The Great White Error and the Great Black Mirage: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Philosophy of Race

Abstract

Given Frantz Fanon’s preeminence within the burgeoning subdiscipline known as Critical Philosophy of Race, it is surprising that, with very few exceptions (e.g., Silverman 2005), little attention has been paid to his concept of race. The intense scrutiny given to his account of blacks being raced by the white gaze in Black Skin, White Masks seems to have distracted attention from all other aspects of his thinking about race. To be sure, Fanon himself is in part responsible for the relative silence on this subject insofar as he himself left no sustained meditation on race as such, but his caution was appropriate. He knew the danger of appearing to underwrite any of the dominant concepts of race that had been employed in the first half of the twentieth century. But I show here that he also did not underwrite the new consensus about race that was emerging in the 1950s around the UNESCO Statement on Race. That is to say, he did not abandon the concept of race altogether as so many of his contemporaries did on the grounds that it was not supported by the scientists, nor did he embrace the new anthropological notion of culture purified of any reference to race that lay at the basis of the new account of ethnicity. Finally, he also did not share the contemporary passion for individualism, because he believed that “a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity” is ineffective politically (Fanon 2004:11).KeywordsNational CultureAfrican CultureCritical PhilosophyBlack SkinNegro CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.