1. Frantz Fanon - The Negro and Recognition
in
Black Skin, White Mask

2. Introduction : Black Skin, White Masks :
 Black Skin, White Masks - a book about the
mindset or psychology of racism.
 Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist
and black, post-colonialist thinker.
 Written for white French psychiatrists.

3. The Negro and Recognition
 Frantz Fanon was not a big believer of Adler and Hegel, but
nonetheless he used their ideas as a jumping off point to
understand the blacks from his home island of Martinique.
 Adler says that you understand someone not through his words
and actions but through the end he aims to achieve.

4. The Negro and Recognition
 In Martinique black people put each other down to feel good about
themselves. So mistakes in your French or at your work are
remembered and repeated – not because they are so terrible in
themselves but because it allows others to put you down so they
can feel better about themselves.

5. The Negro and Recognition
“I am Narcissus, and I want to see reflected in the eyes
of the other an image of myself that satisfies me.”
(Black Skin, White Masks - Page 187)
 Fanon shows that it goes back 400 years. The fault is not in
the souls of black people but comes from white rule, which
forces blacks to live in a world where their human worth is
questioned. But since blacks are not in a position to put down
white people, they prove their worth by putting down each
other.

6. The Negro and Recognition
 Hegel says that our sense of self worth and even reality comes from
others, particularly from how they react to our actions.
 So blacks in America, having had to fight for equal rights against
whites, have a firm sense of themselves. Seeing the hatred in the
eyes of white people and hearing the names they were called and
knowing the body count, they fought for an equal place in society.
 The blacks in Martinique were not so fortunate. They never fought
for anything – except for the white man in wars overseas. Whites
freed the slaves on their own. And instead of mean looks and mean
words and bodies hanging from trees like in America, whites in
Martinique show “nothing but indifference or paternalistic
curiosity” – while looking down on blacks all the same.

7. The Negro and Recognition
 The Negro, Juan de Mérida, says this:
What a disgrace it is to be black in this world!
Are black men not men?
Does that endow them with a baser soul, a duller, an uglier?
And for that they have earned scornful names.
I rise burdened with the shame of my color
And I let the world know my courage . . .
Is it so vile to be black?
 As we can see, Juan de Mérida must be understood from the
viewpoint of overcompensation. It is because the Negro belongs
to an “inferior” race that he seeks to be like the superior race.

8. CONCLUSION
 In place of honest hatred was a false smile, Which gave
blacks nothing to fight against. All they could do was bite
their tongue and smile back. Giving them a weaker sense
of themselves while still remaining unequal.

9. Thank You.