Frantz Fanon speaks his mind regarding his experience as a black man. We follow his thought process over a few of his experiences and his reactions to pieces of literature.
Fanon suggests that “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man… the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.” Fanon describes blackness to be one that is dependent on white, not one of positive dependency, but rather an imposition that is inescapable. I can’t agree with Fanon more. In a country where white supremacy is prevalent, blacks simply cannot be viewed through a lens where they aren’t judged by their skin color. Fanon quotes an unidentified person: “Understand, my dear boy, color prejudice is something I find utterly foreign.” This compliments Fanon’s idea, color prejudice is not something self-imposed or brought out within any society, but one that is created arbitrarily by a group. Fanon’s inescapable experiences of black inequality and judgment lies in the fact that he is in a place where prejudice exists.
Through the experience of a young child repeatedly calling out “negro” in the presence of Fanon, he goes through a series of deprecating thoughts: “the Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly.” The mother of the child realizes that Fanon is a civilized man and and tells Fanon to ignore her son. The child’s repeated utterances of the ugly words left Fanon speechless and dumbfounded. He describes himself to be a triple person, one that is responsible for his skin, race, and ancestors. He gets caught in a bind where any type of reaction to the child would be disadvantageous to his people.
Fanon talks briefly about the working of a serum for “denegrification,” that at one period in time, the idea of whitening a black man was considered. I have never considered the idea that such experiments were attempted before and it’s quite appalling to think that dark skin was seen as some type of curse. Fanon does not input his opinion regarding denegrification. The idea begs the questions: would the majority of dark skinned people take the serum if they had the choice? In other words: how many people of the dark skinned population would abandon their identity? Fenon believes that blacks should persevere and hope that prejudice will one day disappear. And given his self-applied responsibility as a triple person, he would likely turn down a denegrifying serum.
Fanon talks about a particular character in Native Son, Bigger Thomas, who is put in a position where he’s told to shoot a white man. He responds with, “I can’t shoot white folks,” in which he justifies himself with the simple fact: “because they’re white folks.” Fanon calls Thomas’ response a result of feeling nonexistence, more severe than the feeling of inferiority. A character like Thomas shows that the minds of a person can be programmed a way in which logical explanations are absent. Thomas’ response to why he cannot shoot a white man simply begs the question once again. Imposed prejudice does more than set racial inequality, but inflicts a negative mindset upon the ones subjugated.

Although societal taboos are increasingly becoming fewer and fewer in contemporary culture, it is a common facet of human nature to observe that when something ‘obscene’ is expressed publicly in popular culture, it immediately will become a widespread sensation. One example that comes immediately to mind is the recent New York Times best selling novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” which although contains dubious literary merit – or so I’ve been told – also vividly depicts human sexuality in a way not often brought up in polite conversation, so inevitably everyone felt the necessity to read it.  This idea that what is considered ‘wrong’ or ‘inappropriate’ is also exactly what society craves obsessively and will go to any lengths to get a glimpse of is a focal point in Michel Foucault’s discourse in “The History of Sexuality,” and goes farther to say that by defining these harmless notions as wrong in the first place we are in fact creating our own taboos which we will then feel the necessity to obsess over and crave. In the text Foucault states that in censoring and “putting boundaries [around] what one could say about sex…installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex” (1506).  It is because these limitations pertaining to acceptability in society are so rigidly fixed that make taboos so desirable to us.

Foucault portrays this repressed state of society by ways of Europe in the Victorian era 17th century. He states the origins of this form of thought rests in this age primarily through the mode of the teachings of the Catholic Church, “whose greatest reserve was counseled when dealing with sins against purity” (1503).  The Catholic Church is still notoriously uptight about sexuality and one’s ability to overtly express it, and as seen with the various scandals concerning Catholic priests and small children throughout the years, perhaps they are not taking the right approach to this ideation of sexuality. It is an interesting notion that we in fact are the perpetuators of the very ideas we as a society claim to abhor by identifying these ‘wrong’ concepts in the first place, and is a concept which brings me back to Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying” in which he states that the fact we are able to use language so readily is because we as a society forgot that we were the ones who created it in the first place. There is a forgetting period which is pertinent for any established ideology to continue existing as supposed ‘fact’ and this is seen in the Victorian era’s view, and in a sense still of our own contemporary capacity to discuss taboos such as explicit sexuality in popular society today.

