White Masks (French: Peau noire, masques blancs) is a 1952 book by Frantz Fanon.

In this study, Fanon uses psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical theory to explain the feelings of dependency and inadequacy that Black people experience in a White world. He speaks of the divided self-perception of the Black Subject who has lost his native cultural originality and embraced the culture of the mother country. As a result of the inferiority complex engendered in the mind of the Black Subject, he will try to appropriate and imitate the cultural code of the colonizer. The behaviour, Fanon argues, is even more evident in upwardly mobile and educated Black people who can afford to acquire status symbols. Originally formulated to combat the oppression of black people, Fanon's insights are still influential today, being utilized by various groups such as the Palestinians, the Tamils, African Americans and others, in their struggle for cultural and political autonomy. Fanon presents both historical interpretation and underlying social indictment.

In a particular selection of Black Skin, White Masks called "The Negro and Psychopathology," Fanon delves deeper into the psyche of colonized, black subjects through brief psychoanalysis. He begins his argument with a discussion of the inability of black people to fit into the norms established by white society. He claims that "a normal Negro child, having grown up in a normal Negro family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact of the white world." This is due to the unconscious and unnatural training of black people from a young age to associate blackness with wrongness. Fanon cites comic books and cartoons as devices of white society to cement the idea in children's minds that black people are villains. When these images are placed in the hands of black children, they experience a "trauma" that becomes inherent to their behavioral make up. Fanon focuses most of this selection on the concept of collective unconscious and collective catharsis. He argues that the experience of trauma early on creates a collective nature among oppressed black populations.