Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)

This book was interesting but not really enjoyable or powerful. It certainly raised a lot of good points and its anecdotal evidence was meaningful and easy to follow, but it often fell victim to its own style, becoming too conversational yet discussing too serious of a topic. While I understood that Fanon was going for an easy to read, honest book, I feel that Black Skin, White Masks may have taken that concept too far. Also, some of the graphic descriptions were a little awkward...

A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history. Fanon's masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said's Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Black Skin, White Masks is psychologist Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the BlackSkinWhiteMaskspsychological pathologies produced by colonialism, in the West in general and in the French Antilles, in particular. Fanon’s main thesis is that colonialism and racism corrupt the psyche of both blacks and whites, albeit in different ways: “the Negro enslaved by his inferiority [and] the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.”