Through reading F. Fanon’s Black Skin White Faces I was able to see what being a Black Man in his time was like at that time. I can understand how he felt while also being able to see the inconsistencies in his both his beliefs and his identity as a black man. 

His ability to find some type of identity in the world he was attempting to be a part of was constantly hindered by his outward appearance. Franz could not create and identity as a a distinguished and learned man because what he was, was socially incompatible with who he was trying to be. As a black man in his time (the most important thing to take notice of) had to live with the scientific racism that sought to dehumanize those without european or asian ancenstry; a historical fact that explains why he keeps referring to his ancestors. 

Franz Fanon’s referral to his ancestors is important because he felt that he lacked the historical connection to an intellectual past; a luxury afforded to those races he lived amongst. He felt that the primitiveness of his ancestors (sub-Saharan people) hindered his ability to be accepted among the white society he wanted to be a part of. 

He then goes on to elevate within his own mind the black identity by finding links to poetics and inventiveness in African history; a connection which to him was more consonant to the identity he wanted to create for himself in a euro-centric society. He goes on to demote and bring down the idea of whiteness that he has created within himself so that he can bring up black identity and this is where we see how he is as guilty of racism and tribalism as the Europeans who occupied the society he wanted to be a part of. 

He becomes as racist as those who view him in a negative light by seeking supremacy in his own race above those of white people.

“Power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. It’s success is proportional to an ability to hide it’s own mechanisms.”

Chapter One:

I). According to Foucault, the 17th century was the harbinger of an age of sexual prurience. By refusing to address issues of sexuality, by censoring it, society sought to control it. However, instead what happened was a “discursive explosion” in which a “rhetoric of allusion and metaphor was codified” so that sexuality became a dominant undercurrent of 17th century western culture.

Key Term: “Authorized vocabulary”

2). By not talking about things they become more strictly defined. The idea of social redistribution of sexuality; how it’s talked about, how it’s not talked about, when it’s talked about, when it’s not talked about. “A restrictive economy that was incorporated in to the politics of language and speech.”

Just as light cannot exist without darkness, indecent speech cannot exist with a socially constructed conception of so-called “decent” speech.

3). Religiously, I’m not understanding the point that he’s trying to get to next. Definitely something to go back to and try to puzzle out for later. Something to do with confession – maybe how by forcing even minute hints of sexual desire to be confessed, the importance of them is amplified. “A twofold evolution tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings – so difficult to perceive and formulate – of desire.” I think it would fascinating to explore this difference between the external and the internal that Foucault sort of briefly touches upon. Perhaps the internal self-examination the church is forcing upon it’s denizens is supposed to circumvent external action. It seems that sex is so prevalent and tangent to almost any other human function, so instead of creating a society where people don’t indulge in premarital sex, the church has created a society in which people are obsessed with discourse related to quantifying and controlling sex. This ideology of sex is marked as a conspicuous entity in our culture. “And finally, do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial or insignificant.”

So possibly by transmuting sexual urges into a religious or academic discourse, then power over sex and subsequently power over people can be achieved. “The scheme for transforming sex into discourse had been devised long before in an ascetic and monastic setting. The seventeenth century made it into a rule for everyone.” By casting this umbrella of sexual discourse onto every single person, instead of just monks or ascetics, then this discourse could be used to preoccupy/control “the masses.” “The forbidding of certain words, the decency of expressions, all the censoring of vocabulary, might well have ben only secondary devices compared to that great subjugation: ways of rendering it morally acceptable and technically useful.”

