Per Caritatem

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon recounts his experience on a train of being “fixed” by a white other—an other which happened to be a child who had already been habituated to see blacks as defined by the white imagination.  As the child’s refrain, “Look! A Negro!”[1] crescendoed forth and came to a close with a fearful questioning of the “Negro’s” next move, Fanon not only experienced the gaze of the white other, he also began to see himself through the white gaze.[2]

I cast an objective gaze over myself, and I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics—and they burst my eardrums with cannibalism, backwardness [l’arriération mentale], fetishism, racial defects, slaves and above all, and above all:  “Y a bon Banania.”  On that day I was disoriented, incapable of existing outside with the Other, the White man, who mercilessly imprisoned me.  I carried myself far away from my Dasein [de mon être-là]—very far away—and constituted myself as an object.  What was this for me, if not a separation [décollement], an uprooting [arrachement], a hemorrhage which congealed with black blood over my entire body.  Nevertheless, I did not want this reconsideration, this thematization of myself. I wanted quite simply to be a human among other humans.[3]

As Fanon takes up the white view of himself, he experiences its all-encompassing reach.  That is, his becoming a white-defined black other involved more than his present encounter with the child on the train; in essence, he entered into the white erasing and re-scripting of black history.  Not only is his present fixed by the white other, but his past is fixed as well.  The child’s unison refrain gives rise to polyphonic lines of “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism” and the like.

Even if it is the case that the child, because of his lack of cognitive development, is an unwilling or non-culpable participant in furthering racism and racial discourse; nonetheless, the effect—un-reflective racism in children—is a reality that confronts the black other on a daily basis and forces him to experience his phenotypic differences as conceived by the white imagination.  As Fanon explains, “I am overdetermined from the outside.  […] The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.  I am fixed.  Once their microtomes are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality.”[4] Fanon’s body, particularly his ever-present, always uncovered black skin, brimming with manifold white-determined meanings, takes on a life of its own.  This second-self is created through discourse—a socially constructed subjectivity—a kind of reverse shadow whose form creates a path upon which Fanon must walk. As the encounter with the child continues and the refrain sounds once again, “Look, a Negro!  Maman, a Negro!”, the boy’s mother, somewhat nervously, cries, “Ssh! You’ll make him angry.  Don’t pay attention to him, monsieur, he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are.”[5] As Kant, Hegel and other Western philosophers have asserted, the Western tradition, for which white European culture becomes the surrogate, is the standard for determining whether a nation has a culture or could possibly become cultured and civilized, and thus enter into world history.

Kant, paving the way for Hegel, claims that true history begins with the Greeks and that non-Greek peoples are validated only through contact with the Greeks.  On Kant’s estimation, the (non)histories of non-Greeks are simply “terra incognita,” an amorphous X, lacking (Western) form and thus unable to appear as intelligible.  He then turns to the Jews to illustrate how a nation may enter a state of historical and cultural recognition.

This happened with the Jewish nation (volk) at the time of the Ptolemies through the Greek translation of the Bible, without which one would ascribe little credibility to their isolated records.  From that point forward (if this beginning has been properly ascertained) one can pursue its narratives.  And thus with all the other nations (Völkern).[6]

In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel takes up this same line of thinking; however, in order to justify his position, he provides an elaborate narrative in which Geist’s presence or absence indicates whether a nation has historical, cultural or socio-political significance.[7] One might go as far as to claim that the mother’s remark to Fanon has its own genealogical history which is consonant with the Western philosophical tradition; her awareness of this history matters little.  Approached in this manner, echoes of Hegel’s depiction of Africans as cannibalistic can still be heard in the child’s cry, “Maman, the Negro’s going to eat me”.[8]

All of these discourses—whether philosophical, pseudoscientific, or everyday chatter on a public train—comprise the many pieces of Fanon’s “black” self, woven together by the white other.

Notes

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[1] The French reads, ‘tiens un nègre’, which can also be translated, ‘Look! A Nigger’.  Perhaps various English translations have presented a kinder, gentler version, thus concealing the ‘sting’ produced by the child’s repeated utterance.

[2] See also Bart van Leewan, ‘To What Extent is Racism a Magical Transformation?’ Journal of Social Philosophy 38 (2007), 296 ff.  Van Leewan discusses the ‘gaze’ from the perspective of the racist in order to give an account of the motivational structure of racism.  In addition, van Leeuwen’s essay offers several practical anti-racism strategies (see especially, 303–5).

[3] My translation.  Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 90-1.

[4] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95.

[5] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93.

[6] Immanuel Kant.  ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784)’, trans. Allen W. Wood, 107–120, at 118. Anthropology, History and Education. Ed. and trans. Günter Zöller and Robert Louden.  (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118.

[7] Robert Bernasconi has devoted several manuscripts to the study of Hegel and his Eurocentrism.  See, for example, Bernasconi, ‘With What Must the Philosophy of World History Begin?  On the Racial Bias of Hegel’s Eurocentrism’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000):  171–201.  See also, Bernasconi, ‘Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti’.  In Hegel After Derrida, ed. by Stuart Barnett, 41–63.  London:  Routledge, 1998.

[8] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 93.

In my previous post, I gave a broad overview of three central views of race in contemporary race theory literature:  racial skepticism (K. Anthony Appiah), racial constructionism (Ron Mallon), and racial population naturalism (Robin Andreasen).  Racial skeptics hold that since biobehavioral racial essences do not exist, and there is nothing for the term “race” to signify, “races” do not exist.  The racial constructionist agrees that there are no racialized essences; however, she understands race as a social kind and sees value in racial discourse.  The racial population naturalist likewise rejects racial essentialism; yet, she claims that “races may exist as biologically salient populations, albeit ones that do not have the biologically determined social significance once imputed to them.”[1] Personally I situate myself within the racial constructionism camp and thus consider race an important social reality worthy of our discourse, study and continued reflection.

In this post, I want to focus on the term “social constructionism” in order to then discuss how various thinkers have come to understand subjectivities, identities and concepts as socially constructed and whether or not or to what degree human agency is compatible with some variant of social constructionism.  More specifically, I am interested in understanding how identities or subjectivities and concepts such as “race,” “slave,” and “black” arise, how they are sustained and eventually become ossified historically, and what role various socio-political institutions, discourses and cultural practices play in their formation and maintenance.

