Frantz Fanon

Key ideas

Locked in blackness, locked in whiteness

Racism locks Black people into blackness, and white people into whiteness. Social structures produce these ways of being, which then lock people into their racial categories, deforming the minds of white and Black people alike.

The zone of non-being

To confront blackness honestly in an anti-Black world is to descend into a “zone of non-being”. Yet this is not despair: from it comes an affirmation of Black life, “a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies”, which the anti-Black world cannot contain.

Language and the skin

To speak a language is to take on a world and a civilisation, so the colonised who speak the colonisers’ language voice their own subjection. And perfect French cannot free a Black speaker, since race is written on the skin; white surprise at a Black person’s eloquence is itself a reminder of inferiority.

Colonialism is total

Colonialism leaves no part of the human person untouched. In Algeria Fanon’s analysis widened from blackness to the oppressed of the colonised world in general, and to how colonial rule shapes minds, culture and political organisation.

Violence and liberation

In The Wretched of the Earth violence is a precondition of liberation. Fanon analysed the colonised as workers, intellectuals and the “lumpen proletariat”, a term taken from Marx, and warned that the colonised intellectual tends to translate colonial life into the coloniser’s terms.