As a side note, I think it’s interesting how this is relevant to how we live today. Sexuality, not sex, is something that belongs in a dimension that is pervasive in cultural thought, and yet is still stigmatized and couched in religious/political jargon (such as issues of abstinence only education, or abortion).

4). Scandalous literature as a way to achieve mastery and detachment – imprinting an effect of spiritual reconversion, or turning back to God. The goal (or sub-goal) is to achieve “displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself.” The censorship of sex installed a complex apparatus that increased the amount of sexual discourse in play. It also created this sexual economy that is deployed through a varying number of means.

5). How this transmutes from a religious apparatus to a public interest one.

“Power mechanisms that functioned in such a way that discourse on sex – for reasons that will have to be examined – become essential.” How sex went from being something shameful to being something that was inserted into a system of utility – taking it from something to be judged and turning it into something that’s administered. See: The policing of sex. Especially if you look at the metrics of population used: birth/death rates, growth/resources, health/illness.

“There also appeared those systematic campaigns which, going beyond the traditional means  moral and religious exhortations, fiscal measures – tried to transform the sexual conduct of couples into a concerted economic and political behavior.” These measures also act as anchorage points for racism, giving scientific credibility to perhaps eugenics or ethnic cleansing.

6). Children: By erasing sex from discourse aimed at children, you’re building everything they come into contact with an acknowledgement of this silent “permanently taking it into account.”

The Philanthropinum of May in 1776, in which adults acted more childishly about sex than actual children. When goal was organizing this philanthropinum, what was his intended goal? What was the point he was trying to make with this philanthropinum?

Chapter Two:

1). The mere fact that a society is collectively speaking about sex does not overshadow what is said about it. Because any sexual activity that does not fit in line with the churches teaches is pathologized or criminalized, we can see how the people who set these norms in place were simply trying to set in place ” a sexuality that is economically usefull and politically conservative.” Although Foucault admits that he doesn’t know for sure if this was in fact an overarching goal of those who set ideologies, this sure was the ultimate result. The three main bodies that govern sexual practices are CANONICAL LAW, THE CHRISTIAN PASTORAL, and CIVIL LAW. The main institution used to perpetuate the grip of these three bodies is marriage. Confusion that surrounds sodomy and the sexuality of children reinforces how strict the codes of marriage are.

*I would like to disagree with Foucault on this part, because even though children may be curious about sex and sexuality, I think it’s crossing a line to say that they themselves  are sexual beings. I think that it’s patently absurd to say that children have the capacity for sexuality until they hit puberty, in which case they start to not be children any more. I’m not sure if this maturity/age bracket is what Foucault is referring to when he uses the word children, but if so then I think he needs to be more clear. I know that he and Derrida did sign a petition to abolish the age of consent in 1977.

Anyways, sorry for digressing. “For a long time hermaphrodites were criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical disposition, their very being , confounded the law that distinguished the sexes and prescribed their union.” This is a great point that supports Foucault in his case to illuminate how absurd and hypocritical it is to have a socially constructed conception of “natural” and “unnatural” sexuality . The two great systems that the West uses to govern sex are the law of marriage and the order of desires. Foucault subverts these systems and sublimates them by deconstructing contemporary sexual norms.

Foucault asks if the labeling and classification of sexualities is repressive because it doesn’t just draw lines and boundaries around types of sexual disparities, but works to dispel certain ones off the psychosexual map altogether. However, instead he asserts that the “function of the power exerted in tis instance was not that of interdiction, and that it involved four operations quite different from simple prohibition.”

a). War against onanism, especially in the case of children

b). Incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals – one’s homosexuality becomes rooted in every other aspect of their life. By labeling someone, you’re incorporating it into their being.

c). Not entirely sure at what Foucault is driving at – have to revisit.

d). Devices of sexual saturation – How power and sexuality is circulated and distributed, and to whom it is distributed to. Hierarchies and infrastructures that allow for this saturation.