As a provisionary starting point, it is helpful to think of social constructionism as analogous to the production of artifacts.[2] Broadly put, an artifact is an object designed and created by a human agent for a specific purpose or set of purposes.   Such objects include handcrafted bookshelves, Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, Cézanne’s painting, Le Cabanon de Jourdan, and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor.  Here we have reasonably unobjectionable instances of objects designed and produced by identifiable agents.  However, when we consider Western tonal music, the modern state or human language, we encounter artifacts whose specific intentional and originary agents are difficult if not impossible to identify.  Nonetheless, in the second group of examples human agency is no doubt involved and the emergence and maintenance of each involves reference to historical and socio-political practices, customs, and traditions.  Similarly, as Sally Haslanger explains, certain categories of individuals “count as social constructions because the conditions for being a member of the kind or category include social (properties and) relations.”[3] For example, to be considered (legally and officially) adopted obtains only in a society that recognizes the status of legal adoption and has the social and political structures in place to facilitate such practices.  Just as agents produce artifacts for various purposes, so, too, identities, subjectivities and concepts are constructed intentionally as well as unintentionally through discourses, institutions, traditions and socio-political practices.[4]

With the above sketch in place, let us turn to a few examples from Frantz Fanon in order to illustrate more concretely how human subjectivities—like artifacts—are constructed.   As Fanon explains, in a mostly black community in the Antilles, he neither identified nor saw himself as a “black” subject; however, once he entered a predominantly white socio-political context where the category “black” is assigned in advance multiple negative meanings, a confrontation with racially scripted phenotypic differences was unavoidable. [5] Fanon likewise narrates how a particularly painful racial encounter on a train was a breaking point for him.  That is, although he resisted repeatedly the ascriptions imposed upon him by the dominant discourse, he eventually gave in and began to internalize the white-defined view of the black other—intellectually inferior, culturally incompetent, an object to be fixed.  With this example, we see how discourse can function—one may even argue—causally to construct a particular subjectivity or identity.  Here we have a subjectivity, “black,” which was constructed in a specific socio-historical context through discourse, institutional practices, legal structures and so forth.  There is nothing intrinsic to the subject that corresponds to the fictive identity created by the dominant discourse; yet, because the society itself is, in this case, structured racially, those who have been labeled “black” can and often do come to see themselves as possessing at least some of the characteristics that have been ascribed to them.   As Haslanger observes,

Our classificatory schemes, at least in social contexts, may do more than just map preexisting groups of individuals; rather our attributions have the power to both establish and reinforce groupings which may eventually come to “fit” the classifications.  In such cases, classificatory schemes function more like a script than a map.[6]

None of the above should be taken to mean that an individual is completely socially determined or unable to resist or re-construct his or her subjectivity.  In future posts, I plan to discuss specific examples of such resistance possibilities via textual analyses of Foucault, Fanon and Frederick Douglass.

Notes

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[1] Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 526.  See, for example, Robin Andreasen, “Race:  Biological Reality or Social Construct?”  Philosophy of Science 67 (2000):  S653–S666; Philip Kitcher, “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris (New York:  Humanity Books, 1999):  87–120.

[2] This section on social constructionism is indebted to Sally Haslanger’s work.  See especially, Sally Haslanger, “Ontology and Social Construction,” Philosophical Topics 23 (1995):  95–125.

[3] Ibid., 98.

[4] Regarding unintended socially constructed identities, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the history “delinquency,” showing how it emerges as an unintended subjectivity produced by the modern prison system.  This new subjectivity arises in spite of the fact that the stated intention of the institution is to rehabilitate offenders.

[5] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 90.

[6] Haslanger, “Ontology and Social Construction,” 100.  Haslanger labels this type of construction, “discursive.”  Here “[s]omething is discursively constructed just in case it is the way it is, to some substantial extent, because of what is attributed (and/or self-attributed) to it” (Ibid., 100).

Describing how “black” subjectivity in a colonized context is socially constructed and comes to function as an imposed hermeneutical lens for black experience, Frantz Fanon writes,

For no longer does the black man have to be just black, but he has to be black over against the white man. Some would want to remind us that this situation works both ways.  We answer back that it’s false.  The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.  From one day to the next, Negroes have two systems of reference from which they must take their bearings.  Their metaphysical, or less pretentiously, their customs and the authorities to which they referred, were abolished because they were in contradiction with a civilization that has ignored them and imposed itself on them.[1]

As my own description of Fanon’s passage indicates, the terms “social construction,” “constructionism,” and similar phrases are commonplace in much of the current philosophical literature on race, gender and sexuality.  For example, most contemporary philosophers of race argue that race is not a natural, biological kind—a widely-held belief that came to full fruition in the nineteenth century. [2] In contemporary race theory literature, this former view of race goes by a variety of names:  racialism (K. Anthony Appiah), biobehavioral essentialism (Ron Mallon), racial essentialism and so forth.   Given the widespread rejection of this position among race theorists, it is important to have a clear idea of precisely what the position entails.  Ron Mallon presents a concise explanation of the three aspects of racialism or what he calls biobehavioral essentialism.

Races were believed to share biobehavioral essences:  underlying natural (and perhaps genetic) properties that (1) are heritable, biological features, (2) are shared by all and only the members of a race, and (3) explain behavioral, characterological, and cultural predispositions of individual persons and racial groups.[3]

Although there are significant points of disagreement among scholars engaged in race related studies, there is, as Mallon highlights, a general consensus among philosophers of race, sociologists and biologists that “races do not share such biobehavioral essences.”[4] Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence against racialism is the conclusion reached in recent scientific studies of intra- and intergroup genetic variation.  As the study of genetics gained prestige in scientific circles, those adhering to racial essentialism turned to this new field, believing that the differences among races must be the result of an underlying genetic discrepancy.  However, “studies of human genetic diversity suggest that genetic variation within racially identified populations is as great as or greater than diversity between populations.”[5] In light of these findings, the possibility of confirming a distinct racial essence “shared by all and only members of a race” is highly improbable.[6]

Even with a general consensus concerning the untenability of racialism among philosophers of race, debates abound as to whether racial discourse should be retained given the negative purposes for which it has been utilized. In light of the abundant evidence against a biobehavioral essentialized notion of race, many race theorists argue for what Mallon has labeled, “racial skepticism, the view that races do not exist at all.”[7] Others, however, believe that although an essentialized, hierarchical view of race must be rejected, racial language, nonetheless, should be salvaged, albeit purged of its negative history.  This second group defends what Mallon calls racial constructionism.  On this view, race is a social construction and thus exists as a social, rather than a natural kind.[8] Racial constructionists hold that the notion of race as a social kind plays a crucial role in establishing, maintaining and developing a group’s identity; consequently, it as well as racial discourse must be preserved.  Mallon lists a third group, racial population naturalism, which claims that “races may exist as biologically salient populations, albeit ones that do not have the biologically determined social significance once imputed to them.”[9]

Notes

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[1] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, rev. ed., trans. Richard Philcox (New York:   Grove Press, 2008) 90.  I have modified the translation in several places. Originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris:  Seuil, 1971).  “Car le Noir n’a pas plus à être noir, mais à l’être en face du Blanc.  Certains se mettront en tête de nous rappeler que la situation est à double sens.  Nous répondons que c’est faux.  Le Noir n’a pas de résistance ontologique aux yeux du Blanc.  Les nègres, du jour au lendemain, ont eu deux systèmes de référence par rapport auxquels il leur a fallu se situer.  Leur métaphysique, ou moins prétentieusement leurs coutumes et les instances auxquelles elles renvoyaient, étaient abolies parce qu’elles se trouvaient en contradiction avec une civilization qu’ils ignoraient et qui leur en imposait” (Peau noire, masques blancs, 88-89).

[2] For a helpful historical and philosophical discussion of the significant figures and events that paved the way for nineteenth century (pseudoscientific) racial essentialism, see Robert Bernasconi, “Who Invented the Concept of Race?  Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2001), 11–36. Bernasconi argues that although Kant was not the first to use the term “race,” he was the first to give the term definitional precision  As Bernasconi explains, for Kant, what distinguishes race from variety is the fact that “races are marked by hereditary characteristics that are unavoidable in the offspring” (Ibid., 17).  Regarding the problems of a biological concept of race, see Daniel Blackburn, “Why Race is not a Biological Concept,” in Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, ed. Berel Lang, 3–26. Oxford:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.  See also, Ron Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” Ethics 116 (2006):  525-551, especially 528–29.

