Black Skin, White Masks: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The chapter begins with two exclamations: “Dirty nigger” and “Look! A Negro!” Fanon notes that such phrases turn black people into objects. After hearing them, he wants the person who said them to give a sign confirming that he is indeed human, but gets nothing. As long as black people remain living in black nations, they will not have to exist “for others,” an idea Fanon adapts from Hegel. Fanon argues that colonialism has destroyed people’s ability to grasp the ontology of blackness—meaning that it is impossible for people (of all races) to understand what it means to exist as a black person. This is due to the way colonialism forces black people to live in relation to white colonizers.

Due to this ontological erasure, black people are cut off from their own bodily experience, forced to view themselves “in the third person.” Fanon considers the cumulative effect of hearing a child on a train shout: “Look! A Negro!” over and over again, followed by “I’m scared!”. He argues that if he had only heard that phrase once it might be easy to dismiss, but hearing it multiple times leads to a complete crisis of identity. He feels self-conscious about his body and an awareness of the history of his ancestors. Fanon returns to the scene on the train, adding that the child’s mother urges Fanon to ignore the boy, saying “he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are.” Yet this does not make it any better.

Fanon runs through all the negative stereotypes and fears about black people, before writing that the little boy now cries: “Maman, the Negro’s going to eat me.” Fanon feels crushed by whiteness and filled with anger. When a woman remarks, “Look how handsome that Negro is,” Fanon reacts with the same fury, responding: “Fuck you.” He is roused by the thought of a conflict, but is disappointed by the reality that white people respond to his righteous anger only with further rejection. He feels determined to “assert myself as a BLACK MAN.”

Sartre argues that Jewish people are constantly fearful of confirming anti-Semitic stereotypes, and that this fear corrupts their personalities. Yet Fanon points out that it is possible for Jews to hide or downplay their Jewishness, and that, while Jewish people have faced terrible persecution, unlike black people they do not suffer from being “trapped” in their own race in the same way, since black people cannot hide their blackness. Fanon desires nothing more than to be “unnoticed.” He feels ashamed and humiliated, and cannot even find solace in other black people, as they have internalized racist ideas and are constantly trying to make themselves white.

At the time Fanon is writing, there are many black doctors, teachers, and priests, so it might seem to some as if negative stereotypes about black people are dying away. However, he points out that black doctors exist in a precarious situation. If they make a single mistake it will be taken as proof that black people are not capable of being doctors at all. White people claim to hope that “color prejudice” will soon “disappear,” but Fanon must still live with the torturous knowledge that he is irrationally “despised” on account of his race. Science has now proven that there is no biological hierarchy of the races, and that, from a biological perspective, people are all the same. Yet while white people reluctantly acknowledge this, they have remained steadfast in their opposition to sexual and romantic intimacy between different races.

Examining the way that science has been used to justify racism in the past, Fanon exclaims: “Science should be ashamed of itself!” He then returns to the comparison between anti-black racism and anti-Semitism. Some people say that anti-blackness and anti-Semitism are essentially the same thing, but Fanon clarifies that while all anti-Semites are also prejudiced against black people, the reverse is not necessarily true. At a certain point, Fanon decided to take pride in his blackness and in black culture. Having been irrationally rejected by white people, Fanon refuses to participate in irrationality himself. Instead, he embraces the “bitter brotherhood” of black people.

Fanon includes quotations from Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, the central text of Négritude. He acknowledges the power of “black magic,” eros, and rhythm, but cautions that celebrating these things can give the impression that black people are “backward” and “naïve.” Claiming that black people have a special relationship with the body and earth can in turn reveal that white people lack such a relationship. Fanon quotes an American friend who writes that when white people feel they have become too “mechanized,” they turn to black people for “human sustenance.” While it may give black people relief to be “recognized” in this way, Fanon emphasizes that this is really a false assurance.

White people often claim that black people are supposedly magical, poetic, or animalistic in nature because they are at an earlier stage of human development. Yet from his own reading Fanon knows that there were advanced black civilizations that long preceded the colonial period. Fanon quotes another passage by Césaire, in which he argues that precolonial black populations were both technically advanced and morally superior to the violent white colonizers who destroyed their way of life. However, once again Fanon points out that it is easy for white people to coopt a view like Césaire’s. White people might claim that precolonial black civilizations were gentle and kind in the same way that children are gentle and kind, and that, again, this is because black people are at an earlier stage of development than whites.

Fanon moves on to quote Sartre’s critique of the fact that followers of Négritude tend to be “militant Marxists,” who substitute a focus on the issue of race for the more universal issue of class. Fanon admits that when he first read Sartre’s words, he was deeply hurt. Although Sartre goes on to suggest that black people embrace Négritude anyway, Fanon finds this patronizing and not at all reassuring. Fanon is left with a feeling of total loss, and re-emphasizes that “the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man.” Black people suffer from the feeling that they do not exist, and live in fear of themselves. Fanon is determined to embrace the depth and fullness of his own existence in spite of racism. However, this is difficult and painful.