Sadler's Lectures

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks - Woman And Man, White And Color

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 the discussions in the second and third chapters of the work, titled "The Woman of Color and the White Man," and "The Man of Color and the White Woman." Fanon examines what would need to be the case in order to have the possibility of "true, authentic love—wishing for others what one postulates for oneself, when that postulation unites the permanent values of human reality." His answer is that "mobilization of psychic drives basically freed of unconscious conflicts" would be needed. Since he "believe[s] in the possibility of love, he "endeavor[s] to trace its imperfections, its perversions in these two chapters.

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Duration:: 25m
Broadcast on:: 01 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. Early on in his work black skin, white masks, Franz Fanon is gonna devote two chapters that are kind of mirror images of each other's fires. Their titles go to looking at relations between people of color and white people and what we can learn by looking at their desires, what it is that they're aiming after and whether satisfaction is actually possible. And it's interesting because what is he not doing? In these chapters, as we're gonna see, at the end of the first one, which is actually chapter two, and at the end of the second one, chapter three, he's gonna be saying, well, we can't draw general conclusions about relationships between black people and white people in sexual relationships or relationships of love. From these examples that we're looking at, we have to get beyond this and even recognize the contingency of those divisions to some degree. Now, these are titled similarly, the fam or om de couleur, so the woman or man of color, not the black person, not the negro, but of color. And we'll see why in just a moment, and the white man or the white woman, la blanc, la blanc. So the first one is about the woman of color and the white man. The second one is about the man of color and the white woman and what are possible for them. And he begins chapter two with this very interesting reflection, right? And he's going to bring up Jean-Paul Sartre and being in nothingness. Now, if I don't take quite a bit from Sartre, but he also differs from him very significantly and is critical of some of, we could say Sartre's conclusions or even dead ends. So he starts out by saying, "Man is motion towards the world and towards his like." And then he brings up to components, a movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest. So that's on one side, a movement of love, a gift of self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called ethical orientation. So there's the motif of domination, of aggression. There's the motif of something other than that, a self giving, loving, the ethical arrangement or orientation towards others. And he says, every consciousness seems to have the capacity to demonstrate these two components. So all of us human beings, we can be marked by one or the other. And it's not so simple as to say, well, choose this or choose this because he goes on and says simultaneously or alternatively. So within most of us, both of these themes have some play. And he says, the person I love, for an example, will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood while the need to earn the admiration of the love of others will erect a value making superstructure. What an interesting way of looking at it on my whole vision of the world. So, while people do try to withdraw, to isolate themselves or just to control other people, these are ultimately unsuccessful strategies. And it's not as if we can easily jump to the value making superstructure and find our place in it in part because we live in a world of others. And the racial distinctions and divisions that have historically developed, although they are contingent, they do play an important role in how people view these things. So he says, you know, SART appeared to formulate a description of love as frustration, being a nothingness amounted only to an analysis of dishonesty and in authenticity. But here's an important fact that remains. Fanon goes on to say, true, authentic love, wishing for others what one postulates for oneself when that postulation unites permanent values of human reality. So this is a good way of describing love entails, as he's going to say, the mobilization of psychic drives basically freed of unconscious conflicts. Now, does that mean you have to be perfect? You can't have any sort of unconscious conflicts. No, he says basically freed. So this is going to be something on a continuum. Many people are essentially captivated by and just reproducing their unconscious conflicts, which, you know, perhaps psychoanalysis or other forms of psychotherapy could bring to light and help to some degree to resolve. And that is part of what he wants to do in these chapters. So he says, I believe in the possibility of love. That is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions. And then he says in this chapter devoted to the relations between the woman of color and the European, it's our problem to ascertain, to one extent, authentic love will remain unattainable before one is perched oneself of that feeling