Black people have to start living in the present instead. In modern contexts, that means freeing one’s self of the past. But learning a sense of self-worth also requires moving beyond thinking of one’s self as a slave. This sense of self-worth has to be discovered, not taught. Rather, Black people learn to assert their own dignity through fighting back against oppression. In contexts that are closer to slavery, you can’t teach a Black person through ideas alone. He acknowledges that it will look different in different places. In Chapter 8, “By Way of Conclusion,” Fanon explores what these ways of educating men might look like. In contrast, Fanon wants to discover ways to “educate man to be actional.” The key is to make it possible for people to transform the world that defines them. It makes it seem like Black people will always be stuck being defined in opposition to a whiteness that has more power. Although Fanon generally agrees with this “dialectical” picture, he is worried about the fundamentally passive and reactionary role this gives to people. An identity is formed through being different from something else.

If you never encounter someone different from you, you don’t think of yourself as a race but simply as a human. Black doesn’t exist as an identity until Black people encounter white people. We already saw what this means in the context of race. We should cure society, Fanon argues, rather than one individual at a time.įor Hegel, every identity is constituted through its opposite. Only then can individuals, too, be freed of their neurosis. Thus, to cure this neurosis, we have to change the society that makes white better than Black. Black people want to be white not because of an individual neurosis, but because of the social conditions that make whiteness more advantageous than Blackness. In effect, Fanon thinks Adler’s psychological picture is ultimately insufficient for explaining the experience of Black people, because the problem isn’t just individual. In the case of race, that means telling a Black person simply to give up their desire to become white and accept that they are Black.įanon disagrees with Adler’s conclusions, although he agrees with some of his psychological principles. The cure is to reveal to this person the pathology of this desire so that they can give it up.

The problem arises when someone wants to become something he is not, for instance when a Black person wants to become a white person. An individual comes into contact with someone else and judges one’s self in relation to them.

It is this kind of comparison, and of seeing one’s self through white eyes, that leads to problems of inferiority and pathology as discussed earlier.įor Adler, any kind of psychological problem related to recognition is by definition an individual problem. Henceforth, Black people always compare themselves to white people. In other words, people come to have a sense of identity by being 'recognized' by the “Other.” Remember from previous chapters that, according to Fanon, Black people do not think of themselves as Black until confronted by a white Other that imposes a racial distinction. In both cases, recognition refers to a process by which people come into awareness of themselves through awareness of an other. Adler was a psychotherapist and Hegel was a philosopher known for his “dialectical method” in which two things that are contradictory are brought into relation. Now, Fanon brings together the various threads of his argument into a discussion of how this might be done.Ĭhapter 7 is on “Recognition,” a technical term that Fanon explores through the work of two thinkers: Alfred Adler and Georg Hegel. Many of the themes of these chapters have already been hinted at in the previous chapters, in particular the ways in which society needs to be transformed in order for Black people to be freed from wanting to become white, in turn freeing them from the psychological problems this entails. The final two chapters of Black Skin, White Masksmove Fanon’s discussion from a psychological study of the present into a political discussion of the future.

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