A review of Fanon for Beginners, by Deborah Wyrick Ph.D.

[img]2854|right|||no_popup[/img]If we are to believe the commentariat, the best experts on race in America are white men – the same folks who, coincidentally, are also experts on women. The good news expounded by these experts, whose expertise rests in being experts more so than anything resembling social science, is ably summed up by Bill O’Reilly on The Daily Show: “…there is no more slavery, no more Jim Crow. The most powerful man in the world is a black American and the most powerful woman in the world, Oprah Winfrey, is black.” Thus we are presented with the climax of the American project, the realization of a color-blind society in which all it takes for success is the union of good values and hard work.

Among partisans of a certain political persuasion, this rosy dogma admits no dissension, no heretical acknowledgment of white privilege. Yet social science research tells us that this optimism is far from warranted. In a 2002 study by the Institute of Medicine, for instance, researchers concluded that “a large body of research underscores the existence of disparities. For example, minorities are less likely to be given appropriate cardiac medications or to undergo bypass surgery, and are less likely to receive kidney dialysis or transplants. By contrast, they are more likely to receive certain less-desirable procedures, such as lower limb amputations for diabetes and other conditions.”

Another example comes from the real estate arena, such as the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity report in 2008:

The continuing levels of racial and economic segregation in America’s metropolitan areas result from a long history of public and private discriminatory actions. Segregation is rooted in historical practices but is maintained and sometimes worsened by continued discriminatory practices, including: present-day discrimination and steering in the private rental, sales, lending, and insurance markets; exclusionary zoning, land use and school policies at the state and local governmental level; continuing government policies affecting the location of subsidized housing; the limited choices provided to those who receive federal housing assistance; income and wealth differences; and bank and insurance disinvestment in minority neighborhoods.

It’s true that crosses don’t burn on lawns (although police do shoot unarmed black men), that buildings no longer have segregated entrances, that civil rights no longer exclude entire classes of people from political participation (provided they have the right identification). The word “racism,” so offensive to people who believe that society has escaped its racist past, can indeed easily be wielded carelessly, without regard for accuracy. With social science research, demonstrating a clear and persistent problem, however, the question is: How can a society be racist yet not racist at the same time? History holds a lesson. Consider, as Vermont’s Rokeby Museum teaches us about the experience of escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, that black slaves escaped the South only to be isolated by Northern racism. It was the white man telling the black man while he shouldn’t be a slave, he isn’t welcome in the neighbourhood, either. (And don’t think about marrying anybody’s white daughter.) Such is the cognitive dissonance between the moral impulse towards equality and the impulse to sustain white privilege.

The answer has to do with the workings of the human mind, specifically the ways our behavior is influenced by unconscious bias. While a person may not be a KKK or neo-nazi racist, he or she may manifest unconscious negative stereotypes in actions. These expressions can be microbehavioural, such as eye-contact, or more tangible as in the case of racial steering in real estate, in which agents unconsciously direct people to different neighbourhoods based on their skin color. Scientific research in this area is exemplified by the work of Harvard psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, whose Project Implicit measures what they call “implicit stereotypes.” Through an online test available to the public, their Implicit Association Test (IAT) “measures attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. The IAT may be especially interesting if it shows that you have an implicit attitude that you did not know about. For example, you may believe that women and men should be equally associated with science, but your automatic associations could show that you (like many others) associate men with science more than you associate women with science.”

For a brief discussion of race in America, we have yet to pin down one of the essential problems with the national conversation. So let us complicate matters by considering the global context in which that national conversation is entwined, however much awareness of that connection is tamped down. That context, of course, is the colonial project of Western powers directed towards Africa and other Third World nations —  countries populated by non-white peoples. Whatever objection we might raise towards whites offering opinions on events in Ferguson, a community not even close to their own, how are we to think about the aftermath of colonialism worldwide?

This is where For Beginners books enters the discussion with Fanon for Beginners, Dr. Deborah Wyrick’s thorough and accessible introduction to a man she describes as “Philosopher and psychoanalyst, revolutionary and writer…one of the 20th century’s most powerful social philosophers.” Her subject, Frantz Fanon, took on many roles during his lifetime, from soldier to psychiatrist, all revolving around a common theme: freedom. It seems almost embarrassing to write something like that given how, in American politics, the word freedom has been debased by political rhetoric.  We’re saddled by the piously repeated mantra of “less government, more freedom.” Bumper stickers, in other words, by people who are all too happy to use what government remains to bully everyone else. By contrast, the freedom Fanon was concerned about is not merely a rhetorical invocation, but a vigorous challenge to the active and pervasive oppression of the colonial system and its legacy. Dr. Wyrick outlines this challenge, starting with a biography of Fanon and continuing with an insightful overview of his written work.

As she explains in her introduction, the book is organized around three key themes, each corresponding with a vital Fanon text:

1. The Search for Black Identity, as presented in Black Skin, White Masks, the stunning diagnosis of racism that Fanon wrote while he was studying medicine and psychoanalysis.
2. The Struggle Against Colonialism, as explained in A Dying Colonialism and Toward the African Revolution, essays Fanon produced when he was actively engaged in Algeria’s war of independence;
3. The Process of Decolonization, as analyzed in The Wretched of the Earth, the book that extended insights gained in Algeria to Africa and the Third World

The portrait that emerges is fascinating and, unsurprisingly, provocative. Agree or disagree with Fanon’s ideas – and there’s ample room for both, his views on the necessity of violence in the process of decolonization being a major contention – Dr. Wyrick persuasively demonstrates their importance and continued relevance. At the heart of it, if one is to pick the book’s most salient insight, is Fanon’s psychoanalytical answer to the question, What does a black man want? Fanon’s controversial answer, Dr. Wyrick explains, is that he wants to be white.

“This pathological desire is forced upon black people by white civilization and European culture. Colonialism, slavery, and other means whereby the West dominates the rest of the world have given rise to social practices, discourses and ideologies that attempt to justify oppression while establishing global standards of value.”

In practice, this means that whiteness becomes a standard reified (however unconsciously by people unaware of their own privilege) into a global measure by which other cultures are to be judged.

We return to where we started, with the black experience embedded in white people’s discussions on white people’s terms. The tendency in the American conversation on race is to reject the experiences of people who don’t fit into the mainstream (white) narrative. Yet when every black person I’ve spoken with on the subject related to me the ways, trivial and severe, in which their black skin marked them for different treatment from whites, it is clear that the national conversation is marginalizing voices that need to be heard. Even in academic settings important non-white voices can be marginalized. I never heard of Fanon, let alone read his works, until recently. That  is a shocking (though not at all surprising) gap in my obviously Eurocentric education. As valuable as Fanon for Beginners is as an overview, it is more valuable as a firm reminder, even in our multi-cultural society, that there are voices beyond the white intelligentsia of the West – and that these voices must be heard if society is to achieve genuine progress. The question thus becomes: Who will listen?

For more on Fanon for Beginners and other For Beginners books, visit www.forbeginnersbooks.com.

Frédérik Sisa is the Page's assistant editor and resident art critic. He can be reached via eMail at fsisa@thefrontpageonline.com, and invites you to connect with him via social media:

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