[3] Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 528-529.

[4] Ibid., 529.

[5] Ibid., 529.

[6] Ibid., 529.

[7] Ibid., 525, italics retained.  See, for example, K. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in Overcoming Racism and Sexism, eds. Linda A. Bell and David Blumenfeld, 59–78.  Oxford:  Rowman & Littlefield, 1995; Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race (New York:  Routledge, 2002).

[8] Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 525-526, fn. 4.  See, for example, Charles Mills, Blackness Visible:  Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1998); Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York:  Routledge, 1996); Michael Root, “How We Divide the World,” Philosophy of Science 67 (2000):  S628–S639; Ronald Sundstrom, “Racial Nominalism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002):  193–210.

[9] Mallon, “‘Race’:  Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 526.  See, for example, Robin Andreasen, “Race:  Biological Reality or Social Construct?”  Philosophy of Science 67 (2000):  S653–S666; Philip Kitcher, “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris (New York:  Humanity Books, 1999):  87–120.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon presents his two-fold schemata, the historico-racial (schéma historico-racial) and epidermal racial schemata (schéma épidermique racial) as a corrective to Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema (schéma corporel).  In brief, Fanon’s historico-racial schema brings to light the historical contingencies and mythological narratives imposed upon blacks, whereas the racial-epidermal schema speaks to the sedimentation of the so-called “black essence.”   In other words, once the (white-imposed) narrative of what it means to be a black person, which includes the various meanings that have been assigned to phenotypic differences, has become fixed, ossified and even naturalized in the social consciousness, various “scientific” discourses, and cultural and legal practices, the black essence has been “successfully” created.[1]

When the transition to the racial-epidermal schema takes place, the all-pervasiveness of the white gaze—here understood broadly as the white mythological narrative as manifest in the cultural consciousness and systematically expressed in the cultural institutions and practices of a given society—functions like a Panopticon, keeping the black person under constant inspection.  Though speaking of the incarcerated, Foucault’s description applies quite well to the black person’s situation vis-à-vis the white, European other, “he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.”[2] As soon as the racial-epidermal schema has come to fruition and the black essence fixed, the requisite racial machinery has likewise been established to ensure “proper” social boundaries and to keep the white mythology unchallenged.  In a way similar to the Panopticon’s ability to “disindividualiz[e] power” and distribute it through various socio-cultural and legal structures, institutions and people, Fanon’s schemata point to the systemic racial structures of colonized Europe.[3] These racialized disciplinary practices, though not identical to the disciplinary practices Foucault describes, nonetheless share close family resemblances with “a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.” [4] The racial-epidermal schema, broadly construed to include these systemic, disindividualized power structures, enables even the most vulnerable and innocent members of society—the child on the train—to be an instrument of and even operate the racial machinery.[5]

When the white mythology has its way, it gives birth to black subjugation, which has both an external and an internal dimension.  The external aspect is socio-political in nature and is often manifest in discriminatory legislation and unequal educational and employment opportunities.  The internal aspect comes when the black person can no longer bear the weight of the white alienating gaze and internalizes the narrative.  To return to Foucault’s metaphor, when the black person breaks down and accepts the white mythos, there is a sense in which the panoptic surveillance is no longer needed.[6] In Fanon’s description of his self-fragmenting descent, he draws attention to the sense of powerlessness that he felt in a colonialized context wherein mis-recognition by the white other was the norm.  “Disoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from myself, and gave myself up as an object.”[7]

Fanon is cognizant, in other words, of the black person’s participation in this already-given white-scripted history.  His statements, “I transported myself” and “gave myself up as an object,” acknowledge his active involvement in accepting the white mythology.  Although this particular act is negative, it nonetheless highlights the fact that the black person in a colonialized or similarly oppressive context is in reality not a mere res, a thing determined from the outside and lacking genuine freedom.  Fanon, in fact, makes numerous statements affirming his freedom—a freedom that involves his ability to creatively re-script his own narrative and to refuse to be shackled by a pre-given white narrative.

I find myself one day in the world, and I acknowledge one right for myself:  the right to demand human behavior from the other.  And one duty:  the duty never to let my decisions renounce my freedom.  […] I am not a prisoner of History.  I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction.  I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life.[8]

These declarations in no way undermine Fanon’s schemata, particularly his account of the coming-into-being of a fixed black essence once the racial-epidermal schema has been established. This is the case because his genealogy of racial sedimentation (i.e., black essentialism) or the giving way of Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema to the racial-epidermal schema is not a necessary but a contingent event, which qua contingent can (in theory) be undone or at least significantly dismantled.

In other words, Fanon’s agonized cry of alienation, although genuine and intensely felt, should not be interpreted as a despairing last word.  Rather, Fanon calls for a counter-narrative which refuses to be frozen in a white-scripted past.

Notes

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[1] On the movement and interpretation of Fanon’s schemata, I concur with Weate’s analysis, which characterizes the racial epidermal schema as “a later stage in psychosomatic disintegration and alienation” (“Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” p. 174).  Weate goes on to discuss the movement to the epidermal schema as Fanon’s attempt to trace a “genealogy of racial essentialism” (p. 173).  As he explains, “[b]y marking the two stages of the ‘historico-racial’ and then the ‘racial-epidermal’, he is therefore contesting the view that essentialism, and in particular black essentialism, is grounded in a biological problematic.  For Fanon, the essentialization of blackness is the product of a concealed perversion of history. It is only once this concealment is consolidated (through epidermalization) that questions concerning the biological ground of race arise.  The distinction he makes between the two stages of schematization or epistemic enframing therefore allow biologistic discourses around race to be seen as phenomena derivative upon a prior perversion of history that is subsequently concealed” (Ibid., pp. 174-75).

[2] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200.

[3] See, e.g., Fanon’s critique of Monsieur Mannoni in chapter four of Black Skin, White Masks. Contra Mannoni’s claims, Fanon draws attention to the fact that the very “structure of South Africa is a racist structure” (p. 68).

[4] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 202.

[5] In his chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon recounts his experience on a train of being “fixed” by a white other—an other which happened to be a child who had already been habituated to see blacks as defined by the white imagination.  As the child’s refrain, “Look! A Negro!” crescendoed forth and came to a close with a fearful questioning of the “Negro’s” next move, Fanon not only experienced the gaze of the white other, he also began to see himself through the white gaze. See Black Skin, White Masks, p. 92.

[6] See Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” p. 176. See also, Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 92.  Again, Foucault’s account of the effects of being constantly seen but never seeing share similarities with the experience of a black person in a white-dominating context.  “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.  By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects” (Discipline and Punish, p. 203).

[7] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 92.

[8] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 203-4.  Fanon goes on to say, “[t]he density of History determines none of my acts.  I am my own foundation.  And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom” (p. 205).

