by Jalen Faddick
Whiteness as a social structure is perhaps the most pervasive descriptor of difference, being, and non-being. Structures of whiteness and being formally delimit the identities, bodies, and lives of non-white people. Frantz Fanon recognizes this in his depiction of identity in the book Black Skin, White Masks. The question of black identity is often not a question of one’s construction of identity, nor is it one of righteous self-determinism, but instead of coercion and supplanted being. Adopting other selves is an act of self-preservation. Essentially, there can be no true independence from whiteness when it is the dominant form of expression and oppression. Therefore, in Fanon’s attempt to describe the conditions of being black, the white hegemonic mode of expression renders impossible a complete, coherent sense of independently formed identity for anyone under its influence.
To understand the vastness of white expression and the precarity of black identity formation, it is essential to look at the conceptions of whiteness at the forefront of popular black thought in Fanon’s life in Martinique. In the popular black imagination, Fanon argues, the centres of colonial activity and influence are seen as holy sites where access is limited and coveted. “The black man entering France changes because for him the métropole is the holy of holies; he changes not only because that is where his knowledge of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire comes from, but also because that is where his doctors, his departmental superiors, and innumerable little potentates come from….”[1] It is because of this conception of difference, and even inferiority, that the person of colour would be forced to consider changing or adopting new identities. The perceived inferiority or lack of prestige might then influence someone to attempt to access this prestige. The difficulty of discovering true black identity manifests in the revelation of the sense of inferiority disseminated through societies dominated by whiteness.
In similar instances of othering, Fanon tells the reader how white citizens informed him of his inferior status in white society. He writes of comments he received in France, specifically from a white child who exclaims in fear at the sight of another human being. “Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!”[2] To be othered and inflicted with the burden of inferiority is to be forced to adapt and adjust. Fanon argues that it is almost as if, through the exposure of the black man to his race and his subjugation, his identity must harden and callus over. “Disoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from myself, and gave myself up as an object.”[3] From this dissociation and separation from one’s being, the drive to become less of oneself and more of ‘the Other’ is exaggerated. To be a successful subject under whiteness is to seek and adopt the clear identities deemed acceptable by white hegemonic expression.
The obvious problem here is the social and physical demarcation of blackness to skin. Stuart Hall speaks about the process of blackness becoming intrinsic to skin colour: “…epidermalization: literally, the inscription of race on the skin. This armature of ‘race’ provides the black subject with that which elsewhere Fanon calls an alternative ‘corporeal schema.’ But, as he always insists, this schema is cultural and discursive, not genetic or physiological…”[4] The effect here is two-fold. First, by epidermalizing race, it becomes inescapable. It is on the body, like a permanently affixed flag signalling allegiance. Second, epidermalizing race creates a potentially essentializing centre of difference within the body, as Fanon states: “As a result, the body schema, attacked in several places, collapsed, giving way to an epidermal racial schema.”[5] Therefore, a new sense of self is developed when the black body is othered, delimited by epidermal, social, and economic categories.
One such identity pervasive in the case of the French Colonies Fanon describes is the identity of the French speaker. In the métropole, the Creole language used by black colonial subjects is simply unacceptable and relegates the expressive capacity of the black man in white France to relative illiteracy. Therefore, the most ‘successful’ and revered man of the Antilles, who speaks perfect French, “is the one to look out for: be wary of him; he’s almost white.”[6] The black Antillean man who speaks perfect French, however, is not white. Fanon’s non-whiteness is a fact that the French people remind him of without hesitation. “Seeing a black face among his flock, the priest asked him: “Why you left big savanna and why you come with us?’”[7] The use of language here to demean and speak down to someone because of their blackness, both noted socially and physically by language and skin colour, respectively, indicates that this identity of a French speaker, while necessary for one to be taken even remotely seriously, does not guarantee humane and respectful treatment from white speakers. As it turns out, the inherent problem with a black man speaking French is not how well he speaks but that he is black while speaking it.
In this sense, eloquence and knowledge of French, or any other colonial language, is just a manufactured obstacle. Once eloquence and understanding of the language are obtained, a new identity is formed, and the black man becomes ever closer to approximating whiteness. Approximating whiteness, however, is not a simple process. New obstacles are constructed as new identities are formed. Fanon explains that each of his identities and his rejection of the endless pursuit of approximating whiteness demonstrates a clear picture of dominance, subjugation, and subversion. “[Alienation] develops because he is victim to a system based on the exploitation of one race by another and the contempt for one branch of humanity by a civilization that considers itself superior.”[8] As the subjects of white expression attempt to approximate it, they become alienated from their identity and develop the calluses of whiteness to protect themselves from what they have been told is the horror of their black skin. Being ridiculed by children, talked down to, assaulted, whipped, chained, lynched, and brutalized, inheriting a lineage of suffering becomes an exercise in habitual identity formation, an act of renewal, and an act of alienation.
