What is to be a Black Person? A short essay.

“En termes de conscience, la conscience noire se donne comme densité absolue, comme pleine d’elle-même, étape pré-existante à toute fente, à toute abolition de soi par le désir. Jean-Paul Sartre, dans cette étude, a détruit l’enthousiasme noir. Contre le devenir historique, il y avait à opposer l’imprévisibilité. J’avais besoin de me perdre dans la négritude absolument. Peut-être qu’un jour, au sein de ce romantisme malheureux…

En tout cas j’avais besoin d’ignorer. Cette lutte, cette redescente devaient revêtir un aspect achevé. Rien de plus désagréable que cette phrase : « Tu changeras, mon petit ; quand j’étais jeune, moi aussi… tu verras, tout passe. »

La dialectique qui introduit la nécessité au point d’appui de ma liberté m’expulse de moi-même. Elle rompt ma position irréfléchie. Toujours en termes te conscience, la conscience noire est immanente à elle-même. Je ne suis pas une potentialité de quelque chose, je suis pleinement ce que je suis. Je n’ai pas à rechercher l’universel. En mon sein nulle probabilité ne prend place. Ma conscience nègre ne se donne pas comme manque. Elle est. Elle est adhérente à elle-même.”

- Frantz Fanon (1952, 109)

What actually is to be a Black person? Is it an ontological immanent category? Is it just an answer, a revenge towards the White’s man status? Among the racial debate there are several possible answers to these questions and it is actually possible to write a large monography on it.

The aim of my brief reflection in the following pages is to present a turning point in Frantz Fanon oeuvre Peau noire masques blancs which might bring us to an interesting comprehension of what is to be a Black person. The passage above has close connection with this moment of recognition of the Black consciousness. We are to ask what is this element of the unforeseeable, and why it seems that the black consciousness needs to go for a struggle in order to become something. Moreover we are also to ask what kind of struggle is it and what is to be a Black person for Fanon following the passage cited above (1952, 109)? To answer those questions, first of all, I will establish some connections between Frantz Fanon losing himself in his negritude and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, then I will compare Fanon view with W.E.B. Du Bois, thus in the light of these analysis I will bring a possible answer to what it is to be a black consciousness immanent in its own eyes.

Fanon’s study aims to eliminate the vicious circle which consists in White men considering themselves superior to black men and Black men wanting to prove to Whites their equal value. For these ends he will show to his reader the inferiority complex double caused by both economic processes and the “epidermalization” of this complex in the black body. In other words, the black man has no more to be for the other, he is not an ontological being (Fanon 1952, 87) because the black man is black in relation to the other, and the other is the white man.

In fact, this is a close association to Hegel’s Phenomenology, as we recognize his vocabulary and theory of what is it to be in the world and in history. In the Phenomenology the understanding that the world is a world without history and that the subject recognizes this world in its finished form is, in effect, a singular moment inside of a process that starts where and when the conscious being is for itself. This being that exists here/now is a sense-certainty. In chapter IV Self-certainty’s truth, Hegel describes how the self-consciousness knows itself as object through the encounter vis-à-vis an Other. This encounter is a struggle, a “life-and-death struggle”; when the fight starts, it is a struggle for the Black self-recognition. The two consciousnesses fighting embody existence in contrary ways: the first is independent “existence-for-self being” the other is dependent, existing in relation to an Other, as Hegel asserts “the former is master, the latter slave” (2019, 94–95). Finally, they fight, and the master denies the existence of the slave, but in this relation the master proves to be bound to the slave, there is a chain “from which he was unable to break free during the struggle, thus proving that he wasn’t independent” (Hegel 2019, 95). In contrast, the slave who at this point of the struggle fears nothing, because death is no longer a problem for him, turns out to be a radical negativity — this is the moment of “pure existence-for-self” (2019, 96), since “moment by moment, his dependence on natural existence and working” is “his way free of it” (2019, 97).

The close relations between Hegel’s dialectic and Fanon’s passage we are analyzing seems to be highly significant, for when Fanon explicates that he needs to be driven out of himself. According to Fanon the “former slave wants to make himself recognized” (2008, 169; 1952, 176), previously in chapter 5, he had decided to fight and since he had been denied recognition, he decided to assert himself as a Black Man. Even if the other would hesitate in recognize him, he was left with “only one solution” (2008, 87; 1952, 93): to make himself known. The enigmatic rout of the black consciousness is also presented by Du Bois in his work The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois’ Black man has this “double-consciousness” (2019, 8) because you have the Other determining how you should look to yourself. This “seventh son” (2019, 8) is in a particular ontological position, is to be some way from Africa and in other ways been transformed by the slavery. If we read Du Bois as a dialectic unfolding the Spirit, his protagonist is the Black man, hence Hegel’s protagonist is the Spirit; in both narratives there is a seek for freedom. On his side, Du Bois inserts the Sorrow Songs, the music of the “unhappy”, and in this way we can find something that according to Du Bois is “far more ancient than the words” (2019, 169). In brief, they are a message of the slave to the world, furthermore it is possible to see here the struggle and the fears of these people. However, “of the death the Black man showed little fear” (Du Bois 2019, 173), again we find a development of the necessary Hegelian condition to enter the self-recognition process -overcome the fear of death. Thus, this seminal oeuvre actually finishes with a reflection about the Sorrow Songs, about the hope that they try to achieve. The hope of his fathers, sustains Du Bois (2019, 176) still exists in the songs while they are sung, still this hope survives, it survives “even so” (2019, 176). The Veil will be removed and the prisoned will go free, through the songs? It is not clear, but is emblematic how he chooses to close his work. One possible solution for Du Bois to answer what is to be a Black person, is to put in play the Sorrow Songs, for him it seems that something can be known through song, specifically about blackness. It is a different outcome if we compare it with that of Fanon, but it lays as Fanon’s view in the Hegelian slave-master dialectic. For Du Bois there is this Spirit which is a gift that the Black people brought not passively to America, this Spirit with capitalized letter not for accident. By affirming the value of the Black people, Du Bois states its importance for America and this seems to be the importance of Black self-consciousness for him.

