Books Black skin, white masks

Black Skin, White Masks is a seminal 1952 work by Frantz Fanon, offering a psychoanalytic exploration of racism's psychological impact on Black people under colonial rule.​

Key Themes

Fanon analyzes how Black individuals internalize white superiority, leading to alienation through adopting "white masks"—French language, behavior, and aspirations—to gain recognition, yet this causes fragmentation and self-hatred. He critiques Négritude's romanticized Black identity as insufficient, emphasizing the white gaze that reduces Blackness to a phobic object defined by historical racism and stereotypes.​

Chapter Highlights

Chapters dissect language's role in inferiority, Black women's desire for white partners, white men's fears of Black sexuality, and the pathology of colonial subjectivity, drawing on Hegel, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. Fanon calls for collective catharsis to overcome these damages beyond individual therapy.