Sadler's Lectures

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks - Parallels Between Antisemitism And Anti-Black Racism

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher, psychoanalyst, and social critic Frantz Fanon's work Black Skin, White Masks

It focuses specifically on his comparative discussions of antisemitism directed at the figure of the Jew and anti-Black racism or negrophobia directed at the figure of the Black person. There are similarities and connections between the two dynamics but also some important differences that Fanon highlights

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Duration:: 17m
Broadcast on:: 05 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Sadler Lectures Podcast. Responding to popular demand, I'm converting my philosophy videos into sound files you can listen to anywhere you can take an MP3. If you like what you hear and want to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. I hope you enjoy this lecture. Throughout his work, black skin, white mask, Franz Fanon is going to draw connections and sometimes similarities between antisemitism and what we nowadays call anti-black racism, which he has a different word for, not exactly the same thing, but a component of it, Negro phobia displayed through actions and attitudes. And it's going to come up in the very first chapter in a rather off-hand way. He talks about a black person who's made to talk pigeon, being fastened to the effigy of him, snaring him and imprisoning him, the eternal victim of an essence of an appearance for which he's not responsible. It's something that's imposed. And so he says, naturally, just as a Jew who spends money without thinking about it is suspect, suspect to non-Jews who are anti-Semitic, then a black man who quotes Montesquieu had better be watched. Why? Because he is actually taking part in the culture, the French culture, that he's supposed to be granted access to, but isn't really by everybody within the society. Now jumping ahead to chapter four, which is titled the so-called dependency complex of colonized peoples where he's taking on this idea that the reason why some people got colonized is they have an inferiority complex about themselves. And then the colonizers came in, took over, were naturally viewed as greater than humans than the people who were colonized. Fanon says, that's nonsense. That's not really the case. And he brings up SART and a work that we're going to see referenced a number of times, anti-Semite and Jew. And SART says, "The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew, that is the simple truth from which we must start. It is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew." Now obviously, can Jewish people exist even if there aren't anti-Semites in the background? Yes, of course, but what is Fanon's point here, being defined as this particular social entity with all of its associations as the Jew. That is on the part of the anti-Semite. And similarly, something has happened in terms of race. He says, it is the racist who creates his inferior. The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the Europeans' feeling of superiority. Let's have the courage to actually say that it's not the inferiority, which then draws something out of the one who's temporarily superior, the colonizer, rather it's something that is imposed. Through history, through time. And it's not fair and it's not accurate, but it does play a massive role. We see in chapter five, he begins to take up this theme and spell it out in more detail. Chapter five is called The Fact of Blackness. And it's an interesting phenomenological examination of what it's like to be identified and then treated as the Negro, as black. And he brings up, once again, John Paul Sartz, anti-Semite, and Jew. And he says that they allowed themselves to be poisoned by stereotypes that others have, right? And so he's saying that this could be a problem, not just for Jews, but also for black people, the ones that he's addressing in this. He says, they allow themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype others have of them and they live in fear. Their acts will correspond to this stereotype. And then he brings up another interesting term. We may say their conduct is perpetually over-determined from the inside. There's an internalization that takes place, which introduces ambiguities. Is this act the act of a civilized person? Or is this act the act of a savage? Is this act the act of somebody who belongs in society or somebody who is ostracized and marginalized within society? So he says there's a vital difference here, though. The Jew can go unnoticed, as he says. They can be unknown in their Jewishness. They are not holy what they are. And you could say, well, in some circumstances, like in the Nazis, we're rounding them up and sending them to be exterminated. That was all they were reduced to. And yes, yes, Fanon is not contesting that. He's talking about the much broader sort of anti-Semitism that you counter. And he says his actions, his behavior, are the final determinant. He's a white man, and apart from some rather debatable characteristics, for example, large noses, which are stereotypically associated with Jewishness, but don't actually bear out, he can sometimes go unnoticed. He belongs to the race of those who, since the beginning of time, have never known cannibalism. And he says, granted Jews are harassed. They're hunted down, exterminated, cremated. But these are little family quarrels. The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked out. But is this what's available for a black person? No, because it's indexed directly to the color of their skin and perhaps other racial characteristics as well, many of which don't actually hold. And it's not as if there's a single black race that has all of these things as racists typically think. There's a number of different peoples and connections and things. So he says that I am given no chance, right? I am overdetermined from without. So we see that term again as well. I am the slave, not of the idea that others have of me, but of my own appearance. So there's a very important distinction there. It's not as easy to get away from that. A little bit later in the chapter, he is going to discuss the work again by Jean-Paul Sartre who is saying that there's all sorts of interesting interconnections between these things. And then we go on a little bit further and he talks about a teacher of his who had what he thinks is a really good and generalizable insight. So he says it may seem strange that the antisemites outlook should be related to that of the Negro folk, right? Why not? Because you could easily like hate one class of people or fear one class of people, but not fear another. So why are these connected? Are they intrinsically connected? And he says it was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles who recalled the fact to me one day, whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention because he's talking about you. And I found, Fanon says, that he was universally right, by which I meant that I was answerable in my body and in my heart for what was done to my brother later, I realized that he meant quite simply an antisemite is inevitably anti-Negro. And then he goes on and he's got this interesting phrase, you come too late, much too late, there will always be a world, a white world between you and us, a world of social structures that are historically built up, that are contingent, but are very resistant to change, but can in fact change. So one form of irrational, arbitrary, dislike, persecution, hate, fear of one group, is likely to be mirrored in that of others as well, 'cause it's not really ultimately about