Silence the Criminal

by Simone Arielle Levy

Fifty years later, Frantz Fanon, the Martinican revolutionary who inspired Steve Biko, lives on. His writings, and the conversations that they continue to inspire, reach beyond skin colour into the deeper politics of the human mind in Fanon's questioning of what it is to be human. In ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, Fanon looks at what he calls the cognitive dissonance that emerges when people are presented with new evidence that contradicts their core beliefs. Fanon says that “because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."