“It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursing them according to lines of indefinite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality, but included it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals.” By drawing lines of sex and gender power structures are allowing for maximum saturation, producing and determining the sexual mosaic. Sexuality is in fact messy and intangible and is more likely to manifest itself along a spectrum than a binary. Because there are so many more centers of power though, more attention is manifested and verbalized to disparate sexualities, subverting traditional modes of power/sex.

Also, I came across an interesting lecture that puts Foucault and Butler into conversation with each other, in case anyone is interested. I think it would be really cool to examine how female sexuality plays into Foucault’s ideology. http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300/lecture-23

Michael Foucault claims that speaking about sex was easier in the 17^th century than it is now. Sex has become this taboo, making people uncomfortable to speak about it. Sex is a natural process, but naturally, society has cultivated this prohibition against it, creating negative connotations to it. Foucault says that the word sex, in and of itself, has become more of a practice of knowledge than it is natural and fun. Sex soon became less about pleasure and more about science. Sex became a topic studied in psychology, constantly under the microscope. As if it had to be explained, sex became a topic that needed reasoning behind, meanwhile it should not have been.

The Bourgeoisie, Foucault explains, was trying to eliminate conversations of sex, constantly looking down upon people who speak of it. The more the topic of sex was controlled, the more people wanted to analyze it. Sex became less about pleasure and more about shame. It was only spoken about in religious confessions which led to an up rise of societal analysis on the topic.  Sex was no longer natural or emotional it became logical, and people wanted to place a definition on it.

Around the 18^th century, sex was spoken about to children in an attempt to educate them and lure them away from having sex with other students. Soon boys and girls were separated into different schools and there were curfews placed to regulate their sexual activities. These actions told children that sex was a negative thing and that it needed to be studied to prevent horrible outcomes. Foucault disagrees with this theory of silencing sex talk. He feels that this constant silence feeds into the curiosity of knowing about sex. This silence helps motivate the urge to know more about the subject, almost like forbidden fruit.

Foucault explains how any little thing concerning sex would want to be studied. Any behaviors deemed as sexual, would want to be explored and studied. The silencing of sex created this oblivion to a process that was supposed to come natural to humans. Sex is still considered to be taboo and is not widely spoken about. People still get uncomfortable on the topic. As for me, I have to admit that I get uncomfortable talking about it and studies on sexuality and differences among people always intrigue me, making this theory to be true.

I can see a lot of people reading Althusser’s Ideology and ISAs and finding it either incoherent or irrelevant, but I believe what he has to say in this essay is incredibly relevant and maps out the sickness that invariably comes with a capitalist society. Althusser explains that the average capitalist must be aware of what would be needed to replace what has been used up in the process of production, and then notes that the labour involved in the production process must also be reproduced. Of course, those who are controlling this process of production and reproduction seek growth in production, and must also grow in reproduction to make up for the growth in production (well that’s a mouthful). While production expands and material resources that are used in the process of reproduction, the human labour that is necessary to, in a way, “fund” the production/reproduction process, must also be replenished and expand with the expansion of the production/reproduction process. The issue with this is that the expansion of the non-human resources is so great that it exceeds reasonable human resources– basically, the time that keeping up with the growing production/reproduction necessitates. The drowning of human labour in this constantly expanding production/reproduction process creates the aforementioned sickness of capitalist society. Somewhere in this process, human labour is cheapened because so much of it is required. Companies do not pay their employees enough money to function on. It’s reasons like this that my boyfriend has to work 10 hour days just to get by, as if a 9-5 workday isn’t grueling enough. The reason the 40 hour workweek exists is sickening too. The whole concept is a scheme which forces workers into building their lives on the few hours they have when they return from work and the weekends. Because of the way this system is structured, we often rely on the instant gratification of television, video games, or any other activity that takes money, but not time, because time is so precious to us, thanks to the illness the capitalist system has inflicted upon us. What’s even more sickening is that it’s completely intentional– they want to keep us hungry for high-cost, instantly gratifying means of entertainment. Things that take money, not time. Who wants to go for a walk in Prospect Park, or take the subway all the way to Brighton Beach to enjoy the scenery and relax when your time is so precious? I highly recommend reading this article, which explains what I’ve been writing about in full; I was subtly aware of this structure, but had yet to read it on paper (or screen, rather).

