Colonialism did far more than enslave and maim its victims' bodies; its principal offense was to infiltrate and pervade the minds of generation after generation of colonized and racialized people. When Fanon argues that colonialism placed the colonized within “two frames of reference” he speaks to the schism within the consciousness of the colonized. Colonization for Fanon creates a division in the identity and meaning-making capabilities of racialized people. The split is between the racial and cultural characteristics that inform Black identity, for example, and the identity of the exemplary white citizen or Black subject that white society expects Blacks to assimilate into. Colonization instigated the motion of modern history, and placed at the bedrock of the modern neo-liberal order the hopes for a white destiny, where white superiority is secured in the antithesis to the racialized inferiority. The only available route for a Black person’s success was through the white institutions that assume a paternal role over Blacks and favor white success. A familiar strategy of limiting the hodological pathways and instilling these two-frame references is the colonial coercion of the colonized education system. Colonizers often rewrite the colonized’s history to praise the colonizer as the liberator, and scapegoats the colonized ancestors as impediments to their descendent’s own advancement (as opposed to the colonizer). This fragments the racialized students’ identity into a Black face that bears the weight of a truth of Black freedom that conflicts with the more general curriculum that antagonizes any colored face. Black and colonized’ cultures are diminished as infantile versions of the more developed western parent nations. Colored faces are thus taught to strive for whiteness at the expense of striving for their own unique expressions of colored identity. This duality of consciousness becomes the product of a social bad faith, and disadvantages colored peoples in attaining their self-realization as beings for themselves, rather than for a white master. 

Colonialism and racialization are perpetuated on a material and immaterial level, a social or institutional level. ‘Post-colonial’ people are economically disadvantaged, on the world stage and the domestic market. African Americans continue to reel from the consequences of redlining, a brutal intergenerational wealth gap; economic imperialism sees to post-colonial nations being rendered the dependents to western economies due to the lost time and capital resources during the colonized years. Not only do colonial legacies leech from the material reserves of racialized people, but they seep into their consciousness as well. The French colonial authorities developed educational curriculums for school children that mythologized the colonizer and lacerated the colonized from their own history. In effect, this created a persistent white force rewriting the imaginary and identity formations of racialized people.  As a consequence of this socialization, the colored has been given two poles in between which they can realize their consciousness within, and one of these poles has been commandeered by a white history. The colored person’s metaphysical configurations, customs, and values are ejected by the conflicting indoctrination of the colonizer that aims to other the colonized and assimilate them into a white world where they are nothing but other. For Fanon, consciousness is formed through racializing societal institutions. A colored person’s awareness of their own freedom to construct their own identity is challenged by social institutions that try to reduce Black or colonized consciousness to an object with a being in-itself rather than for itself. When a colored person is racialized, their capacity for and receptivity of their meaning-making is put into question. The colored person can remit this process through ontological resistance that entails symmetrically and non-reactively returning the white gaze. A standstill between white’s othering and the colored individual’s liberation weathers the illusions of the objectification it is posed with. 

An account of how consciousness absorbs and dispels racialization, however, would be incomplete without a discussion of historico-racial schema. This schema is encapsulated in the psychologies of racialized and colonized people through the collective unconscious. The traditional use of the term originates from Carl Yung’s collective unconscious. For Yung, the collective unconscious houses the innate, a-temporal, and absolutes. Its function is to structure our way of thinking and is informed by the idealistic edge of our normative temporal horizons. Fanon differs from Yung’s collective unconscious by arguing that rather than archetypes, this unconscious is riddled with stereotypes. Fanon’s collective unconscious structures consciousness. It configures it through a racial and socialized imaginary that informs people’s personal identities. As our memory of the world, the collective unconscious is acquired at a young age through the informational sources individuals are exposed to. Whether through the media or social media, films or books, comic books or schools, through the eyes of a child all these sources are relevant. They form our understanding of the world and consequently where society places us in relation to it, how it embraces or limits our abilities. For Fanon, part of the collective unconscious of colonized peoples is the tension between the two frames of reference of the white world and the Black self. and in turn, informs how they see the world. When the memory of the world is a story being broadcasted by white radios, their projection of the undesirable qualities of whiteness onto the othered schema of Black people can be caustic. Fanon speaks to a process in which whites try to purify the white identity by defining Blacks and colored people as the antithesis to their moral and epistemic purity (139). In turn, these propositions are internalized by racialized peoples through a process of naturalization. This awareness and acceptance of the white colonial projection onto the makeup of history and how this process informed our lives allows us to depart elsewhere. In that spirit, Fanon offers a present where colored people can define their identities in detachment to their corporeal schema. 

Fanon poses the following solutions to these colonial constructs: re-imagining the school system in order to account for its role in perpetuating the white imaginary; material restorations and institutional reformations; organization and solidarity of colonized and racialized peoples; and reintroducing the reinvention of colored identity in their own historical and modern cultural tradition. Fanon stood for the reformation of the traditional colonial curriculum of western schooling that perpetuated the white imaginary and the Black inferiority. The unification of Fanon’s double consciousness is a personal and historical project of colored peoples. Thus not only must racialized people detach their minds from the orbit of white history and the presumption of a non-existential and generalized ontology, but institutional reforms are also necessary. School systems must also be adjusted for a more comprehensive account of colonial history and the importance of unique lived experiences in describing the social stratification of colonized and racialized peoples. Fanon argues that we must refuse to consider the present as being definitive, as the unavoidable product of a shrouded and white-constructed history. The future is constantly in motion. Instead, individuals, the society they live in, and the institutions that support or limit social ventures, must depart through their acknowledgment of their role in permeating the legacies of our shared colonial history. Fanon stands for solidarity between racialized and oppressed peoples in “redressing the injustices of the present” (Al-Saji Lecture). By unifying movements of liberation from western superiority complexes, the white project of obscuring the colonial history and the non-reactive break from it is made brazen.  

 

 

Bibliography (minus in-text citations): 
Fanon, Frantz, and Charles Lam Markmann. Black Skin, White Masks. 1967th ed., New York Grove Press.

 

Professor Al-Saji's lectures on Existentialism