As Carter shows, Maximus the Confessor’s Christological vision has much to contribute to contemporary discussions on race, both theological and otherwise.  Love for Maximus is central to all actions, divine and human.  The “otherness” of creation came into being not by necessity but through unconstrained divine love and generosity.   Human beings, though the pinnacle of God’s creation because they image or reflect God in a unique way (imago Dei), chose to turn from their Creator, which resulted in a triple alienation.  Instead of intimate communion with God and one another, we experience discord, fragmentation and even hostility.  Instead of a respectful, cultivating relationship with the created order, we manipulate nature, giving little or no thought to its telos and purpose in God’s cosmic plan of redemption.  With God no longer our primary love, our “love” becomes self-focused and tyrannical.  This misdirected love is transposed into a dominating, monotone key in which polyphonic harmonies have no place.  Carter, in his appropriation of Maximus’ reflections on love, argues that distorted self-love (philautia) has the propensity to harden into a disposition of ‘possession’.[1] If such a disposition becomes entrenched in the social consciousness, we have at least one of the essential ingredients for large-scale mechanisms of oppression.[2] Carter believes that certain core teachings of the Enlightenment, especially those traceable to Kant, not only gravitate toward the possessive-tyrannical disposition, but are also integrally related to the emergence of various racialized mechanisms of modernity.[3]

For instance, in a colonialized situation, ‘philautia functions as a substitute for a doctrine of creation inasmuch as the self-constituting I creates a reality and draws all else into it by making it utility or assigning it a use value in the world of the I.’[4] Bringing Maximus’ theological critique to bear on the modern problem of racism, Carter interprets the modern self, driven by its misdirected self-love and armed with its Enlightenment, pseudo-scientific teachings of racial hierarchies, as a variation of Adamic transgression but translated onto the socio-political level.  That is, just as Adam (and Eve) unsatisfied with their sub-creator roles in God’s story, sought to become narrators of their own story, so too the Enlightenment discourse on race offers its own narrative of origins and human destiny.  This narrative, however, is rigidly monochromatic.  When taken up by certain misguided Christians, it transmutes into “a narrative of how human beings came to be bearers of race and how within this narrative whiteness became theologically supreme as a modality of religious dominance and world commerce.”[5]

As both ancient (Maximus) and modern (Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr.) Christian witnesses proclaim, the Christian narrative, which begins with creation out of love and climaxes with re-creation through the resurrected life of Jesus Christ, is not inherently a discourse of oppression.  It does, however, involve suffering, the shedding of blood and even violent death.  The Christian scriptural account does not present us with stories of perfect human beings.  Rather, it portrays humans—including those who are part of God’s covenant people—in their failings and achievements, in their faithfulness and recalcitrance.  Perhaps the most inexplicable part of the story is why a completely sufficient, content Trinitarian God willingly decides not only to begin and to continue the story but likewise to enter into the story and to assign himself a seemingly tragic role in which he suffers and dies at the hands of those whom he came to save.  Even so, when the Word became incarnate and made himself vulnerable to the vicissitudes and strains of human existence—misunderstanding, rejection, and even death-by-crucifixion—he proclaimed to the world that his Lordship was not the way of colonization or domination.  Rather, this omnipotent Lord set aside his privileges and became a slave, dying a slave’s death yet simultaneously conquering death, of which his resurrection is the definitive sign.[6]

With the incarnation and humiliation of Christ, the corporeal schema and the master/slave dialectic are undone, nullified and ultimately replaced by an inexplicable ‘logic’ of love wherein, paradoxically, a seemingly tragic death opens the way to life.   Christ’s particular, poor, Jewish flesh becomes, in Carter’s words, ‘the site of God’s wealth,’ the place where ethnic, class and even gender ‘binaries’ no longer serve oppressive purposes.[7] In other words, Christ’s flesh becomes the place where human diversity finds unity—a unity that saves difference.  We see this unity-in-diversity in the New Testament itself.  For example, Jewish Christians are not forced to relinquish their Jewish heritage and practices, though both must be re-interpreted in light of the Christ-event.  Nor are Gentile Christians compelled to become Jews and adhere to traditional Jewish customs (e.g., circumcision).  Rather, Christ’s particular Jewish flesh opens the way for all to participate in Trinitarian life.   Unlike philosophical schemata that flatten difference for the sake of unity (or vice versa), Christian conceptual categories, particularly those related to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, provide a model for a unity that upholds difference.  For instance, the horizontal one-and-many union between Christ and his people—people of diverse languages, ethnicities, and social classes—is an image of the one-and-many reality of the Trinity.  At the heart of Christian teaching is the proclamation that vertical and horizontal “communities” of unity-and-difference can (and in the case of the Trinity do) coexist in non-violent, non-dominating, reciprocal relations of love.

In light of the organic relationship that Christianity has with Judaism, the significance of Christ’s Jewish flesh must not be overlooked—a point that brings us back to Fanon.  In his critique of Merleau-Ponty’s generic corporeal schema, Fanon drew attention to the ways in which the white-scripted narrative (mis)colors black skin with multiple negative connotations.  Fanon’s analysis shares structural similarities (and dissimilarities) with the Christian’s emphasis on the importance of Christ’s particular embodiment as a Jew; however, the particularities involved are not racial in the modern, biological meaning of the term.  Christ’s Jewish flesh, nonetheless, exhibits the same polysemous and metonymic capacities—encompassing within it Israel’s covenantal history and reconfiguring that history in light of the central events of his embodied life:  Incarnation, death and resurrection.[8] Unlike the white-imposed narrative which closes off the black person’s freedom, Christ’s Incarnation and invitation to intimate union break down barriers of exclusion and thus open possibilities of freedom which transcend anything philosophy has to offer.

Notes

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[1] J. Kameron Carter, Race:  A Theological Account, (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 345.  Carter goes on to say that the ‘basic structure of colonialism’ is “grounded in a will-to-possess and intellectually sustained by a will-to-forget” (p. 345).

[2] Of course numerous other factors would have to be taken into account in order to give an adequate explanation of the rise of colonialism and racism.

[3] See also Robert Bernasconi, ‘Who Invented the Concept of Race?  Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race’, in Robert Bernasconi (ed), Race, (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2001).  Bernasconi argues that although Kant was not the first to use the term “race,” he was the first to give the term definitional precision.  ‘By setting out clearly the distinction between race and variety, where races are marked by hereditary characteristics that are unavoidable in the offspring, whereas the distinguishing marks of varieties are not always transmitted, Kant introduced a language for articulating permanent differentiations within the notion of species’ (p. 17).

[4] Carter, Race, p. 345.

[5] Carter, Race, p. 348.  See also Carter’s commentary on Maximus’ Epistle 2 and the ways in which it ‘becomes an interesting and unexpected resource for probing whiteness as a racial-colonialist way of ordering the world, that, in fact, deploys the discourse of Christian theology to do its work’ (p. 345).

[6] ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited [ἁρπαγμόϛ], but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross’ (Phil 2:5-8, NRSV).  See also 1 Cor 15 and Rev 1:18.

[7] Carter, Race, p. 368.  St. Paul says something along these lines in his epistle to the Galatians.  Describing the new reality of God’s people, those baptized into Christ who now form an alternative community operating against the grain of the world’s logic, St. Paul says, “[t]here is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28, NRSV).  Of course, I am not suggesting that this alternative community has been realized.  According to Christian belief, the full actualization of such a community will occur only in the eschaton.  However, even in the midst of the already-not-yet eschatological tension that characterizes the Christian life in via, the redemptive benefits of the Christ-event make possible proleptic glimpses of communal life in Christ’s kingdom.

[8] See Luke 24:27 where Jesus says that the law and all of Hebrew Scripture must be re-interpreted Christotelically.  In addition, though Carter does not develop this idea, the giving of Christ’s flesh in the Eucharist is another significant way that the many are continually made one in their present already-not-yet eschatological existence.