In being other, separate, or different, the development of an alienated self becomes apparent through these identities that are never entirely white enough. It is a surrounding act taken on by the colonial hegemony of whiteness and white expression. “Not only is Fanon’s Negro caught, transfixed, emptied and exploded in the fetishistic and stereotypical dialectics of the ‘look’ from the place of the Other; but he/she becomes – has no other self than – this self-as-Othered. This is the black man as his [sic] alienated self-image…”[9] Thus, the inner life of Fanon’s subject, the black man, is given another dimension. He not only seeks to approximate whiteness through his identity, but in this process, he becomes wholly separate from non-white modes of being. To be black is to be persistently placed in relation to whiteness.
Such an alienating process, as to be separated from one’s identity, which has already been denoted as inferior, is a manifestation of colonial ideology’s symbolic, identity-based violence. This violence is internalized as self-hatred, and a lack of self-efficacy, both of which further alienate the black man from himself and, indeed, from his potential to exist as black beyond whiteness. The black subject must be liberated from this realm of non-being brought on by colonialism’s subjugation. “The contemporary era is haunted by Fanon, in that the Black subject continues to be in the existential predicament of not having the will to live but to survive.”[10] Tendayi Sithole is invoking Fanon’s descriptions of alienation here to describe how the conditions of colonial racialization have moved through time and remain in place in the contemporary era. The reality for the black subject, or the non-white individual, is to be so alienated from true, or truly expressive, forms of being that the dominant mode of being forces the subject to merely survive and not live. Surviving is not a way of being. Surviving is a way of dying. It is a path to violence, to warfare, to dehumanizing acts that can then be pointed to as proof of why the non-white individual deserves to merely survive, not to live.
Fanon adds to the conversation of time as he situates the precarious circumstances which delimit black identity formation. “The black man, however sincere, is a slave to the past.”[11] The inability to express oneself, independent of whiteness and white expression, is temporally fraught. Whiteness is not a static phenomenon. It is omnipresent and informs how people of colour interact with and understand themselves and their histories. The struggle of people of colour to liberate themselves from the gaze and entrapment of whiteness is a struggle with past enslavement, brutalization, and terror, and the present-day realities of oppression and identity restriction, which prevent the formation of genuinely independent, uninhibited black identities.
It is the gaze of whiteness that Fanon and Sithole illuminate as an essential component of the effective othering and alienation of the black subject. Whiteness is exemplified in the ability to gaze, look at, and subject black bodies.
The Black body is the target because of the mere fact of being made to be available to the White gaze as an object to be looked at. The White gaze assumes the form of the mechanistic terror unleashing suffering and misery on the flesh of the Black subject. The White gaze means that the Black subject is always in question. To be questioned means that Blackness must always justify its existence. This justification being not enough means that Blackness is in a void and is a void in itself. That is to say, the White gaze empties Blackness of all essence and form that constitute the life of the subject.[12]
This explication of the white gaze’s power provides insight into the function of colonialism and anti-blackness. These mechanisms function by placing blackness in question, asserting whiteness as dominant, and allowing the insidious effects of the resulting symbolic violence. This phenomenon might be understood as a profoundly violent extraction of being and selfhood that occurs as a non-physical interaction. Given the existence of the non-physical, symbolic violence and the profound physical violence intrinsic to colonial projects, a parasitic, self-reinforcing societal organization emerges. At the top exists whiteness and non-white subjects cascade down the hierarchy in a flow of self-justifying oppression by alienating non-white bodies from their identities.
To the point of justification and identity, the constant reinforcing of otherness by the white gaze and its ‘mechanistic terror’ is an intentional act that is inextricable from the ability for whiteness to exist as the dominant mode of being. To have access to whiteness is, therefore, not a neutral position. Despite certain calls that appeal to the universal good-natured qualities of contemporary and colonial white populations and their values,[13] the reality remains that having access to the white gaze presents a power imbalance that creates the conditions for precarious identities for non-white subjects and self-indulgent identities of “freedom, justice, and equality…predicated on the politics of exclusion”[14] for white actors.
…there is no need for the White subject to justify its existence, because its humanity is not brought into question. The White gaze with its racist inferences, fantasies, and registers and its verbal economy is the dehumanizing project. In its racist operation, it derives pleasure from the misery and agony that afflicts the Black subject.[15]
The construction of whiteness must not be understood as a benign, aspirational identity to be assumed by non-white subjects, as it is interwoven with the gaze that actively breaks down those subjects’ humanity. It is an insidious and deeply problematic identity insofar as its construction is based on and allows for the displacement of the non-white subject from themselves.
Implicit in the power of whiteness is the passivity of its enforcement. Whereas the non-white subject constantly adopts identities to conform to whiteness, reeling from victimization at the hands of symbolic and non-symbolic violence, and comporting with economic, social, and political exclusion and exploitation, the white subject simply exists within their own dominance. “The black man wants to be like the white man. For the black man, there is but one destiny. And it is white. A long time ago, the black man acknowledged the undeniable superiority of the white man, and all his endeavours aim at achieving a white existence.”[16] This destiny of acquiring whiteness when it cannot be reached is an exhausting, unending existence for the black subject. Whiteness can be existed within for the white subject without effort, but for the non-white subject, it must be attained through all efforts and, thus, exhausts the non-white subject. For the non-white subject, it is impossible to be for oneself in a racially constructed world, and they must dedicate their being to another impossibility. The white subject faces no such dilemma and may exist within the comfortable limits of whiteness. Meanwhile, the contemporary white subject may even delude themselves into believing in their proclaimed values of freedom, justice, and equality.