of inferiority or that Adlerian exaltation. Adler was, of course, a very important early psychoanalyst who talks about this, you know, feeling of inferiority and the need to overcompensate, which Fanon is bringing up here. So while an individual is caught up within this dynamic of feeling inferior, for whatever reasons, they are going to have a difficult time attaining some sort of true authentic love, you know, putting aside the problems of finding the right partner and all sorts of other ways in which things go wrong. Now, he's going to examine two different literary, let's call them monuments or representations of persons within this chapter. And then he's gonna analyze one further in the chapter on the man of color and the white woman. So he talks first about this work, "Jusui Martinique's" by Myot Capesia and it's published in 1948. So this is, as he says, one day a woman named Myot Capesio being a motivation whose elements are difficult to detect, sat down to write 202 pages her life in which the most ridiculous idea is proliferated at random, the enthusiastic reception that greeted this book in certain circles forces us to analyze it. And he says, you know, this is actually a cut rate merchandise, a sermon in praise of corruption. Now, why is that the case? Because Myot is in love with this white man. And as Fanon says, to whom she submits in everything, he is her Lord, she asks nothing, demands nothing except a bit of whiteness in her life. And, you know, he goes on to talk about her inferiority and how this is expressed in her desire to go to one of the poshest, most elite parts of Martinique, where the rich people live and how her blackness and the whiteness of the man that she's involved in play themselves out. And, you know, talks about her trying to turn her classmate black by pouring ink over his head, realizing that this is not going to work. And he says that what she's caught up in is essentially a viewpoint that is mannequin, where black is devalued, white is valued, one is good, one is evil, and the goal is ultimately to get away from blackness, which she can't do. And he talks about her desire for being a kind of lactification. Okay, so, lactification, coming from the word for milk, right? So, milk is white, being turned white, and he goes on to say, "In a word, the race must be whitened." Every woman in Martinique knows this, says it repeats it, whiten the race, save the race, but not in the sense one might think, not preserve the uniqueness of that part of the world in which they grew up, but make sure it will be white to turn away from one's own reality, ethnicity, all of those sorts of things. And we see that this is carried forth and internalized into the black community, where they are expressing not only their own inferiority in relation to whites, but teaching the others that sort of even enforcing on the others, that this is the case for them as well. So, it gets reproduced generationally or culturally, we could say. And he's going to go on and point out a really critical passage, right? This is close to the end of his analysis where he's talked about whether ego withdrawal is possible. And he says, "From black to white is the course of mutation. "One is white, as one is rich, as one is beautiful, "as one is intelligent." So, whiteness is not just a racial distinction, it is tied in with a superior status and valuation, right? So, there's the possibility of richness, there's also a mention of if you're rich enough, then color doesn't matter, everyone is white if they're rich, but also beauty, these standards, and there's discussions there about makeup and things like that, and intelligence, which is going to be a really key thing for Jean Vanuis, as we're going to see in the next chapter. So, then he moves on to Abu Dula Saji, who writes this arguably autobiographical piece, Nini, who talks about, like he says, how black men can behave in contact with Europeans, but also how women are going to orient themselves, particularly if they fit into a sort of middle ground in the racial hierarchy. And so, he says, analyzing various passages of Saji's story, I'm going to attempt to grasp the living reactions of the woman of color to the European. First of all, there are two such women, so we have a distinction to make here. Who are they? The Negroes and the Mulatto. The first has only one possibility and one concern to turn white. The second one's not only to turn white, but to avoid slipping back. A sort of hierarchy is in place. When some people are in the middle part, others are at the top, others are at the bottom. So, this is what, indeed, could be more illogical than a Mulatto woman's acceptance of a Negro husband. For it must be understood, once and for all, it is a question of saving the race. And as we saw, saving the race is tied with lactification. So, he says, this is Nini's great problem. A Negroes had the gall to go so far as to ask her to marry him and she rejects him. And not only does she reject him, again, we see the force of culture here. Having learned the circumstances, the whole Mulatto society plays chorus to her wrath. And they bring up all sorts of institutional consequences that could result. There's talk of taking the matter into court, having the black man brought up on criminal charges. There will be letters to the head of the Department of Public Works, to