Black Skin, White Masks

The Introduction sets out the program of Black Skin, White Masks, along with the tone for the rest of the investigation.

The basic premise of Black Skin, White Masks is that the encounter between white European colonizer and black colonized subject gives rise to a unique set of psychopathologies. Specifically, white men consider themselves superior to black men, and black men are driven to prove that they are the intellectual equals of white men. Fanon’s aimin Black Skin, White Masks is to understand the “massive psychoexistential complex” (5) created by this relationship between blacks and whites and, by analyzing this complex, to destroy it and thereby achieve “the liberation of the man of color from himself” (2).

As Fanon explains, when he speaks of “the black man” he has primarily Antilleans (people from the French island colonies in the Caribbean) in mind, but also uses the word more broadly as a shorthand for all people of African descent who are native to European (especially French) colonies or who were born in European countries. Thus, “the black man” functions as a synonym for “the colonized subject.” When he speaks of “black psychology” he emphatically does not mean the psychology of pre-contact peoples in Africa, or Africans who have never been colonial subjects, which he takes to be fundamentally different from that of the colonized subject.