Negritude is the movement in which Fanon will look into for the historical evidence to demonstrate the greatness of the negro. Negritude was movement founded by Cesaire, its goal was to destroy the myth of the negro. In achieving this goal the negro would no longer be considered the other of the white man. One can see why this would be attractive to Fanon. Negritude explored the great negro civilizations, it looked at qualities such as art, rhythm, emotion, occult, gentleness, and social harmony. Something “ I can be known by” instead of the color of my skin. The white man responds though;yes we had that too, now we have moved beyond that. The white man looks at the negro as “our children; playful and rhythmic.” The white man goes to him when he needs a break from his “progress of reason”. Once again the black man's essence was provided for him. Fanon also looked at the arguments of white scholars discovering that Africans worked gold and silver over 2000 years ago. The white man again responds yes but we have moved passed that. We represent progress with reason. The negro did not keep pace with the “evolution of humanity”. The essence is created for the negro, he is fixed unable to create what he is. In fact these claims are made of an essence and not an existence. He has no existence as a consciousness but an existence as a thing. The black man is made to have all of his identity as a racial identity. It is at this point Fanon realizes that Negritude is a transition not an end, rather it is a step along the way. He realizes he is not yet a potentiality rather the essence is already provided. Fanon is clearly disappointed by this, the transition contains no emotion, no enthusiasm. Without a negro past or future, he is not wholly black and cannot be white. Fanon says for the moment I am damned.
Fanon now will seek to defeat the psychopathological structures that stand in the way of creating an authentic existence. He realizes that Negritude was based on the blackness of the other. Fanon refers to Jung and the archetypes in consciousness. He will say that due to colonization the colonized and colonizer have developed a collective consciousness. There is a psychoanalytic quality to this collective consciousness. Fanon uses Freud's Oedipus complex. However instead of the young boy seeking to kill his father, the young boys of Martinique will have conflict with the colonizer (the authority figure). The colonized identifies with the colonizer, self-esteem is sought to be attained from the colonizer. The exchange of psychological problems goes both ways though. Phobogenic qualities develop in the white man which in turn harm the black man also. The image of the black man seen as sexually powerful creates fear in the white man. The psychological image gives birth to sexual anxiety. This is also harmful to the black man because it determines his essence as sexually potent and nothing else. Here is another example of how a psychological structure prevents an individual from creating their own existence. Scientific facts of how physiologically black and white are the same are ignored because it is a psychophobia. This physcophobia perpetuates sexual anxiety and the view of the black man as a sexual animal. Fanon makes the point of saying that Jew is attacked as a representative of his race, the black man is attacked for his body. The colonized and the colonizer both have psychological obstacle to overcome. Another way these psychological obstacles present themselves is through the use words. Fanon looks to etymology to examine this.
First Fanon recognizes that the black man is viewed as a symbol of evil. The collective unconscious has decided that everything black is; “ugly, sin, darkness immoral”. Fanon concludes that “he who is immoral is black”. White is the opposite of this. There fore the black man who behaves morally is not black. The black Antillean is therefore a slave to this cultural imposition. These symbols of immorality as blackness created by the collective unconscious cause the black man to think if he remains black he is all those symbols. Another example of how his existence is determined for him. These symbols cause the him to end up hating himself.
Black Skin, White Mask. - Frantz Fanon
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