I hope I didn’t get too off topic, but this is something I get rather impassioned about, especially since it’s my future staring me in the face. But I have one more thing to note, which is as disgusting as it is interesting, and unbelievable given what minimum wage can get someone in 2013 (absolutely nothing):

“The premise of minimum wage, when it was introduced, was that a single wage earner should be able to own a home and support a family.  That was what it was based on; a full time job, any job, should be able to accomplish this.

The fact people scoff at this idea if presented nowadays, as though the people that ring up your groceries or hand you your burgers don’t deserve the luxury of a home and a family, is disgusting.”

Here’s a taste of The Clash doing “White Riot,” one of the songs Hebdige talks about in the excerpt from SUBCULTURE.  And I think the commercial that precedes the track, plus the fact that Sony now owns the video, are also richly resonant, given Hebdige’s argument about the capacity of subcultural practices to become recuperated by capitalist societies via the commodity form.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvG3is7Bm1w&w=420&h=315]

There are all kinds of stereotypes in literature. Frantz Fanon talks about how “blackness” is part of society because of the outer appearance people give an individual and how this could separate African Americans. What this causes based of the reading is that there is no chance for American Americans to create a self-image or idea of how they want to be portrayed because of the way people perceive of them. As Fanon continues with this experience, he relates it with the similar experience of Jewish people, “the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness…His actions, his behavior are the final determinant… [but] He is a white man…he can sometimes go unnoticed…I [however] am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without.” In history, African Americans were seen as inferior, forcing them to be slaves for white people, the cause of Jim Crow laws and other things to be separated by white people, one of the many hated people among the Ku Klux Klan, etc. Jewish people suffered discrimination in the Holocaust, being forced into camps, separation of families and the main thing, genocide. I believe that African Americans, Jewish people and any other racial group that was not white were always and in the slightest way, are still considered inferior. Although inferior, Jewish people had the opportunity to blend amongst white people because of their skin color unlike African Americans with their dark skin color.  

This reading is very different from what we have read throughout the semester. Fanon reminds me of what I am learning in one of my other classes about how Latinos have been discriminated in history. I can actually relate to discrimination. The apartment complex where I live in is mostly composed of orthodox Jewish, meaning if you are not like them, you are not important in their eyes. So when people see me not with my family, they think I am either white or Jewish, which to them, I am accepted. When these orthodox Jews see me with my dad, the superintendent of the complex who all these people rely on, they will not say anything out loud but they will give me dirty looks since they know I am Hispanic based off my dad’s skin color since he has that “Hispanic tan” as I heard it before. Another thing that I can mention is that (forgive me in advance for saying it the way I am about to but, you will see why I do because I took great offence) my brother got accepted to this very expensive private school with an almost full ride, and when one of the orthodox women in the building in heard this, she had the audacity to bring up in the conversation with my mom, “oh, how did he get in? Is he smart and can you offered it?” After this encounter with that stuck up, self-centered woman, whenever I see hear, I pay no mind to her existence. How would you feel as a parent, sibling or even the person being talked about, listening to that?   

