From Idealist to Disillusioned

Frantz Omar Fanon (1922-1961) was born in the small island of Martinique in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies. Originally a colony of France, it exists as one of its departments and regions, meaning that Martinique currently operates within the same rules and authority as mainland France. It is just an extension of the European country.

As a young person, Fanon was intrigued by revolution, particularly when the Vichy government, the pseudo government which collaborated with the Nazi regime in France, tried to take over his homeland. They were ousted in quick order. Thrilled with the result and hopeful to see similar results for others, he joined the French army.

Pausing his education, Fanon served in the army, heading to the African front along with many other Black soldiers. He soon realized with disgust that he and his fellow soldiers, while fighting for the same cause as their white colleagues, were treated with absurd differences. In Algeria, he witnessed firsthand the racist policies put in place to suppress the native, non-white people. Finishing out his service in Europe, he and other people of color who either signed up or were conscripted to the army were removed and sent away to their respective places of origin, so that France could look white when it took its victory lap.

After the war, Fanon entered the University of Lyons, where he studied for his bachelor's degree, later studying psychiatry. He received a holistic education there, pursuing philosophy and literature as well as medicine. But his lived experience infuriated him. He performed as well or better than the other students, but because of his Black appearance, he was treated as an inferior. 

He decided, as a result, to dedicate his life serving communities as a psychiatrist, and studying the psychiatric impact of colonialism on native people, those subjected to it. He moved to Algeria, where he worked at psychiatric facilities, observing both those who had been abused by the system and the abusers in the system. As revolution boiled over, he grew tired of working for the state of France and quietly assisting the resistance.

In 1956, Fanon sent a letter of resignation to his job with the French government. He could no longer see what he had seen and work with them. He joined the Algerian resistance openly now.

Around the same time, Fanon developed leukemia, which he had treated in what was then the Soviet Union. It was suggested that he would have better treatment in the United States, and so, after suffering his ailment after brief remission, while still doing his part in the Algerian resistance, Fanon quietly headed to the US for better treatment, under the silent gaze of the CIA.

He was left under the watch of a CIA agent who left him without medical care until he entered the hospital for pneumonia, dying shortly after. He was 36. His body was returned to Algeria and buried with much solemnity.

Code-switching and Colonialism

Fanon’s body of work is small, given he did not have long to dictate it to his wife. His first major work, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) solidified his work as an intellectual and formidable philosopher. The book, which details much of his own experience as a Black man living in France, also picks up psychological concepts from cutting edge psychiatrists, and philosophical concepts from cutting edge philosophers, using them to make the point that, in a society where white men are considered the default human, Black men will always be considered less, even if they aspire to be what white men think of as great.

In this work, Fanon details from his own lived experience as both soldier and scholar, but highlights a broader problem that exists between people of color and the broader white-dominated culture. You can’t win as a Black man, Fanon writes. If you aspire to education and professional endeavors, and perfect your French and study passionately, you will not win the game, because instead of being the best psychiatrist, you will always be the best Black psychiatrist, and your heritage will place that marginalizer on you every time, because you are not quite human as a Black man, when inspected through the lens of colonial white supremacy.

Fanon offers his first examples of this when talking about language and its relation to Blackness in a white community. For the Black man, he has two ways of going about the world. He speaks one way with the wider world, uses the terms that the culture prefers, speaks politely and pronounces his words in the preferred way. At home, he lets down this guard and speaks in a more relaxed way to his community, to his culture. He will always be alienated from this predominant culture, and will never feel at home, because even if he perfects his language and speaks well, it will always be considered “good for a Black man,” and considered in a condescending light.

Fanon illustrates very clearly what we today call “code-switching.” Code-switching happens in many different settings, and is often attributed to multilingual people, such as immigrants to another country, who would speak English, for instance, to people in the wider community, but speak Spanish to people in their own community.

Code-switching can also be a word for when people speak in various dialects or formalities, given the context of the encounter. Many people in the Black community in the United States, for instance, might use “standard” English in the workplace, but a more familiar dialect at home. To return to your home language is to relieve yourself of the tight corset of formality.

To Fanon, however, code-switching is indicative of something worse for those who must use it. In mimicking what white oppressors see as desirous in their culture, Black people are taking on the trappings of their oppressors and harming themselves in the process, stripping themselves of a humanity that the oppressor refuses to offer them. That’s got to be pretty upsetting.

A poster of Frantz Fanon displayed in Minneapolis, Minnesota during a rally protesting the police shooting of Jamar Clark in 2014. Photo by Tony Webster, courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Tearing It Down: Lived Experience as Testament

Fanon’s scathing linguistic commentary is but one symptom of a larger problem, a problem that white people don’t really think about because they don’t live it. In France in the 1950s, even though the country had long prided itself on an egalitarian view about race and slavery, the idea that people of color within France and in its colonies might be human and not want to be mistreated through humiliation and condescension was not common.

And to be fair, as later works in critical race theory will attest, white people do not know what it is like to live as a Black person. This is not in some superior sense, to say that Black people are superior to white people, but rather as a reminder that you don’t come equipped with the same lived experience as other people, especially people of different cultural and racial backgrounds. It is one thing to know something theoretically, but it is another to have to live it.

For Fanon, sharing his own story was powerful. It uncovered what a society that prided itself on its ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité really does when it sees someone as Other. The alienation of people who have to code-switch in societies takes its toll. We just do not see it as viscerally as those who walk it everyday. The oppression was the product of a society that just kind of came in and inserted itself and ideals into places where people already had their own, different ideals and selves.

During my time in Macon, Georgia, I observed this in real time. I watched a community that divided itself in half, on color lines. I watched the poverty and educational decline of one half, with the wealth and education landing squarely on the shoulders of the other. I spoke to my friend Mo about how angry this made me feel, watching what felt to me to be 1950s-style racism right in front of me.

“You see this, but you are seeing what we already know, because we live this every single day.” A Black woman from “up North,” Mo and I would often speak on matters of race and social justice. My own outrage, my own anger was like a baby learning to walk where she and her family had been running a marathon before.

As Fanon suggests, living life as a Black person in a white-dominated society is different from how a white person in a white-dominated society lives it. For Fanon, the solution is to reject the dehumanization, the claim that people from the diaspora, for instance, have no culture, no intellect, no humanity. The solution is to throw off the yoke of the oppressor and claim one’s own culture.

I am reminded of the many Americans who think that Africa is either one country, or a series of countries that all have starving children and sad people. Content creator Charity Ekezie from Nigeria has had many things to say about these stereotypes against her culture and Africa in general. I will let her have the last word here, and leave on a lighter note.