In the closing section of Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon emphasizes the need for the black person to be future-oriented and to actively reject the white-scripted narrative into which he was born while creatively carving out a new present and future.  For Fanon, this meant a willingness to employ violence and to risk his own life so that human beings would no longer “be enslaved on this earth”.[1] Yet, his vision also included a call to human solidarity, a call to blacks and whites and to all human beings to “move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born”.[2]

Does his appeal to human solidarity, his repudiation of the past and his refusal to allow the “density of History to determine” his acts mean that Fanon has no interest in his ethnic roots or that he sees no value in highlighting the distinct contributions of people of color?[3] One need not draw such conclusions.  Rather, because he is acutely aware of the power of socio-historical forces to create systematic, racialized mechanisms and eventually essential-ize a people group, Fanon understood the need for a “disalienation” to occur.[4] This disalienation requires that the black person break the bonds of his historical (white) inscription and begin to write his own narrative.  Here we should not overlook Fanon’s affirmation of human free agency even in extreme situations of oppression.  As human beings, we are not determined completely by socio-historical conditions.  However, in the colonial situation where skin color defines in advance a person’s value and his or her place in society, abstract philosophical schemata—such as Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema and Hegel’s mythological master/slave dialectic—come up short because they fail to consider the existential reality of racial difference.[5]

Among other things, Fanon’s account of his experience in a white-scripted world points to the human need to understand oneself as part of a larger narrative—a narrative in which both human freedom and cultural and ethnic diversity are valued and respected.  Though the context was slavery and not colonialism and the dissimilarities between the two should be acknowledged, it is instructive to consider the ways in which some African Americans re-constituted their identity by bringing an ancient narrative of oppression and liberation into conversation with their present circumstances.  As Rowan Williams observes, if the dominant group takes on the role of defining the out-group’s identity, we should not be astounded if the latter’s response is, “‘We don’t need you to tell us who we are’.  Certain kinds of separatism are necessary to highlight the reality of a difference that has been overridden by the powerful conscripting the powerless into their story”.[6]

In fact, such a response in the form of counter-narratives of non-white-defined identity and creative strategies of resistance was precisely how many African-American slaves chose to struggle against white oppression and the brutality of American slavery.  Given the theological and specifically Christian approach that my account will discuss, it is necessary to acknowledge that Christianity has not been faithful to its own best teachings related to the issue of slavery.  In fact, under the banner of Christianity and with the “justification” of Scripture, many proclaiming the name of Christ fought to preserve the inhumane institution of slavery.[7] Nonetheless, in spite of such oppression, the African spirit resisted a reduction to white sameness.[8]

This resistance took many forms from physical violence to seeking a new life in free territories to purposely disrupting work routines.  Whatever shape the opposition took, a common conviction driving the slaves’ subversive maneuverings was a refusal to accept the degraded, sub-human existence imposed on them by white masters, coupled with a commitment to assert a self-defined, rather than an other-defined account of black identity.[9] Another area in which resistance manifested itselfwas in what we might call the specifically religious sphere.  “Slave religion”(Cone’s term), which continually asserted the dignity of blacks because they too are created in God’s image, not only affirmed “freedom from bondage” but also “freedom-in-bondage”.[10] That is, though Christian slaves did seek an ultimate end to their sufferings in the next life, they also believed in and sang spirituals about a God who was actively involved in history now—in their history—“making right what whites had made wrong.  Just as God delivered the Children of Israel from Egyptian slavery, drowning Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea, he will also deliver black people from American slavery”.[11] The spirituals are often inspired by biblical passages which emphasize God’s care for and active involvement in liberating oppressed people, as well as his willingness in the Person of Jesus Christ to enter into an exiled existence and even physically touch the untouchables.

While the black spirituals communicate an abiding trust in God’s promise to deliver his people, they also provide an avenue for the slaves to cry out in their suffering, thus creating their own version of Israel’s “How long, O Lord?”[12] Here we not only have an eschatological hope on the basis of who God is and what he has done in history and is doing in the present, but we likewise have an acknowledgment of the eschatological tension experienced now where injustice often prevails.  When the day finally came and the slaves were freed from their bonds, these African American believers experienced an “eschatological freedom grounded in the events of the historical present, affirming that even now God’s future [the eschaton] is inconsistent with the realities of slavery.  Freedom, for black slaves, […] was a historical reality that had transcendent implications”.[13] In other words, even though a form of liberation had come—a proleptic view of the eschaton—the very fact that slavery existed and thus required a decree of emancipation underscores the dislocated character of our present world.   In short, one of the central theological themes of black spirituals is the belief that God has not forsaken his people, coupled with the conviction that he will one day deliver them from their unjust human oppressors.   However, it must be stressed that the faith in view here was not a mere passive waiting for divine deliverance but involved creative strategies of active resistance to a white-defined identity.  “Resistance was the ability to create beauty and worth out of the ugliness of slave existence.  Resistance made dignity more than just a word to be analyzed philosophically”.[14]

Notwithstanding the genuine differences between Fanon’s colonial (and postcolonial) context and the African-American’s enslaved (and segregated) context, the oppressed in both situations are given an other-scripted narrative—a narrative which is one component of a socio-political, racialized apparatus that seeks to destroy difference.  Whether the narrative comes from “enlightened” Europeans or “Christian” slaveholders, the latter having more in common with the former than with the teachings of Jesus the suffering servant, the goal is domination and a reduction to white sameness.  If in fact colonialism and modern institutions of slavery are fueled by a desire to possess, destroy and re-make others in one’s own (white) image, and Christians who have supported these projects have been in grave error, is it possible to vindicate Christianity so that it might still be considered a valid option for the possibility of saving difference?  J. Kameron Carter believes it is possible and has recently made a case for rescuing Christianity from its perverse instantiations.

In part two, I shall discuss Carter’s reading of Maximus the Confessor.

Notes

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[1] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 202.

[2] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 206.

[3] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 205.

[4] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 206.  This is not to deny the complicity involved in the black person’s internalization of the negative other-scripted narrative.

[5] This is not to suggest that Fanon’s critique resulted in his repudiation of all philosophical analyses and methodologies.  Rather, Fanon’s project can be seen as a needed corrective and expansion of the philosophical tradition.  On Fanon’s original contributions to the master/slave dialectic, see Nigel Gibson, ‘Dialectical Impasses:  Turning the Table on Hegel and the Black’, parallax 8 (2002), esp. pp. 33-41.  As Gibson explains, ‘[r]eciprocity in the colonial experience is not so much deformed as closed off.  The colour barrier stops the dialectic.  Fanon further maintains that the slave cannot win recognition through labour; since the master wants only work, he is not at all interested in recognition’ (p. 36).

[6] Rowan Williams, ‘Nobody Knows Who I Am Till the Judgement Morning,’ in On Christian Theology, (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2000), p. 281.

[7] See, e.g., James Cone’s discussion of slave catechisms created by white ‘Christians’ for the purpose of producing docile slaves and to attempt to convince slaves that they were in fact created to be slaves (The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation. (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972), pp. 22-23.  Here one sees more continuity with Aristotle’s notion of ‘natural slaves’ than the biblical teaching that all humans are created in the image of God and are therefore equal before God.

[8] As Cone explains, ‘[w]hen white people enslaved Africans, their intention was to dehistoricize black existence, to foreclose the possibility of a future defined by the African heritage.  White people demeaned black people’s sacred tales, ridiculing their myths and defiling the sacred rites.  Their intention was to define humanity according to European definitions so that their brutality against Africans could be characterized as civilizing the savages.  But white Europeans did not succeed; and black history is the record of their failure’ (The Spirituals and The Blues, pp. 23-24).