the governor of the colony, to call their attention to the black man's behavior and have him dismissed and recompensed for the moral havoc he has inflicted, right? And so, he says, here we see how a girl of color, now, color includes everybody within a certain spectrum, reacts to a declaration of love made by one of her own, what happens in the case of a white man? Once more, we resort to Saji and she's got a long passage here that he brings up and he says, something remarkable must have happened on the day when the white man declared his love to the Mulatto, what is it? There was recognition in corporation into a group that had seemed hermetic. The psychological minus value, the feeling of insignificance in its corollary, the impossibility of reaching the light totally vanished. From one day to the next, the Mulatto went from the class of slaves to the head of masters. She had been recognized through her overcompensating behavior, she was no longer the woman who wanted to be white, she was white, she was joining the white world. So, interestingly, two different possibilities, rejecting the other person of color, accepting the person who was white, why as a bargain to get whiteness, to get access, to become part of, that word hermetic means sealed off, right? So, Fanon here has an interesting observation that he's going to make. He says, what is there to say after these expositions? Whether one is dealing with my own capesia of Martinique or with Nini of San Luis, the same process is to be observed. A bilateral process, an attempt to acquire by internalizing them, assets that were originally prohibitive. It is because the Negroes feels inferior that she aspires to win admittance into the white world. In this endeavor, she will seek the help of a phenomenon that we shall call affective, erythism. And he says, so this is the sum of experiences and observations of seven years. Regardless of the area I've studied, the one thing has struck me. Now, notice what he's going to say here. The Negro enslaved by his inferiority makes sense. The white man enslaved by his superiority. And then what is it? Both of them act in accordance with a neurotic orientation, right? So, the imposition of race as something that divides people, that's used for evaluation of people, citing who gets opportunities, who can be viewed as a legitimate object of affection. All of these sorts of things helps to produce a dynamic that will, in his day, he calls it neurosis. We would nowadays call these bad social dynamics and psychological disorders and all of these sorts of matters, right? And he says, it'll be objected here. There's nothing psychotic in those who are discussed here. But, I would like to cite a couple examples. And he brings up the person who is a bed discriminated against on the basis of race who wants to become the boss so they can boss around people underneath them. And essentially force others into the same circumstances that he himself has been in. He also talks about a customs inspector who is very severe with tourists or travelers. And he says, if you aren't a bastard, they take you for a poorer person. Since I'm a Negro, you can imagine how I'm going to get it either way, right? And then he brings up Adler once again. Then he goes on to talk about this character, John Vanus. And now we're looking at a man of color in relation to white women. And he says, there's a novel by Renee Moran, which seems to be autobiographical that will help us with this. So what are the terms of the problem for John Vanus? He's a Negro born in the Antilles. He's lived in Bordeaux for years. So he's a European as well, but he's black. So he's a Negro. There is the conflict. He does not understand his own race. And the whites do not understand him. And as he observes, the Europeans in general, in the French are particular, not satisfied with simply ignoring the Negro of the colonies, repudiate the one who they've shaped into their own image. So there's a kind of alienation going on here. He's not black, he's not white, he's not neither. And he can't really figure out where he's going to fit in or figure in. So he says, unable to be assimilated, unable to pass unnoticed, he consoles himself by associating with the dead, or at least the absent. His associations ignore the barriers of centuries and oceans. What does he get access to? Literature, right? The life of the mind. There at least, he can just be a person. He talks with Marcus Aurelius, Joinville, Pascal, Perez Galdos, Robert and Thaggor. And notice that we've got people who aren't all Europeans in this mix, right? So he is going to develop, as Fanon is going to say, the stance of an anxious and agonized black man who is having to deal with a world that of course he didn't make, right? So he says he wants to prove to the others, he is a man, they're equal. Let's not be misled though. Jean Vanuis is the man who has to be convinced. It is in the roots of his soul, as complicated as any European that the doubt persists, right? He's uneasy and anxious, an anxious man who cannot escape his body. So this is kind of a central dynamic and problematic. He says, Jean Vanuis, feeling that existence is impossible for him without love, proceeds to dream it into being. He proceeds to dream it alive and to produce verses. He's got somebody who is in love with him, Andre Mariel. She's written to him