Frantz Fanon Reflection. Love him!

My reflection today is on the most interesting article in my opinion on the Fact of Blackness from the Book “Black Skin, White Masks” by Frantz Fanon. In class we covered a section and a few terms he used. He uses lots of medical theories to describe his thoughts and experiences about racism, the racialized and the realm of whiteness. Frantz always wanted an explanation of why there was such an inequality of society through skin color and he said when he couldn’t get one as he demanded an explanation “nothing happened, I burst apart”. 

I was struck by that little graphic line because when something burst apart it’s because it can’t contain itself anymore. For instance a dead body or the mere fact that a dead body has little meaning so his quest for an explanation wasn’t important.  Frantz talk about being black has always been in relation to the white man. One cannot live without the other. When the term “black” is used; it means somebody with the background of having ancestors from slavery. Who was in control and deprived us from many things? The white Man! So therefore he speaks about how do we break free from this cult? We could then expand and say that black in relation to the white man is evident in the dialectal processes that takes place on a daily basis. When black males greet each other it’s “what’s up nigga”. Why do they say that? Is it because they are proud to be black and that’s the name that was given upon them? Or is it because it subconsciously hurts them they are not as privileged in the society as the white man so they have to boost each other up? So many questions could be asked to these simple metaphors taken place in our everyday lives. When I try to analyse Fanon’s whole article; I see a phenomenon of him being one person but when others from another race look at him he is representing something bigger than who he really is in people’s mind. We could see this evident when he says “I stumbled, and movements, the attitudes, the glances fixed me there”. This shows that one man alone can represent a whole race and a whole notion of color movement. Just in our everyday lives when a black person is late, we are quick to say…its okay, all black people are late. Just one person represents the attitudes of a whole race when the reality is everybody has that one bad day when they are late for school, work or whatever the circumstance may be. Speaking of reality Fanon speaks of Ontology meaning circumstances of these comments and attitudes of other races is a simple social reality. What you see is the whole truth. Actually we can say most of the attitudes of colored people has been derived by Colonialism. The colored act the way they do because of the extreme cruelty their ancestors was placed under for the welfare and benefits of the white masters.  By reading this article Fanon illustrates how it feels to have people think upon what and who he is, and them being wrong. He shows how he’s stuck by always contradicting what he does by the mere fact that he can’t do what he does, or know what he knows because he’s black. Fanon also makes a point to say that he is black and logically the dumbest white person is at the same level as the dumbest black man.