Blackface, White Mask...Racism As Psychosis...

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

Abu Ruyaa

10 mins ·

Aljazeera English Website

·

Interesting Read...hmmmm...

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aljazeera.com

Blackface, white mask: Racism as psychosis

What the blackface scandals in the US tell us about the state of white…

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon offered a classical critique of the dehumanising effect of racism operating at the roots of a colonial conquest and its contingent cultural domains. He analysed how western colonialism and racist power relations have compelled people of colour to see themselves through the lens of white supremacy - ie donning a "white mask".

Identifying this dangerous tendency, he called for liberation from this destructive self-image: "The black is a black man; that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated. The problem is important. I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from himself."

In my Brown Skin, White Mask (2011) I extended Fanon's argument to look into the fate of brown immigrant intellectuals who put themselves at the service of a dysfunctional empire and become its native mis/informers. Instead of adding any momentum to the progressive politics of their adopted countries, these comprador intellectuals side with the ruling ideologies of reactionary, racist, and predatory imperialism.

Later in his Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014), Canadian scholar Glen Sean Coulthard challenged the very idea of "recognition" of the indigenous peoples in liberal politics. In between the state and indigenous peoples, Coulthard proposed, a mere acknowledgement of the terror settler colonialism had perpetrated on First Nations not only amounts to very little but in fact derails a more substantive reconstruction and redeployment of denied and denigrated cultures towards a progressive politics.  

These two and other works go back to Fanon's originary idea: "I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world, I am not responsible only for the slavery involved in Santo Domingo, every time man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act."

That is, the struggle for liberation from the bondage of racism and slavery is geared towards the liberation of the entirety of the human soul, not just its native location. In this sense, Fanon is as much responsible for the liberation of Iran as I am for the liberation of the Caribbean and Coulthard for the liberation of Palestine.

This is also what American author and activist James Baldwin meant when he said: "When you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had the right to be here, when you do that, without knowing this is the result of it, you have attacked the entire power structure of the Western World."

But this self-universalisation, while being liberating for the person of colour, is seen as threatening by "the white man".

Full article:  https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/blackface-white-mask-raci...

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

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