by Frantz Fanon

Black Skin, White Masks is a sociological study of the psychology of racism and the dehumanization inherent to colonial domination. With the application of historical interpretation, and the concomitant underlying social indictment, Fanon formulated Black Skin, White Masks to combat the oppression of black people; and thus applied psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory to explain the feelings of dependency and inadequacy that Black people experience in a White world. Black Skin, White Masks is part manifesto, part analysis; it both presents Fanon’s personal experience as a black intellectual in a whitened world and elaborates the ways in which the colonizer/colonized relationship is normalized as psychology.