As I finished reading this and looking over the blog, I agree with Monazohny’s blog where he talks of “secreting” of racial identity and the example of Miley Cyrus. It is acceptable for white people to do anything “ghetto” or “black” but when a black person does something that is normal to them, it is deemed inappropriate and socially unacceptable. Relating to this topic, one example I want to bring up is that remember in the news a white police officer shot a black teenager for looking suspicious by having his hands in his pockets and his hoodie covering his face? There will always be an opposing side and an agreeing side to any situation, but in this case, many people agreed with what the officer did. Now thinking with the opposing side, imagine skin color was reversed, would people on the white police officer’s side agree? Of course not! People will be like kill him in vengeance of the white teenager.      

I found Frantz Fanon’s piece “The Fact of Blackness” to be a refreshing break from the more dense texts we have been reading. This text reads as a stream of consciousness, which makes it feel very honest and raw. In Fanon’s text, he discusses black identity in a white world. To Fanon, it seems that white people’s racism towards blacks manifests itself in different ways—whites are either erasing or romanticizing blackness/black culture.

Fanon believes that white liberals who say that they accept blacks as part of a universal humanity are erasing black identity because this rhetoric still does not truly acknowledge and accept blackness. Fanon feels “shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like [him], they tell me it is in spite of [his] color. When they dislike [him], they point out that it is not because of [his] color.” He quotes what seems to be a white mans take on this: “Understand my dear boy, color prejudice is something I find utterly foreign….the Negro man is a man like ourselves…it is not because he is black that he is less intelligent than we are…” This quote sounds a lot like what many white liberals like to say today—“I don’t see color”. This is a problem because by ignoring a black person’s color, you are erasing their identity, culture, history, etc. For Fanon, this renders him, still unable to view himself as a black man. For instance, when Fanon says that he wanted “to be a man, nothing but a man” he still accepts his history which includes his enslaved and lynched ancestors.

Fanon responds to the quote about color prejudice with a question “where an I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?” In this way, he feels as if, instead of being put into a box labeled “dirty negro” for instance, its almost as if he has no place in any category. It is as though white liberals want to hide the black man’s identity and, perhaps ignore their history (including all of the wrongs that have been done to the black race). They want to tuck those things away and perhaps whitewash black culture and history in the process. Fanon mentions the research done on “denegrification” and I think that this concept of color blindness carries the same sentiment. By ignoring differences, the dominant race (in this case white) will expect everyone to follow their standards and be like them.

Fanon also talks about “secret[ing]” a racial identity. This involves embracing many of the stereotypes about blacks that have been created by whites. Fanon accepts them: “Yes, we are—we Negroes—backward, simple, free in our behavior…We are in the world. And long live the couple, Man and Earth!” He states that since he “had rationalized the world and the world had rejected [him] on the basis of color prejudice…[he] threw [him]self back toward unreason.” He talks about the stereotypical magic Negro culture involving black magic and emotion (as opposed to reason) and how this magic substitution differs from the “acquisitive” relationship the white man has with the world. Eventually, the white man will realize that this world has been “forever lost to him and his” and will feel the need to “steal” black culture from their pockets. Fanon states that “The white man had the anguished feeling that I was escaping from him and that I was taking something with me.” Whites as members of the “superior” race and being involved in an acquisitive relationship with the world, feel they must own everything, and that someone who is not white does not have the right to own something that does not or cannot include white people. This “otherness” that black people are a part of is now something to be romanticized and culturally appropriated instead of hated.

One example that comes to mind (which I do feel is overused, albeit recent) is Miley Cyrus’s appropriation of black culture. She wears grills and [attempts to] twerk in her recent music video for “We Can’t Stop”. These are things associated with black culture and usually mocked, given a negative connotation and deemed “ghetto” when blacks partake in it. However when Cyrus takes part in black culture, her grills and dance moves are considered quirky and fun. People are not so quick to judge and police white bodies as they are black bodies. (I am choosing to focus solely on the racial aspect of this issue as opposed to gender). I think this can tie back to the theft of black culture which ironically enough, as Fanon points out in his piece, has been, in many ways, re-appropriated by blacks from the stereotypes created by whites.