More than a few times I have told people of various races “you will never understand what it means to be black, you just can’t because you’ve never been it,” however Fanon comes as close to describing the experience as anyone probably could. Although I could get into how the politics of race still affect us to this day, I prefer instead to look at the ways Fanon has placed the mindset that to this day almost comes prepackaged with “blackness.”

In the literature Fanon addresses how the knowledge of one’s blackness is omnipresent. The actual condition of being black seems to innately if not culturally shape how you look at yourself and more importantly how you believe everyone is looking at you. A big part of the reasoning for this is that racially blacks and whites have othered one another. By specifying one as the other in a receiving end of either hatred or glorification a bitterness and self consciousness has arrived depending on what side of the racial fence you fall on. An excellent example of this is when Fanon talks about the expectations a black man at his time would receive going into a profession. “It was always the Negro teacher, the Negro doctor; brittle as I was becoming, I shivered at the slightest pretext. I knew, for instance, that if the physician made a mistake it would be the end of him and of all those who came after him. What could one expect, after all, from a Negro physician?” Fanon isn’t exaggerating either as this was quite literally the way Negroes were viewed at the time and to some extent the way they are still viewed today when they take up certain occupations. The black man or woman was expected to walk a tight rope of praise and humiliation dangling over high expectation solely because the “other,” the Caucasian man had a societal advantage. The consensus in Caucasian minds was either to praise one’s work as the other or to completely dismiss it.

Living in a “post-racial” society we would at least like to believe that it’s easy to ignore or at the bery least work through color divisions. But at the time Fanon produced this work no such thing was possible. This quote spoke quite directly to me as Fanon contests, that the hatred and the shame that he faces as a black man is not steeped in any sort of logic or rationale. As a result his sanity is at risk, for he realizes that the only barrier tha often stands between him and his goals is racial prejudice. “I had rationalized the world and the world had rejected me on the basis of color prejudice. Since no agreement was possible on the level of reason, I threw myself back toward unreason.”

People often seem to find offense in the world nigger, and I never agreed with their stance. On its own I don’t find nigger to offensive, I suggest honestly that there are a slew of racial terms that would perhaps even be more hurtful than nigger because I know that someone had to produce a great deal of effort to insult me with them. It is in this analysis that I find that the word does not sting when I cannot attach the cultural context to it. Fanon’s work is (to me) a look at how I am blessed to be able to remove such a context from the word. Living in a post racial world has not made me non black, however it has given me the ability to make that blackness less omnipresent in an attempt to become something more important, and that something is human without fear of judgment.

I wanted to post my long response to the very interesting exchange between Rafael and Marian regarding Rafael’s post on Fanon.  Go back and read their exchange, which has lots of interesting discussion of racism as a moral issue and as a symptom of structural oppression of various kinds.  My comment on their comments attempts (successfully?  maybe, possibly?) to refocus the debate on Fanon’s implicit theory of racism and racial commitments of all kinds as an ideology in Althusser’s sense.  Here goes:

First of all, I appreciate both of your rhetorical skill and passion here. But I want to see if I can clarify the terms of the argument, as I see them, and also tie it more closely to FFs argument. I think your exchange (meaning Rafael and Marina) gets a bit lost in the woods on the “racism” and “prejudice” issue, such that you end up talking past one another. Forget the terms for a moment: I think you both agree that anyone can (and does) prejudge in various ways and that it’s never morally defensible. M calls this “prejudice” and reserves “racism” for something else, but I think this is a red herring, since no one–including FF–is defending prejudice as a moral good or even a matter of indifference.

The stickier issue concerns the issue of the effects of what M calls prejudice from different positions. M argues, as I understand it, that the prejudicial beliefs/actions of minorities are perhaps just as immoral as that of the predominant group but fail to be nearly as socio-economically impactful, since the dominant group largely controls the State, Big Business, the media, etc. etc. I certainly agree, though Rafael rather skillfully undermines this argument in ways that bear a lot of scrutiny, pointing out (to paraphrase) that the US is headed rapidly to “majority minority” territory and that minorities increasingly have various forms of institutional power, and thus access to “racism” in Ms terms.

My beef here is that FF is really making a different point in the piece we read. He’s not interested in individual morality here: it may be that X person is wrong to call him a “nigger” or even that FF himself is wrong to tell a well-meaning white woman, “kiss my ass.” But for FF, racial ideology *constructs* the very moral subjects that ostensibly choose “good” or “bad” behavior. And that’s because, in a society where race is a central category of identity, the only kind of self we’ve got is formed and maintained by the constant, ongoing “mirroring” that happens when we are “interpellated” (in Althusser’s terms) by others via the ideology of race. This interpellation runs the gamut from the crude and frontal (“hey, nigger!”) to the much more subtle (“oh, aren’t those African masks primal and exotic!? I guess we’ll put a few in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum as part of the ‘march of civilization’ towards Cubism”).

The drama of FFs essay/performance is to show how hard it is to escape this web of ideological interpellation, and I disagree with R that he does so by retreating in to a cocoon of black supremacy. In the middle of the “chess match” he dramatizes, there is the gesture towards “negritude”–an attempt to speak in a black voice that talks back to white tradition–but for FF this movement is limited in its capacity, since the dominant Tradition (and we can think of Eliot here) can always subsume this isolated black voice within a broader Eurocentric tradition as a (very) junior partner.

So I also disagree with M to the extent that, however true it is that prejudice is amplified enormously by the majority’s access to various kinds of power, that’s not really FFs concern here (though it is elsewhere: see WRETCHED OF THE EARTH). His point is more intimate, in a way, and more Althusserian: that ideology gets under our skin, that ideology speaks through us, that our very selves are made of ideology. It is implicit, however, that FF has more faith than Althusser that individuals can gain some breathing room within ideology by doing things like reading poems, talking back to folks on the train, and, well, reading Fanon. Doing so allows us to exist not as “maimed” or victimized subjects, but as subjects who are alienated from the dominant yet still able to critique it and function within it.

[I didn’t mean to go on so long, but this is complicated stuff. I think I’ll post it as a separate post as well so everyone can review FF a bit.]