Black Skin, White Masks — Fanon

Colonialism's deepest damage is psychological — it gets inside the mind and teaches the colonized to feel inferior.

A deep, taught feeling of being worth less than others, installed by colonial society.

A whole society ranks the colonizer's language, skin and culture as superior, and the colonized absorb this from birth.

The colonial system's, not the person's — it's installed from outside, an injury to heal, not a flaw to blame.

He treats the inferiority as a real injury to a real mind — meant literally, to be understood and healed.

Not just 'who rules the land?' but 'what has colonial rule done to the person's own sense of who they are?'

A whole system keeps teaching the opposite; the cause must be named and changed, not just willed away.

A mind colonial society has taught to see itself as inferior.

A whole world — its values and its ranking of people; taking it on is never just learning words.

Colonial society ranks people by how 'well' they speak it, so mastering it seems to promise being accepted as an equal.

Being cut off from your own community and from your true self, through chasing acceptance in the colonizer's terms.

From your community (you speak 'above' them) and from yourself (straining to be someone you're not).

You leave yourself behind to earn it, yet are still kept at the margin — the ladder never reaches the top.

Refuse it and you're locked out; master it and you're alienated and still not let in — either way you lose.

No — it's a world you enter, so speaking the colonizer's language reshapes how you see people, including yourself.

The colonizer's language promises belonging with one hand and takes away the self with the other.

The colonizer's ways the colonized are pressured to wear over their own self, to be accepted — it hides the real person.

A look that reduces a person to a racial object, defined from outside — seeing skin loaded with the colonizer's fears, not a self.

A frightened child fixes him as a feared object; he is looked at as a thing, not seen as a person.

It decides your identity from outside before you speak, treating you as a type rather than a self.

The outside look becomes an inside voice — the colonized begin to see themselves through the colonizer's eyes.

Once you see yourself as the gaze sees you, hiding behind the colonizer's ways feels like the only way to be worth something.

Sartre's Look is neutral and two-way; Fanon's racialising gaze is loaded with society's ranking and lands one-sidedly on the colonized.

A gaze fixes you from outside, becomes an inside voice, and the white mask feels like the only way to belong.

Test the reasoning of a claim — weigh reasons for and against — and reach a reasoned judgement.

A better mask is still a mask — it keeps the colonizer's ranking in place and the colonized still judged by someone else's standard.

Two people meeting as equals, each seeing the other as a free self — which breaks the object-fixing gaze.

A shared human world where no one is ranked above another by race, and each person is free to define themselves.

The wound was being defined from outside; the freedom is being seen as a self — recognition is the exact reverse of the gaze.

The colonizer holds the power and may never grant it, so recognition can look like a hope, not a plan.

Open-book, one hour: a two-part question on your text — (a) Explain a concept [10] + (b) Evaluate a claim [15].

Name the wound (mind, language, mask, gaze), refuse the false cure (imitation), build mutual recognition and a new humanism.