[9] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 25.

[10] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 28.  In chapter two, ‘The Black Spirituals and Black Experience’, Cone highlights the numerous ways in which African-American slaves actively resisted the white-imposed narrative and refused to accept the biblical hermeneutic of their ‘Christian’ masters.  ‘The slaves were obliged to create their own religion out of the remnants that were available and useful, both African and Christian.  These elements were woven together to provide a historical possibility for human existence.  While white religion had taught blacks to look for their reward in heaven through obedience to white masters on earth, black slaves were in fact carving out a new style of earthly freedom’ (The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 28; italics added).

[11] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 32.

[12] Commenting on the slaves’ expression of faith in the midst of unjust suffering, Cone writes, ‘[f]aith in the righteousness of God was not easy for black people, since God’s liberating work in the world was not always when they expected it.  Their faith did not cancel the pain of enslavement’ (The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 35).

[13] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 42.

[14] Cone, The Spirituals and The Blues, p. 27.

The history of black people, as mentioned previously, is simultaneously erased and re-written by the white imagination.  This new history defines what a black person is—intellectually inferior, in need of a (white) master, incapable of contributing positively to (white, European) society and culture.  The black person does not create this narrative, but is scripted into it and constructed by it.  Nonetheless, a time comes when a black person is confronted with the white mythos by way of a particular, concrete and often painful encounter and thus begins to accept and internalize the mythology.  In Fanon’s words, “[d]isoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from myself, and gave myself up as an object.”[1]

Fanon’s dramatic re-telling of the train episode and the pre-theoretical, racial assumptions apparent in the child’s remarks about Fanon serve a two-fold function.  First, the narrative calls attention to the deficiencies of Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema.  Second, the narrative highlights the way in which phenotypic or so-called “racial” differences—as negatively interpreted by the dominant group in a given historical epoch—close off or a least severely hinder the possibilities of freedom, as well as personal and cultural transformation for the oppressed group.   Hence, Fanon offers his historico-racial schema as a corrective.  Yet, his account also includes the racial-epidermal schema.  Whereas the historico-racial schema brings to light the historical contingencies and mythological narratives imposed upon blacks, the racial-epidermal schema speaks to the sedimentation of the so-called “black essence.”   In other words, once the new narrative of what it means to be a black person, which includes the various meanings that have been assigned to phenotypic differences, has become fixed, ossified and even naturalized in the social consciousness and cultural and legal practices, the black essence has been successfully created.[2]

Once we transition to the racial-epidermal schema, the all-pervasiveness of the white gaze—here understood broadly as the white mythos as manifest in the cultural consciousness and systematically expressed in the cultural institutions and practices of a given society—functions like a Panopticon, keeping the black person under constant inspection.  Though speaking of the incarcerated, Foucault’s description applies quite well to the black person’s situation vis-à-vis the white, European other, “he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.”[3] Once the racial-epidermal schema has come to fruition and the black essence has been fixed, the requisite racial machinery has likewise been established to ensure “proper” social boundaries and to keep the white mythology unchallenged.  In a way similar to the Panopticon’s ability to “disindividualiz[e] power” and distribute it through various socio-cultural and legal structures, institutions and people, Fanon’s schemata points to the systemic racial structures of colonized Europe.  These racialized disciplinary practices, though not identical to the disciplinary practices Foucault describes, nonetheless share close family resemblances with “a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.” [4] The racial-epidermal schema, broadly construed to include these systemic, disindividualized power structures, enables even the most vulnerable and innocent members of society—the child on the train—to be an instrument of and even operate the racial machinery.

Notes

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[1] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 92.

[2] On the movement and interpretation of Fanon’s schemata, I follow Weate, who views the racial epidermal schema as “a later stage in psychosomatic disintegration and alienation” (p. 174).  Weate describes the movement to the epidermal schema as Fanon’s attempt to trace a “genealogy of racial essentialism” (p. 173).  As he explains, “[t]he epidermal marks the stage where historical construction and contingency is effaced and replaced with the facticity of flesh.  The colour of skin now appears to be intrinsically significant.  With the outset of epidermalization, we are at the edge of being-for-others sedimenting into an essence, a ‘fact’ of blackness.  Fanon is therefore demonstrating that essentialism is a discourse derived from a perversive repression of history.  By marking the two stages of the ‘historico-racial’ and then the ‘racial-epidermal’, he is therefore contesting the view that essentialism, and in particular black essentialism, is grounded in a biological problematic.  For Fanon, the essentialization of blackness is the product of a concealed perversion of history. It is only once this concealment is consolidated (through epidermalization) that questions concerning the biological ground of race arise.  The distinction he makes between the two stages of schematization or epistemic enframing therefore allow biologistic discourses around race to be seen as phenomena derivative upon a prior perversion of history that is subsequently concealed” (“Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” pp. 174-75).

[3] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200.

[4] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 202.

In his book, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon challenges Merleau-Ponty’s inclusive notion of a corporeal schema and substitutes his own schemata, first an historical-racial schema, and second an epidermal racial schema.  Briefly stated (and more on this later), Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema describes the way in which the body’s agency makes manifest the historical world.  For Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are not objects in space, rather they inhabit space and through them we experience the world and the other.  In so far as the body is able to participate in and transform its historico-cultural horizon, it is free; in so far as its capacity for expression and its ability to alter its own history and given context are denied, it is not free.[1]

With this background in mind, we turn to Fanon’s text in order to understand why he substitutes his historical-racial schema and epidermal racial schema for Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a corporeal schema.  Fanon argues that a phenomenology of blackness—the experience of skin difference and of being the black other—can only be understood in the encounter with whiteness or more precisely, the white imagination.[2] That is, in a mostly black community in the Antilles, Fanon was “content to intellectualize these differences”; however, once he entered the white world and felt the weight of the “white gaze,” he experienced his otherness and became aware of pre-theoretical racial attitudes which up to that point had not existed for him.[3] In his chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon recounts his experience on a train of being “fixed” by a white other—an other which happened to be a child who had already been habituated to see blacks as defined by the white imagination.  As the child’s refrain, “Look! A Negro!,” crescendoed forth and came to a close with a fearful questioning of the “Negro’s” next move,  Fanon not only experienced the gaze of the white other, he also began to see himself through the white gaze.

I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, […]  Disoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from my self, and gave myself up as an object.  What did this mean to me?  Peeling, stripping my skin, causing a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood all over my body.  Yet this reconsideration of myself, this thematization, was not my idea.  I wanted simply to be a man among men.[4]

As Fanon takes up the white view of himself, he experiences its all-encompassing reach.  That is, his becoming a white-defined black other involved more than his present encounter with the child on the train; in essence, he entered into the white erasing and re-scripting of black history.  Not only is his present fixed by the white other, but his past is fixed as well.  The child’s unison refrain gives rise to polyphonic lines of “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism” and the like.

