In his essay “The Fact of Blackness” Fanon combines his personal experiences with his background in psychiatry to examine the “uniform” of blackness (260). He begins his discussion by stating that “not only must the black man be black; he must also be black in relation to the white man” (257). Pointing out this framework of a foil, Fanon explains that whiteness constructs itself in relation to blackness, which must then be constructed as inferior in order to reinforce the idea that whiteness is superior. On page 260, Fanon further writes, “A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man.” In this way, white supremacy cannot function by simply isolating and casting aside the racial ‘other,’ but must construct an identity around them and subordinate them so as to maintain its control.

He further goes on to describe the individual experience of being black in a racist society, where “assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema” (258). Fanon argues that instead of inhabiting, and coming to know, his own body and attempting to look at, make sense, and interact with the world around him through the knowledge of what his own particular body can and cannot do, he is instead known by the world around him, and is forced to know himself, within the framework of race and the attributes that society includes in the construct of blackness. This comes to define how he interacts with the world – no longer through the corporeal, but through the epidermal.

Fanon describes becoming aware of his body not “in the third person but in a triple person” (259). For Fanon, it is not just of question of knowing that an image of you exists in the minds of others as a ‘third person’ as he/she/it, but that but that he is forced to be aware of his own body, aware of the negative identity and set of images that are applied not only to him, but to his ancestors, to everyone who is incorporated into the construct of blackness, and aware of the way others interpret and assign meaning to him when seeing his skin color. And while Fanon notes that there are similarities between how Black people live in a racist society and how white Jewish people live in a racist society (notably that an antisemite is inevitably anti-black), this experience of your identity being determined for you by your outer appearance is where he makes the distinction between anti-black racism and antisemitism. He references Sartre, who states that being Jewish in a racist society is a case of being “overdetermined from the inside,” where you “live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype” (260). Fanon argues, however, that he is “given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.” He writes that “The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down” but that being black means that even when you “progress by crawling,” there is no way out; you are already “being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes” (260-1). While white Jews live with the fear of their actions fulfilling antisemitic stereotypes, being black means being “locked into the infernal circle” (261). All of your actions will be made to fulfill anti-black stereotypes because “the evidence was there, unalterable” (261).

An interesting essay that I enjoyed and was reminded of while reading this Fanon piece talks about how representations and discourses of love, desire, and sexuality are racialized and coded around which bodies are deemed worthy of the ‘work’ of love. It’s worth a read: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-decolonising-desire-the-politics-of-love