Turning back to Fanon, and this consciousness unforeseeable, comparing him with the Hegelian dialectic, there is fundamental difference: in Hegel there is an absolute reciprocity (1952, 179); the Hegelian master only wants work from his slave, however the black slave cannot lose himself in the object in order to find his liberation. “The Negro wants to be like the master” (1952, 179), this slave turns towards the master instead of towards the object. In this same meaning, Orlando Patterson (1982, 99) affirms that slave not necessarily implies worker, because the slaveness is the special condition that permits the “natal alienation” facilitated by exploitation “as laborer in conditions where no other kind of laborer would do” (99). Maybe it is for this reason, for this subtle difference between Hegelian slave and Black people, as I have said the work relation that makes the recognition course of the Black consciousness tricky. The progression of the Black person is captious because it will not be through work — or just by the acknowledgement of the Other. So, even if the Black person come up with his achievements and contributions in front of the White man, he will not go out from this vicious circle which gives only an outcome to the Negro (using the words of Fanon): to be White (1952, 8).

On the whole, Fanon wants to put an end to the, as I said, vicious circle (1952, 7) and initiate the cycle of freedom (1952, 187). It is necessary for the Black person to acquire his consciousness both of himself and of his body, therefore the black body will no longer be “cause of the structure of consciousness” but it will be “object of consciousness” (1952, 182).

Faced with the “historical becoming”, Fanon puts us in front of a negritude in the face of unpredictability, being is something unpredictable, it seems that the new form that consciousness will assume is something else. Thus, in Hegelian terms, the Antillean psychiatrist concludes: “Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.” (2008, 108).

It is particularly interesting to note that the work ends by bringing up again the concerns with which the author began. In the introduction it is possible to see Fanon expressing the need to let the carcass of man go until it reaches self-combustion (1952, 7), he wants the black man to leave this universe in which he finds himself and for him it is necessary to reach the place of the nonbeing (non-être 1952, 6).

This final chapter closes with the Antillean doctor’s observation that there are some moments when the black man is enclosed in his body (1952, 182). For he does not think it is necessary to compare black culture with white culture in its various aspects, Fanon claims: “I am a man” (1952, 176), and the whole world belongs to him.

Why should he find himself exclusively in the past of people of color?

Immediatly, he textually repeats words contained in his own introduction: “Le Noir veut être comme le Blanc. (1952, 7, 185) Pour le Noir, il n’y a qu’un destin. Et il est blanc.” (1952, 8,185).

We have a leap of consciousness exactly in this citation-synthesis and re-elaboration of these same sentences from the introduction to the conclusion. Here (1952, 185) Fanon begins a series of strong claims about what the colored man can and cannot demand as his right. He brings argumentation to its limits.

Is the black man’s sole purpose to avenge the 19th century Blacks?

Is his only mission to end the former master’s pride?

Emphatically, we arrive at a denial of everything: denial of the white world, of white ethics, of white intelligence (1928, 186), so he doesn’t feel a prisoner of history to come to recognition.

In this way, as I have said, it seems then that this consciousness searching for recognition will come up with a new synthesis, something that did not exist before, “the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence” (2008, 179; 1952, 186).

Being a Black person, that is this synthesis, is not to be Black at all.

“Le nègre n’est pas. Pas plus que le Blanc.” (Fanon 1952, 187)

Frantz Fanon does not get out of his inner struggle with the old paradigms: black, white, superiority, inferiority, slave, master; he wants to show people the “open door of every consciousness” and ends this endeavor with a final prayer: “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (181).

“Dans le monde où je m’achemine, je me crée interminablement.

Je suis solidaire de l’Etre dans la mesure où je le dépasse.”

- Frantz Fanon (1952, 186).

This “man who questions” wants a world where he can recreate himself endlessly and he is part of Being each time he overpasses it. I think that this is the unforeseeable of which he speaks, he wants to do and to be something else than Negro, Black, and the possibilities are countless.

In conclusion, analyzing Fanon’s regressive analysis alongside the Hegelian master-slave’s dialectic and with a few excerpts from Du Bois; it is possible to se the differences and the similarities between them. On the one hand, Fanon takes on seriously account the Hegelian dialectics bringing it on its extremes consequences, and pushing further; on the other hand Du Bois exteriorizes the creation of a self-consciousness through a process of sorrow and hope imposing the Spirit gift that the Black people has brought to America. In other words, America would not be America, without the black slaves, according to Du Bois, he insists on the Black contribution and not-passivity within the formation of the nation in the same measure as of his self-consciousness and the Black recognition for Fanon is to surpass the old dichotomies and the Rosetta Stones of the Blak self-proving of what he has done, or who he was in the past. They go in different directions, but they are trying to solve a consciousness problem.