A few paragraphs before his description of the train episode with the child, Fanon mentions Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema, highlighting the difficulties that a black person experiences in a white-scripted world because of his skin color and the various meanings that have been given to these and other embodied differences.  In Merleau-Ponty’s account, the reciprocal and fitting relation between body and the world gives rise to the possibility of a mutual constructing and transforming of both.  The body is not a mere object in space, but rather is our way of being in a spatio-temporal world; it is the background “always tacitly understood.”[5] With his corporeal schema, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the body’s free agency in its ability to both disclose and transform the historical world.[6]

Fanon, however, is not satisfied with this generic schema and thus introduces his historical-racial schema, which is imposed on him by the white other.  For Fanon, Merleau-Ponty’s inclusive, universal rendering of the corporeal schema through which the self and world emerge does not account for the disparity of experience between whites and blacks with regard to their ability to actively participate and transform themselves and the world.  As Jeremy Weate explains,

In the interracial encounter, the White is able to participate in the schematization of the world, whilst the Black may not, for his skin difference closes down the possibility of free agency.  A white mythos inserts itself between the black body and its self-image, becoming the ‘elements used’ in a reflexive understanding of black subjectivity.  In contesting the terms of Merleau-Ponty’s account of bodily freedom, Fanon provides a genealogy of the existential unfreedom of the black body in the racialized encounter.”[7]

Notes

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[1] Admittedly, I am speaking of the body in a reified way; however, body should not be understood as a res, but rather as a crucial aspect of the psychosomatic whole, which constitutes a human being.

[2] Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” p. 171.  See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 89.  In addition to Merleau-Ponty, Fanon perhaps also has Hegel and Sartre in mind, particularly the former’s dialectical understanding of recognition and reciprocity.  See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 191–97.  For an analysis of Fanon’s reflections on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, see Turner, “On the Difference between the Hegelian and Fanonian Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon et al., pp. 134–51.

[3] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 90.

[4] Ibid., p. 92.

[5] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 115.  Elaborating his notion of body schema, Merleau-Ponty explains, “[b]odily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of spreading them out, because it is the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance, the background of somnolence or reserve of vague power against which the gesture and its aim stand out, the zone of not being in front of which precise beings, figures and points can come to light.  In the last analysis, if my body can be a ‘form’ and if there can be, in front of it, important figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of itself in its pursuit of its aims; the body schema is finally a way of stating that my body is in-the-world” (Ibid., p. 115).

[6] Fanon describes with ironic overtones Merleau-Ponty’s account as follows, “[a] slow construction of my self as a body in a spatial and temporal world seems to be the schema.  It is not imposed on me; it is rather a definitive structuring of my self and the world” (Black Skin, White Masks, p. 91)

[7] Weate, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” p. 172.

“When we rethink the ‘there’ of our identity and community, the historical and contemporary figures that we embody, we may ask, Who sings the praises of those valiant warriors that fought against the colonizers?  Who laments the mothers raped, trapped, and left to die in the decadent slums of cities barely on the realm of modernity when they are no longer fit to be servants in the households of the colonizers-or servants in the households of the newly enriched postcolonial post-avant garde?  Where are the mourners for those who suffer from the rotten foods sold to the postcolonials, enriching world metropolitan centers, now romanticized as postmodern?  Who cares for the amputees from foreign-made land-mines, now abandoned by those who planted them?

The warriors, the mothers, the servants, the truck drivers, the children-these are not ghosts, they are not specters, they are not images in our heads.  These are bodies, black bodies; bodies of black men seen as inherently criminal; bodies of black women unseen, commodities of exchange, objects, things, toys, subjectless receptacles; children seen as already damned and irredeemable”  (Fanon:  A Criticial Reader, xvii).

“Expressing the real is an arduous job.  But when you take it into your head to express existence, you will very likely encounter nothing but the nonexistent.  What is certain is that at the very moment when I endeavored to grasp my being, Sartre, who remains ‘the Other,’ by naming me shattered my last illusion.  While I was telling him:

My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
It reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil
It reaches deep into the blazing flesh of the sky
It pierces opaque prostration with its patience
[Césaire, Notebook of a Return
to My Native Land,
trans. Rosello and Pritchard, p. 114].

While I, in a paroxysm of experience and rage, was proclaiming this, he reminded me that my negritude was nothing but a weak stage.  Truthfully, I’m telling you, I sensed my shoulders slipping from this world, and my feet no longer felt the caress of the ground.  Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness.  Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned.  Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (Black Skin, White Masks, 116-17).

As Sartre explains, negritude is the antithesis of the assertion [not Sartre's personal belief] of the supremacy of the white (the thesis).  Thus, negritude is the moment of negativity; a moment to be overcome.  In contrast to Césaire’s and Senghor’s understanding of black consciousness as an “absolute density,” Sartre presents negritude as a lack, as a “minor term” in the syllogism.[1] How might we understand Fanon’s statement, “Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness”?  Here one could perhaps apply Derrida’s insights while simultaneously expanding them by way of Fanon’s critique of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.  According to Derrida, the meaning of a person’s life is always constituted at the intersection of a reference to the past and some kind of anticipation of the future.  Of course Derrida has in view a deconstruction of the completely transparent, stable, secure Cartesian self.  Nonetheless, Derrida’s emphasis on the role of past and future in constructing the self seems applicable here; yet, it is in need of Fanon’s stress on the fundamental difference of the black man’s experience of the world as mediated by a black body.[2] If a (black) person’s past is erased and re-written in the image of a violent, totalizing (white) other (the project of colonialization), and his future is largely pre-determined by that same other, “damned” is a pretty good description of his present experience.

Notes

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[1] Ronald A.T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, (eds) Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T. White. (Cambridge:  Blackwell, 1996):  63.

[2] Fanon replaces Merleau Ponty’s corporeal schema (schéma corporel) with his own schéma historico-racial and schéma épidermique racial.

In his article, “Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and the Difference of Phenomenology,” Jeremy Weate employs Frantz Fanon’s insights and critique of Merleau-Ponty to argue for a phenomenology that saves difference.  As Weate states,

“[i]n order to challenge a universalist approach to phenomenology and open up a philosophy of race, I shall display one of the profoundest critiques of phenomenology offered this century, that of Frantz Fanon in his paper The Lived Experience of the Black. [...] As I shall show, in fact Fanon’s critique of phenomenology quickly exposes the core of its problematic relation to difference.  Fanon’s text therefore in my view provides a corrective to phenomenology, at the same time as showing how the theorization of lived experience that is its source can reveal the key issues at work between agency, history and the world, and perhaps most fundamentally, the possibilities for justice” (170).

Weate points to Merleau-Ponty’s “inclusive notion of ‘world’” as the locus of Fanon’s criticism, which in turn serves as a source for Fanon’s own radical phenomenology of difference.  Weate begins by drawing our attention to the first few pages of Fanon’s text, in which Fanon immediately brings us into dialogue with Merleau-Ponty by substituting the latter’s “notion of ‘corporeal schema’ (schéma corporel),” first with his own “‘schéma historico-racial’” and second with his “‘schéma épidermique racial’” (170).  Briefly stated, Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema describes the way in which the body’s agency makes manifest the historical world.  For Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are not objects in space, rather they inhabit space and through them we experience the world and the other.  The relationship between body and world is one of mutual transformation, of “reciprocal transfer” (171).  While one can certainly engage in theoretical reflection on the interplay between body and world (as I am right now), Weate directs our attention to the pre-theoretical interplay between the two that occurs in our everyday engagements in the world and which “engenders a coporealized conception of freedom” (171).  In so far as the body is able to participate in and transform its historico-cultural horizon, it is free; in so far as its capacity for expression and its ability to alter its own history and given context are denied, it is not free.[1] As Weate explains,

“Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the corporeal schema leads implicitly to a conception of history as characterized essentially by difference.  Each moment of a culture’s transfer across time through the agency of bodies is at the same time the site of its own differentiation.  Moreover, there is therefore no ‘originary’ moment to any culture:  every culture that attempts to assert its sameness across time has to repress the difference at work in its origin in very present” (171).

