Black Skin, White Masks: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

This chapter begins with a quote from Aimé Césaire about how every person is implicated in the torture and humiliation of others. Fanon explains that this chapter will cover the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni’s book The Psychology of Colonization. Fanon admits that Mannoni’s work is “intellectually honest” and that on some level he has captured the psychological dimension of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. However, Mannoni has failed to reach the truth of the matter. Fanon criticizes Mannoni’s claim to objectivity, arguing that subjectivity is crucial to truly understanding the psychology of colonization.

One problem is that Mannoni argues that the psychological complexes that exist in colonized people have existed since childhood. Fanon objects to the idea that neuroses caused by colonialism pre-exist colonialism itself. He declares that “society is racist or is not,” and those that claim certain countries and regions are less racist than others are misguided. Fanon is resistant to the idea that only black people can understand the problem of racism, but adds that Mannoni—who is white—has not truly understood “the despair of the black man confronted with the white man.” Fanon argues that he does not write from an objective position, and that in fact such a position is impossible.

Fanon argues that wealthy people encourage anti-Semitism among the less well-off because the rich benefit from popular anti-Semitism. He turns to the example of South Africa, arguing that racism does not originate with certain groups of people, but that the entire structure of the country is racist. Mannoni argues that colonial racism is different from other forms of racism, but Fanon rejects this, arguing that “all forms of exploitation are identical” because they all target other humans. Fanon is personally insulted by anti-Semitism because he is invested in the welfare of his “brother,” the Jewish man. He includes a quotation from Discourse on Colonialism in which Césaire argues that Nazism was the application of colonial violence—which had previously only been directed at non-Western people of color—to European populations.

In contrast to Césaire, Mannoni claims that “European civilization and its best representatives are not responsible for colonial racism.” Fanon argues that this statement is false. In reality, every member of a certain nation or culture is responsible for what is done on behalf of that nation. Fanon states that the whole of Europe “has a racist structure,” contradicting Mannoni’s claim that France is one the least racist countries in the world. Mannoni argues that one needs to be a member of a minority population in a certain country in order to experience racism. However, Fanon points out that white people are a minority in South Africa, and yet it is black South Africans who are the victims of racism.

Fanon concludes that “it is the racist who creates the inferiorized.” This echoes Jean-Paul Sartre, who argues that “it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.” Fanon argues that Mannoni only leaves two options for colonized people: develop an inferiority complex, or become dependent on one’s “superiors” for a sense of self-worth. He also claims that Mannoni “forgot” to actually describe “the colonial situation.” The reality of this situation is that colonized people have stopped “existing” in their own right, and are forced to exist “in relation to the European.” The arrival of colonizers in a country creates an economic, social, and psychological “wound.”

Mannoni claims that when white people arrived in Madagascar, Malagasy people “discovered” they were human, then discovered that humanity is divided into white and black, and then sought to achieve equality with white men. However, Fanon points out that prior to colonization, Malagasy people had a coherent sense of their own identity that had nothing to do with white people. Colonized people do not suffer because they are inferior to white people—they suffer because white people treat them as inferior. In response, colonized people try to make themselves white in order to prove to white people that they are human.

Mannoni doesn’t understand this because he insists that the dependency complex is a fundamental part of colonized people, and that only some kinds of people are psychologically suitable for colonization, reemphasizing the idea that colonized people’s feelings of inferiority and dependency were instilled through colonization. Fanon comments that when he is treating black patients, he must not consider their psychological experiences in isolation but in the context of the world. He aims to help black people avoid the demand to “whiten or perish” by enabling them to understand the ways in which their psychological problems are related to the racist world around them.

In The Psychology of Colonization, Mannoni analyzes seven dreams that he claims are indications of am irrational fear of black people. Most of the dreams feature the dreamer being haunted, chased, or attacked by black people (or black animals that symbolically represent black people). Fanon admits that after first moving to France, he was shocked to learn that North Africans “despise” black people, but goes on to explain the way that racist culture encourages different ethnic groups to hate and look down on one another. Fanon emphasizes that people’s individual desires, fears, and neuroses are influenced and even created by the society in which they live. It is wrong to deny the real-world resonance of the symbolism in dreams by always framing these symbols in traditional psychoanalytic terms, rather than acknowledging their racial significance.

Mannoni describes “the Prospero complex,” which describes the colonizer’s feelings of paternalistic superiority and also his irrational fear that his daughter will be raped by “an inferior being.” Mannoni notes that those who experience the Prospero complex have failed to understand that groups of people who are different from them inhabit worlds of their own, which must be respected. Fanon concludes by reiterating that it is the colonizers who instill the “feeling of inferiority” in the colonized, and that this feeling did not preexist colonization. He argues that Mannoni has no knowledge of the psychological character of Malagasy people in precolonial times, nor does he have any sense of what the Malagasy character might be once freed from colonial domination.