The impossible black identities in the face of the white hegemon are still misunderstood as Fanon breaks down the essential fact of race as a tool for subjugation. “The black man is not. No more than the white man. Both have to move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that genuine communication can be born. Before embarking on a positive voice, freedom needs to make an effort at disalienation.”[17] Fanon alludes to a future beyond racial delimitation where whiteness is no longer the dominant, oppressive form of expression. “The problem which preoccupies Fanon, then, is not the existence of the white man in colonialism, but the fact that the black man can only exist in relation to himself through the alienating presence of the white ‘Other.’”[18] This potential future that Fanon is pondering must be constituted of the disillusionment of whiteness as dominant and blackness as subordinate. The racialized construction of reality can no longer be permitted to alienate its inhabitants in the name of white dominance.
In essence, Fanon is thinking about an alternative mode of being. It speaks to a ‘new humanism,’ a future Fanon regards based on disalienation and togetherness. “The problem here is located in temporality. Desalination will be for those Whites and Blacks who have refused to let themselves be locked in the substantialized “tower of the past.” For many other black men, disalienation will come from refusing to consider their reality as definitive.”[19] The aim is not to seek vengeance: “Haven’t I got better things to do on this Earth than avenge the Blacks of the seventeenth century?”[20] The aim is for the white gaze to be rendered moot and for blackness and whiteness to exist, not as categories for value, but in part, as relics of a racial past. This is not to say that blackness cannot exist as a significant source of being, but instead, it cannot command the alienation of the black subject from their identity. “It is not the black world that governs my behaviour. My black skin is not a repository for specific values.”[21] This future does not measure blackness by its proximity to whiteness, nor is it epidermalized to the extent that it essentializes and alienates its subject. This is a projection of togetherness, being unrestricted by race and embracing a ‘new humanism.’
This ‘new humanism,’ or some version of it, is an essential development from the conditions described by Fanon, Hall, and Sithole. The white gaze, for one, is an empowering force for division and suppression that, as Fanon illustrates, is essentially alienating for the non-white subject. The requirement for non-white subjects to constantly engage with whiteness and the persistent exhaustion that accompanies it is a system that can sustain itself only through the dispossession of identity and violence. I offer, then, that this incredibly violent system of self-reproductive identity and oppression cannot exist within a framework built from something more than the past and present colonial hatred of blackness and superiority of whiteness. The project of liberation from whiteness must be built on this understanding of alienated identity. The path forward is necessary as the self-sustaining beast of oppressive white identity seeks to consume all within its structure and dispossess the fundamental ability to determine yourself.
The construction of race to divide, to give blackness something to aspire to, and whiteness something to despise, is inherently problematic for forming identity. So long as race as a conception of difference is allowed to prevail, the ability for a black man to exist as a man without caveat will continue to be an impossibility. However, the deconstruction of racial difference and the accompanying systems will make the true expression of identity, the ability to be black on purpose, an inevitability.
For people of colour, to express oneself under the terms of white hegemonic expression is not to express oneself at all. It is to approximate, attempt and approach whiteness while never fully being understood as, or accepted for, the skin in which you were born. It is, therefore, problematic for the black man, the person of colour, to express themselves in any way other than what is appropriate according to the dominant mode of white expression. The luxury of defining oneself is not afforded to the person of colour. It is, in fact, not a possibility, given the circumstances under which identity is allowed to be developed in white society. This restrictive identity imposed upon the person of colour is suffocating, only serving to further white colonial interests around the world at the expense of black bodies. This suffocation of the inner lives of the person of colour is yet another expression of violence disguised by the myths of white superiority, a myth that must be rejected for the possibility of true expression and liberation.
Endnotes
[1] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008), 7.
[2] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 91.
[3] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92.
[4] Stuart Hall, “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?,” in The Fact of Blackness. Frantz Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), 16.
[5] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92.
[6] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 4.
[7] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14.
[8] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 199.
[9] Hall, “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?,” 17.
[10] Tendayi Sithole, “The Concept of the Black Subject in Fanon,” Journal of Black Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 25.
[11] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 200.
[12] Sithole, “The Concept of the Black Subject in Fanon,” 30.
[13] Sithole, “The Concept of the Black Subject in Fanon,” 26.
[14] Sithole, “The Concept of the Black Subject in Fanon,” 26.
[15] Sithole, “The Concept of the Black Subject in Fanon,” 30.
[16] Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 202.
[17] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206.
[18] Hall, “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?,” 18.
[19] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 201.
[20] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 203.
[21] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 202.
Bibliography
Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 2008.
Hall, Stuart, “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?,” in The Fact of Blackness. Frantz Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Fanon and Visual Representation, 13-37, Edited by Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996).
Sithole, Tendayi, “The Concept of the Black Subject in Fanon,” Journal of Black Studies 47, no. 1 (2016): 24-40. Accessed April 18, 2023, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24572957.