that she loves him. But Jean Vanuis needs authorization. It's essential that some white man say to him, "Take my sister." It's not enough that the woman professes her love. And he goes on and says, "When the question is put directly, "the white man agrees to give his sister to the black, "but on one condition, "you have nothing in common with real Negroes, "you are not black, you are extremely brown." And he says, this is a very familiar procedure to colored students in France. Society refuses to consider them genuine Negroes. The Negro is a savage, whereas the student is civilized. And so they are ostracized in a double sense, right? So what does this lead to? So he's going to bring in a psychoanalyst, Germaine Gu, who wrote a work called La Nivros de Bandon, abandonment neurosis is how it can be translated. And she says that she analyzes two types, the first of which seems to illustrate the plight of Jean Vanuis. It is this tripod he's quoting her. The anguish created by every abandonment, the aggression to which it gives rise. And the devaluation of self that flows out of it, that supports the whole symptomology of this neurosis. And we go on and we, you know, see how this actually applies to the work. And it's pretty convincing here. What we find here is one of the key passages. What is going on? Two processes. I do not want to be loved. Why not? Because once very long ago, I attempted an object relation and I was abandoned. I have never forgiven my mother because I was abandoned. I will make someone else suffer. And desertion by me will be the direct expression of my need for revenge. I do not wish to be loved and I will flee from love objects. And he says, this is also a devaluation of self that's involved here. But there is also an inability to get away from the other. The abandonment and erotic demands proofs of the other, the lover. They're not satisfied by isolated statements. They have no confidence. Before they form an objective relation, they demand repeated proofs from their partner. The essence of the attitude is not to love in order to avoid being abandoned. The abandonment, neurotic is insatiable. He wants to be loved completely, absolutely, and forever. This idealistic thing that generally can't happen, right? And even if it could, you can't have proofs of it, right? So there's an interesting analysis going on here. And then there's a sort of twist. Is Jean Vanuis really representative of black, white relations between men and women? No, because he's an intellectual, and not an intellectual in the good sense, but in, we could say, the truncated sense, right? He's called a crusader of the inner life, a neurotic, all right? One of those intellectuals who try to take a position solely on the level of ideas. It's a way for him to assert a kind of superiority. And what does it really lead to? So Fanon will say, Jean Vanuis is a neurotic, and his color is only an attempt to explain his psychic structure. If this objective difference had not existed, he would have manufactured it out of nothing. A little bit later, he's going to say, I contend Jean Vanuis represents not an example of black, white relations, but a certain mode of behavior in a neurotic who by coincidence is black. So he's not a stand-in for all men, you know, in these potential love relations. He's one way things can go wrong. And there may be, you know, a set of ideas that can be drawn out of this, but you can't make too much of it any more than you can reduce all black women who are involved with white men to the case of Nini or Myote. Neither of them really are going to work, right? So he says, here's the purpose of our study to enable the person of color to understand through specific examples psychological elements that can alienate their fellow Negroes, right? And he says, we need to get away from what he calls the myth of the organic or constitutional and start paying closer attention to structure, where, you know, race is not just about something that would be presumably in each member of the race, but something that is societal, something that is cultural, something that is contingent. And so he goes on and he says that, I believe we would be engaging in fraud by trying to extend the attitude of a noose to the man of color as such. And he goes on to say, in no way should my color be regarded as a flaw from the moment the Negro accepts the separation imposed by the European, he has no further respite. And so he's going to say, we will see another solution as possible, but it involves restructuring of the world. So these analyses, you could say, well, what was the point of this then? In part to show us that we can't take stock characters or individual cases as the representative for any sort of relationship between a person of color and white, it's going to be a lot more complex than that. And there is a potential for true authentic love, regardless of color, but it's going to take a lot of attention to structure. And as he says, sort of the reconstitution, the redevelopment, not just of individuals, but of the world that they inhabit. A process that will never be like completely finished, but people can at least involve themselves in. And that's part of what this book, Black Skin White Masks is supposed to be doing. - 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. 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