Abstract
‘The Fact of Blackness’, the fifth chapter of Martinican psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon’s 1952 work Black Skin, White Masks, maps the journey of a black French Caribbean man coming to terms with anti-black racism as a disabling state of being. Writing in the first person, Fanon makes it clear that white French prejudices against Jews, ‘cripples’ and blacks each has unique historical trajectories, with consequently different lived experiences of dispossession. A moment of public humiliation, when a white child points at him and says, ‘Mama, look at the Negro! I’m frightened!’, leads Fanon to the realisation that his skin colour and other ‘black’ phenotypic characteristics have been alienated from and turned against him. He is:
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Notes
- 1.
Y a bon banania is a creolised reference to a chocolate-based drink popular in France, sold in a box depicting a racially derogatory image of a grinning black man in a fez. The chocolate and the man’s skin are the same colour. Translations from Fanon are by Newton.
- 2.
- 3.
In reading Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) as a discussion of race, colonialism and disability we are mindful of Mary Sherry’s critique of Fanon’s ‘medical model of disability’ in The Wretched of the Earth, which was based on Fanon’s interactions as a psychiatrist with patients at the Bléda Hospital in Algeria.
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Kennedy, S., Newton, M.J. (2016). The Hauntings of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body in the Caribbean. In: Grech, S., Soldatic, K. (eds) Disability in the Global South. International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42488-0_24
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