According to Weate, Merleau-Ponty’s general point seems to be that “the relation between agency and historical freedom” is intimately related to our habituation.  That is, “it is a matter of habit and habituation that we perpetually contribute to the differentiation of our historical world (our “habitus”), from one moment’s action to the next” (171).

With this background in mind, we turn to Fanon’s text in order to explain why he substitutes schéma historico-racial and schéma épidermique racial for Merleau-Ponty’s notion of schéma corporel.  Fanon argues that a phenomenology of blackness-the experience of skin difference and of being the black other-can only be understood in the encounter with whiteness or more precisely, the white imagination (171).[2] That is, in a mostly black community in the Antilles, Fanon was “content to intellectualize these differences”; however, once he entered the white world and felt the weight of the “white gaze,” he experienced his otherness and became aware of pre-theoretical racial attitudes that up to that point had not existed for him (Fanon, 90).  Fanon continues, making his first explicit references to Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema:

“In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema.  The image of one’s body is solely negating.  It’s an image in the third person.  All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. [...]  A slow construction of my self as a body in a spatial and temporal world-such seems to be the schema.  It is not imposed on me; it is rather a definitive structuring of my self and the world-definitive because it creates a genuine dialectic between my body and the world” (Fanon, 90-91).

As Weate explains, Fanon initially agrees with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that both the self and the world are constructed through the corporeal schema.  However, it becomes evident that when applied to the “interracial encounter of black bodies in the west,” the corporeal schema fails.

“Beneath the body schema I had created a historical-racial schema.  The data I used were provided not by ‘remnants of feelings and notions of the tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, or visual nature’ [Jean Lhermitte, L'image de notre corps, Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, p. 17] but by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories” (Fanon, 91).

Here Fanon claims that Merleau-Ponty’s inclusive, unified notion of the corporeal schema through which the self and world emerge in fact exhibits an asymmetry and disunity with regard to whites and blacks in their experience of and active participation the world.  As Weate explains,

“In the interracial encounter, the White is able to participate in the schematization of the world, whilst the Black may not, for his skin difference closes down the possibility of free agency.  A with mythos inserts itself between the black body and its self-image, becoming the ‘elements used’ in a reflexive understanding of black subjectivity.  In contesting the terms of Merleau-Ponty’s account of bodily freedom, Fanon provides a genealogy of the existential unfreedom of the black body in the racialized encounter” (172).

Notes

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[1] Admittedly, I am speaking of the body in a reified way; however, body should not be understood as a res, but rather as a crucial aspect of the psychosomatic whole, which constitutes a human being.

[2] “As long as the black man remains on his home territory, except for petty internal quarrels, he will not have to experience his being for others” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.  Rev. ed. Trans., Richard Philcox.  (New York:  Grove Press, 2008):  89.

In his article, “Racist Variations of Bad Faith:  A Critical Study of Lewis Gordon’s Phenomenology of Racism,” Bart van Leeuwen argues that the racist not only reifies him/herself but also reifies the other.  The racist of course sees him/herself as belonging to the essentially “good” or positive group (the ingroup); whereas the outgroup is a member of the essentially “bad” or negative group, whose essence is inherently flawed.  As van Leewen explains, “other-reification” characterized the “antiblack racism that defined the historical context of slavery and racial segregation during the Jim Crow era in the United States” (58).  Not only was the black slave “invisible to the white person,” his or her very subjectivity was denied, refused, unacknowledged.  Sallie Bingham offers a vivid description of the way in which African Americans were treated as mere objects:   they were “invisible to most white people, except as a pair of hands offering a drink on the silver tray” (58).[1] This objectification and reduction of black individuals to mere tools in the service of whites exhibits the refusal on the part of whites to acknowledge blacks as genuine, human subjects.  To illustrate how whites endeavored to destroy black subjectivity, van Leeuwen turns to a phrase coined by bell hooks, “white control of the black gaze.”  In many if not most instances, a black person was not permitted to make eye contact with a white person while serving him or her.  In fact, “black slaves, and later manumitted servants, could be brutally punished for looking, for appearing to observe the whites they were serving.”[2] A second example, comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, who reflecting on the condition of African Americans after his visit to the United States in 1945, observed:  “they serve you at the table, they shine your shoes, they operate your elevators, they carry your suitcases … they attend their tasks like machines, and you pay no more attention to them than as if they were machines.”[3] As van Leeuwen points out, this reduction and dehumanization of blacks to a mere “pair of serving hands” or functional “machines,” was intimately connected to hooks’ notion of “white control of the black gaze.” Blacks were forced to develop a habitus of avoiding direct eye contact with whites.  This other-reification by the ingroup (in this case the antiblacks) has the potential to foster a third reification wherein the victims begin to view themselves as objects.  Here van Leeuwen turns to a passage from Frantz Fanon’s, Black Skin, White Masks,

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects [...] The movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye.[4]

This sense of being fixed by the other was so overbearing that it produced in Fanon a desire to be invisible, to exist as the anonymous one (59).  “I slip into corners, I remain silent, I strive for anonymity, for invisibility.  Look, I will accept the lot, as long as no one notices me!”[5] All of this leads van Leeuwen to conclude that the racist does not view the other as an absence or empty place in being, but rather as a “surplus of being.  So the basic dynamic of racism must be understood as an escape from the human lack of being (le néant) to the order of things (l’être), a solidification of freedom into total ethnic security” (59-60).  If I understand van Leeuwen here (and I may not given my lack of knowledge of Lewis Gordon and Sartre, so I welcome correction), the “human lack of being” is not absence for Sartre, rather nothingness (néant) is a constitutive element of a human consciousness.  As van Leeuwen explains, “nothingness (néant) as a technical concept denotes a lack of properties, and is opposed to being (être)” (53).  Nothingness is thus closely tied to freedom or what Sartre calls “transcendence,” whereas being speaks of fixity, in Sartre’s vocabulary, “facticity.”  In our human existence and being-in-the-world, we struggle to embrace and live authentically within the constant interplay of freedom and facticity, and this freedom/facticity ambiguity is unbearable for the racist.  In viewing him/herself as well as the other as having fixed essences (where each essence possesses certain inherent capacities and limitations defined by the ingroup-e.g., the racist’s essence is perceived as good and the other’s essence bad, flawed or deficient), the racist in effect is engaged in a flight from freedom, from transcendence, from the néant that cannot be fixed, determined, and controlled.

As I mentioned, I haven’t read Gordon’s work yet (but I look forward to doing so), so I cannot evaluate van Leeuwen’s claims concerning Gordon’s use of Sartre; however, I did not sense that van Leeuwen failed to appreciate the many insights of Gordon’s work.  Rather, his focus was on Gordon’s use of Sartre’s categories in his explications of the phenomenology of racism.

Notes

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[1] Cited in bell hooks, Black Looks:  Race and Representation (Boston:  South End Press, 1992), p. 168.

[2] hooks, Black Looks, p. 168.

[3] Cited in van Leeuwen, Jean-Paul Sartre, “Return from the United States,” in Gordon (ed.), Existence in Black, pp. 83-89, p. 84.

[4] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 109.

[5] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 116.