Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanonwas a Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism. As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and a Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization, and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth20 July 1925
CountryFrance
However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.
There is a point at which methods devour themselves.
Certain things need to be said if one is to avoid falsifying the problem.
The life of the nation is shot through with a certain falseness and hypocrisy, which are all the more tragic because they are so often subconscious rather than deliberate ... The soul of the people is putrescent, and until that becomes regenerate and clean, no good work can be done.
To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
Colinialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natrual resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.
I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder.
Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.
When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.
Mastery of language affords remarkable power.
The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.
Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street.
The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.