Black Skin, White Masks

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Black Skin, White Masks is a book written by Frantz Fanon.

In this study, Fanon uses psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical theory to explain the feelings of dependency and inadequacy that black people experience in a white world.He speaks of the divided self-perception of the Black Subject who has lost his native cultural originality and embraced the culture of the mother country. As a result of the inferiority complex engendered in the mind of the Black Subject, he will try to appropriate and imitate the cultural code of the colonizer, in other words shed his Blackness to adorn a White mask. The behaviour is even more evident in upwardly mobile and educated Black people who can afford to acquire the trappings of White culture. Originally formulated to combat the oppression of black people, Fanon's insights are now being taken up by other oppressed groups - including feminists - and used in their struggle for cultural and political autonomy. Like Marx, Fanon wanted to change the world as well as to describe it. The sustained influence of his writings realizes this ambition.