just a reaction to Jewish people or just a reaction to black people, it's really about a reaction to the other who is feared and hated. Chapter six has even more that is being discussed. And in one of these, we probably want to go back to looking at this idea of the racist creates, they're inferior. And he talks about this a bit in chapter six and tells us that in the universal situation of the Negro, there is an ambiguity which is resolved in his concrete existence and this in a way places him besides the Jew against all the arguments I've just cited. I come back to one fact, wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro, right? Now coming back to this chapter, the chapter itself is called the Negro Encyclopedia Pathology. So he's taking on mostly psychoanalytic discussions of race and inferiority and superiority and how it plays itself out. So he wants to bring a certain kind of psychoanalytic attentiveness. And there's actually a very long discussion that begins by talking about Lacan's theory of the mirror period. Very often translated as the mirror stage and how this doesn't quite play itself out exactly with black white relations and all that. But that's all in a footnote. Coming back to the main text itself, he says that John Paul Sart made a great study of the problem of anti-Semitism. Let's try to determine what's actually going on here. So he says that anti-Semitism can be somewhat distinguished from anti-black racism or neigrophobia, in part because it's centered on sort of cognates of money and what would that be? So money itself, prestige, power, the ability to influence things. I mean, these are the stereotypical things that are described by anti-Semites to Jewish people. Oh, they control the media. They control this. They're this secret cabal that's actually running the show and how do they do it by bribing people with their money, right? And these are stereotypes that have been around for quite a long time. He says, there's a contrast here because this can be rationalized. It's not ultimately rational, but it can be rationalized. He says, on a basic level. So this can be intellectualized. You can provide arguments for it that are not appealing in quite the way as anti-black arguments are. Then he talks about neigrophobia. And he says that neigrophobia is centered in a different way. It is centered on the body. He tells us in the case of the Negro, one thinks of sex. One thinks of the body. And he's going to talk a little bit later. Here he says, the Jew is actually attacked in their religious identity, in their history, in their race, the relations with their ancestors with posterity. And so when the Jew is being attacked, when they're being persecuted, it's the whole race that's persecuted in the person of the individual. What's the story then with neigrophobia? Well, I mean, we could say, what about cases where somebody is just being persecuted because they're black and they're standing in as a token for all black people, 'cause maybe somebody had a bad experience and they're like, I'm not gonna let those black people dominate me and then they shoot 'em or something like that. That could be more like the question of anti-Semitism. But there's also something that Fanon is pointing out here. He says that the Negro is attacked in his corporeality as a concrete being, as an actual being that they're lynched, that they're a threat. And he talks about castration, which is both something that actually does happen to people and historically has happened, you know, like when people were lynched or things like that. But also, you know, has a very important symbolic function within psychoanalysis. It's a way of taking away presumed power and danger from some threat. And that is the way, according to Fanon, that the black person is interpreted. It says with the Negro, the cycle of the biological begins. And this is where there's that note about Lacona and the mirror stage and alterity. And he shifts to discussing the Imago within people and talking about black soldiers being used for things. Later on, within the work and within the chapter, he is going to talk about something and this is gonna bleed over into the last chapter as well. He talks about evil and how both the Jew and the Negro are, whether they like it or not, sort of drawn into the orbit of being identified with evil within the larger culture that they're invited to belonging to as a tenuously secure member. So he says, the Negro is the genital. Is this the whole story? Unfortunately not, the Negro is something else. Here again, we find the Jew. So there's a connection between the two. He and I may be separated by the sexual question, but we have one point in common. Both of us stand for evil. The black man more so for the reason that he is black and he talks about the symbology of black and white. And after that, he goes on and says that the Jew authentic or inauthentic is struck down by the fist of the salot, right? His situation is such, everything he does is bound to turn against him. Naturally, the Jew prefers himself and it happens that he forgets his Jewishness or hides it or hides himself from it. Why? Because he admits the validity of the Aryan system. There are good and evil. Evil is Jewish. Jewish things are ugly. Let us no longer be Jews. So he talks about this dynamic where people are denying this part of their identity. That doesn't have to be the totality of their identity, but has been turned into that by others. They push it aside, repress it, actually turn against their own community and people like them in the process doing that. And Fanon says this can happen with black people as well. And this can be a serious danger. So he says that there's a scapegoating complex here. Fault, guilt, refusal of guilt, paranoia. What others have described in the case of the Jew can apply perfectly in the case of the Negro. Good, evil, beauty, ugliness, white, black. These are the characteristic pairings of the phenomenon that we shall call mannequism delirium, right? And he says, seeing only one type of Negro assimilating anti-Semitism to Negrophobia, these seem to be the errors of analysis being committed here. And he says, well, you know, there's not an error being committed here, but we do want to be careful not to generalize this too far. So Fanon would be against saying, well, there's in white or European culture, there's just this tendency that makes everybody within it distrust Jews or distrust black people. He's not saying anything remotely like that. And he's also noting that there can be all sorts of gradations, for example, in Africa itself or in the Caribbean where people are kind of black, but kind of not black and there's like hierarchies that are set up and all of that. The other thing to point out is that Fanon's analysis here, thinking of it in terms of Jew and Negro as particularly in terms of the history or being set apart and being able to pass and being identified with a body, right? This is an analysis that doesn't just have to do with black people and Jewish people. It could be applied and extended to many other sorts of cases as well as a way of describing a certain dynamic and mindset. Both on the part of the people who are held up as superior and on the part of the people that are put into the position and may accept the position of being inferior. - Special thanks to all of my Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. You can find me on Twitter at philosopher70 on YouTube at the Gregory B. Sadler channel and on Facebook on the Gregory B. Sadler page. Once again, to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. Above all, keep studying these great philosophical works. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (upbeat music)