My reflection on this week's readings and listening

[cathy_ndiaye2]

I was surprised by the tone Fanon used in the text. He has a fatalistic and very negative, if not degrading way of talking of the black man, himself being a black man. It’s almost like he’s talking about himself the way racist people talk about people of colour. I am curious about why he does that though. For example, when he says ‘’ the miserable N’’ and when he describes having brown skin as ‘’ a malediction’’. Further, Fanon quotes Sartre “They [the Jews] have allowed themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them. . .” I feel like in this text this is exactly what Fanon is showing.

Another saying of the author that I found interesting is when he says ‘’ As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others.’’ The way I understand this statement is that it’s only when being with someone who is different than us (in any way) that we can truly question our identity and what we think is ‘’normal’’ and that we can see things that would not have been noticed without this outside perspective. The perspective of others (especially if we share nothing in common) often differs from ours. Hence, we can learn about ourselves through others, and I think this is what Fanon is trying to say in that statement. In a community where people share identity traits, it is more difficult to be able to question ourselves because the people around us validate those traits since they share some of them with us.

In his essay, Ambalavaner Sivanandan writes that: ‘’ Everyone made money on the immigrant worker from the big-time capitalist to the slum landlord - from exploiting his labour, his colour, his customs, his culture. He himself had cost the country nothing He had been paid for by the country of his origin reared and raised, as capitalist under-development had willed it, for the labour markets of Europe.. ‘’ It made me see the situation of colored immigrant workers similar to slavery. We could almost describe it as a ‘’ modern version’’ of the transatlantic slave trade. Indeed, as it was pointed out, the immigrants were exploited for their work and it’s Britain who took total advantage of it. No profit returned to their country of origin, yet it has invested resources in them. The only thing that is different from slavery is that the workers are paid. Paid is actually a big word since what they earned was sometimes not enough to provide for their basics needs. There is also the racism aspect. Even if they do earn money, it’s like their money is not seen as money. It’s almost as if because the money comes from a person of colour it does not have value and we can notice that through the difficulty coloured people had in finding housing, amongst other things.
‘’ ...The shortage of workers, as Ceri Peach shows, made immigrants economically acceptable; the shortage of housing made them socially undesirable.’’ For me, this statement is a perfect example of the ingratitude and the hypocrisy of the West when it comes to immigration. I say the West because it’s not only in Britain that we hear these kinds of discourse, and it was not only in the 60s either. For example, in Quebec, recently Justin Trudeau and Francois Legault had the same kind of remarks about immigrants. However, as was mentioned in this article, in the case of Britain, a lot of money was made of the ready-made" workers, like the author calls them, but instead of investing the profit in social infrastructures and housing to be able to provide for the increasing demand, the state wanted to maximize their profit. Knowing that we can say that the problem is not that the immigrants increased the load on the housing market but rather it is that the resources were not invested optimally.

Furthermore, I would even say that immigrants are a ‘’significant asset’’ for the West. Amongst many other contributions, immigrants contribute to the working force in a way the West could not do alone partly because in these countries, the birth rate is becoming lower and lower. Without immigrants, many jobs would be left vacant.

After reading Sivanandan's essay and the intro from Vivek Bald’s book, it is clear that both Britain and the US were xenophobic and discriminatory in their laws. I was really surprised to see that those states had laws to justify the systematic discrimination toward people of colour. We often hear about the way people of colour were treated in the US even after the abolition of slavery, but personally, it was the first time that I heard about laws that were explicitly defending xenophobia. Also, before learning about it in this week’s readings, I never knew that migrants from the Asian subcontinent suffered from racism similar to the way African descent people were.
Also, in Ibrahim Choudry’s letter we see again the ingratitude of the West toward the participation of South Asian migrants in building the economy of the country. One concrete example he gives is that some young men who came to the US fought in the country’s army, one of the most patriotic things any person could do. Despite this devotion, the US saw them as outcasts and they had to beg to be considered American.

One of the verses in Maimouna Youssef’s song says ‘’ Self hatred and white supremacy are quite the pair’’. I think what she means is that white supremacy can cause more damage on a person of visible minority if that person already has a negative image of herself. This is an idea that we find throughout Lamar’s song, for example when he links his struggle and his feeling of being a hypocrite to the way white people see him. ‘’ That I'ma be just another slave in my head/ Institutionalized manipulation and lies/ Reciprocation of freedom only live in your eyes… ‘’. Here I think that ‘’ your eyes’’ refers to white people. Also, when Lamar says ‘’ You vandalize my perception’’ there is this idea that the person of color internalizes the way the other sees him and he begins to so himself in that same negative way/self-hatred way as was said by Maimouna Youssef. That self-hatred is noticeable in many parts of “The Fact of Blackness”.

