black skin-white mask

Yo main, your folk got a lot of flack for checking Jill Nelson in the previous post from SOME folks on this list serv I belong too called Blackexpressions. Its supposed to be inhabited by writers of fiction, non fiction and verse among other attributes descriptive of one who writes letters. It seem as if some of the members have a problem with me protecting my folk in the intellectually astute manner in which I defended my home boys, Three six mafia. It is obvious also that they despise pimps, but yet fail to realize a pimp can't be a pimp without ho's willing to trick. And we all know that the only thing a ho, who is willing to trick cares about is loot. Not love, wanting a family or a man, no, loot.

Being such as the case, I would like to suggest that they study one of my Idols, Frantz Fanon. Unlike the average mother fucka, I read "The Wretched of the Earth", Toward a dying Colanilism", and "Black Skin, White Mask" before I was out of high school. No teacher made me read it, I just always had a chip on my shoulder and figured i was at war. He was th personification of anti-colonial revolutionary thought back in the fifties.



Fanon's life as a black intellectual in a white world dictated his understanding of the colonizer/colonized relationship, specifically since he was a psyciatrist by training. He knew and wrote about how racism generates a damaging psychological impact on people of African descent because the universal standard for the colonized is a white norm (the consequence of a racist culture).

In Black Skin White Masks, he describes how language and being marginalized as a result of an unchanagable attribute - race, can create a pathology in the oppresed simply as a function of assimulation. By doing such, he suggest that black people take on the responsibility of opprssing black people other than themselves, on behalf of whites because they learn that standards of the white/western world are the only stndards of importance. From his perspective, being colonized by a language has a major influence on ones belief orientation for it is the most effective way to assimulate and assume a foreign culture, inclusive of the beliefs of that culture - even that which equates being black with evil and christian sin. As a consequence, we as people of African descent try to dissassociate ourselves from that conception of evil by acting or being white as possible - even to the extent of vilifying others who don't match the same standard of whiteness (Three six in this case). This epidermalization of cultural values according to Fanon, seperates our belief orientation from our body. So to dog three six and their ways for example, is a way we as black folk seperate our personal consciousness from our blackness.

I just wonder will there ever be a day when we take of the white mask.