¶ … Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Read the book and discuss the book in terms of the title.

Fanon's book is an analysis of identity and racism issues about blacks in a culturally white world.

In order to understand Frantz Fanon's book, Black Skin, White Masks, it's important to understand a little bit about the author himself. Fanon was born in French Martinique in 1925 and moved to France in 1943. He had always thought of himself as French and it was here in France that he had his first taste of racism. He began to write political essays and plays and it was here that he wrote Black Skin, White Masks.

The book represents his own first-hand experience with being a black well-educated man in a world of whites. Because he had studied medicine and psychology, Fanon interjected psychological theories into his writing.

Fanon believes that because blackness is associated with evil and sin and that to escape that identify, the black man puts on a white mask by being inculcated into a white man's cultural world. If he can be assimilated into that society, his personal appearance will be abstract. The eventual outcome is that the black man becomes alienated from his own inner self.

According to Fanon, the category "white" depends...

Thus Fanon locates the historical point at which certain psychological formations became possible and charts the psychological oppression of black men.
The entire focus of his book is the anti-colonial struggle faced by blacks as evidenced by the violence in Africa. The colonized people are trying to free themselves from psychological oppression and be able to create their own existence.

The title depicts the black man as trying to escape his own essence and create his version of a white world. Fanon's book illustrates the intellectual and cultural alienation of blacks in a world of white values.

His writing demonstrates racism at its most powerful. In essence to the point where it can demoralize a man enough to make him disown his own self, his race, and his heritage. It's almost an oxymoron because the black man who despises what the white mane has done to him, then becomes part of what he hates -- the white world and all it stands for.

The book weaves together Fanon's own tortuous journey and dramatizes his own personal experiences. His theories of racism and colonialism are both riveting and thought provoking.…