Frantz Fanon "I, the man of color, want only this..."
Frantz Fanon speaking in Accra, 1958, photographer unknown. Courtesy: London Review of Books
"The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved.
The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man.
And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of color, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a world of retroactive reparations.
The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man.
And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of color, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a world of retroactive reparations.
I, the man of color, want only this:
That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.
That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.
Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible. Before it can adopt a positive voice, freedom requires an ellort at disalienation. At the beginning of his life a man is always clotted, he is drowned in contingency. The tragedy of the man is that he was once a child. It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of
their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.
their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.
Superiority? Inferiority?
Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?
At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness."
Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?
At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness."
"BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS" FRANTZ FANON (Pluto Press, 1986)
Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, p. 231
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