Black Skin, White Masks

Fanon's first book, written while he was training in medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, analyses the psychology of colonial racism from the standpoint of a Black man from Martinique living in France. It begins with language, arguing that to speak a language is to take on a culture, and that the colonised Antillean who masters French is pushed to identify with whiteness. Chapters examine love across the colour line, criticise a French psychoanalyst's theory of the colonised's 'dependency complex', and confront the psychiatric literature on race. The central chapter, translated as 'The Fact of Blackness' or 'The Lived Experience of the Black Man', describes being fixed by the white gaze, a child pointing him out, and his search through reason, Negritude and Sartre's commentary for a way out. The book ends with a call to freedom grounded in questioning and a refusal to be imprisoned by history.

It is a founding text of postcolonial thought and a powerful use of phenomenology to describe how racism is lived in the body and in language.