De-authenticating Fanon: Self-organised anti-racism and the politics of experience

De-authenticating Fanon: Self-organised anti-racism and the politics of experience by Alana Lentin

'The Negro and Recognition'

Chapter 7:  'The Negro and Recognition'

Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon

by Ulandi Du Plessis

In the first part of the chapter Fanon applies Alfred Adler’s personality theory to the ‘Antillean Negro’. He describes how Antillean Negroes act towards each other, always putting each other down.  Adler contended that an inferiority complex could, in some, “arouse… the rash resolve to penetrate the shadows at all costs”[i].  Your unconcious self ideal works to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority; your neurosis goes as far as to impose your reality on another.  Thus a determined strive for superiority, self-validation, or as Adler would say “completeness”, torments the neurotic individual. 

Fanon Reading Group Text Four: 'The Negro & Recognition'

'The Negro & Recognition', the last chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, is online here.