“What matters is not to know the world but to change it.”
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Source: Black Skin, White Masks
Quotes from bookBlack Skin, White Masks
Frantz FanonOriginal title Peau noire, masques blancs (French, 1952)
Black Skin, White Masks is a 1952 book by Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and intellectual from Martinique. The book is written in the style of auto-theory, which Fanon shares his own experiences in addition to presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche. There is a double process that is economic and internalized through the epidermalization of inferiority.
“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Variant: Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions!
Source: Black Skin, White Masks
“There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
“A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Source: Black Skin, White Masks
“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), pp. 38
“Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.”
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Introduction,Page 9
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
“At risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.”
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Introduction,page 8
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
“The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level.”
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Introduction,Page 9
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
"The Lived Experience of the Black Man"/"The Fact of Blackness"
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth...
Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Ch. 2
Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks
Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Chapter 2, "The Woman of Color and the White Man", p. 41