In conclusion, there are many links we can make between this week’s readings and listenings. I think that one of them is that Fanon’s work and Kendrick Lamar's song give us a portrait of the person of colour and the other articles show us what this specific image of the person of colour implicates when it comes to integrating countries like Britain and the US. Youssef's song addresses more of the construction of identity and the way bad self-image can affect it. It is almost as if Fanon and Lamar were explaining or justifying why such discriminatory and xenophobic policies were implemented. In other words, it seems like the West saw (maybe still sees to this day) people of colour the way Fanon and Lamar describe them, and this is why they built policies and laws to make sure people of colour knew they were seen as second-class citizens.

[pashamkhan]

This is such an interesting post, because in it @cathy_ndiaye2 asks a question about Fanon, and then later on in her remarks on Yousef and Lamar, she answers it: Fanon, like Yousef and Lamar, is internalising an external perception, leading to an assimilation of the anti-blackness of others, and self-hatred.

In class I might bring up this idea of the "ungratefulness" of the state regarding the benefits of immigrants. I find it so nice and ironic since politicians more often talk about the "ingratitude" of immigrants themselves.

[shouzab_awan]

My response to Fanon, and my analysis of other readings/listenings

I agree with the sentiment that Fanon’s tone is negative, as to me it feels like this chapter is a description of his experiences, however rather than considering it purely fatalistic or even later as you described it as almost “explaining or justifying…”, I perceived it initially as his way of characterizing the intensity of the adversity he faced. By talking about his experiences as a black man in such harsh and explicit terms, he is giving readers just a glimpse into the alienation that he had to endure. While the true depth of difficulty and pain can never be understood, I feel as though his directed and explicit language, descriptions of events, and later on use of dialogue and poetry allow the reader to understand the issue in a deeper way through multiple facets. While at some points I found this reading more abstract and difficult to read, it would quickly transition into either an example of an experience or insert a dialogue that set me back on track.

As mentioned above, Fanon uses a myriad of terms and phrases that make it seem as though he is “poisioned by the steroetypes others have of them”, however again I think the emphasis on these terms is to expose the absurdity of racism he has experienced. Throughout the reading, I think that Fanon is set on describing the circumstances that have previously and continue to perpetuate this racism. The situation that brought forward the topic of subjecthood and objecthood is a perfect example of this; he describes an occurrence — a child talking with his mother — and describes how even in this regular occurrence, his race stands to mean more than him being a person. I think that this situation stands as an example of how any experience can be the catalyst for your self-worth shrinking. As the child repeats the phrase, Fanon describes his feelings shift from amusement to shock as he discovers the child is afraid of him, and he becomes confined by how the white child sees him, stripped down to just his race.

I also wanted to touch on Fanon’s description of his relation to the Jewish man. I think he does a very good job of comparing and contrasting by, on Page 92, speaking about how “I joined the Jew, my brother in misery” and goes on to even equate them to an extent saying that anything said about the Jewish can be interpreted towards a black person as well. However, earlier in the chapter, Fanon identifies the key difference in the treatment of the two groups — “All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is.” I believe drawing this contrast is Fanon’s way of recognizing the Jewish people as those who have faced persecution, but identify that while they were segregated for their ideas and what they believe, it had never even gotten to that point for black people as others took one look and saw something wrong.

In Bald’s introduction, it is very insightful to see three different perspectives from South Asians all fighting for a similar yet vastly different population goal. Choudhry, in his letter, is advocating for the working-class, already residing labourers who have already been working and living in America to acquire citizenship. Mubarek Ali Khan is seen following a similar approach trying to get citizenship for the 3000 Indians in the US but with more reservation and a less direct approach. JJ Singh’s approach however is the most interesting to me as rather than fighting for the rights of the pre-existing Indian-American residents, he was not only lobbying for future immigrants, but even assuring Congress that his proposition would not lead to an influx of Indian-Americans getting citizenship. While my gut tells me to be optimistic and believe that he was blurring his intentions and would have shifted course later on, his assurance to Congress as well as his departure from cultural items such as his turban once he arrived in the US leads me to assume that there was likely some sort of class/superiority complex at play and he wanted improvement for the Indian-Americans, but only the ones he deemed worthy at 75 out of the 100 that would be allowed to naturalize being “more highly qualified”.

The main similarity I identified between Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry” and Maimouna Youseff’s “Tell My Story” was the concept of building black people up rather than tearing them down. While Kendrick’s song has a stronger focus on the issues and the violence that black people in America face, it always circles back to the chorus “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice”, which can be interpreted differently at the end of the chorus when he says “the bigger I shoot” and transitions back into the issues and the violence, however, I believe the chorus serves as a reminder that despite all the violence, being black is “sweeter”, highlighting their resilience. Youseff’s song more explicitly builds black people up with lines like “I’ll be infamous either way you can’t ignore me”, which serves both to show that 1) there is a sense of negligence from other races towards black people and 2) again, similar to Kendrick’s, highlights the resilience of black people and the importance of not letting others put you down.

The last thing I want to touch on briefly is the final verse in Kendrick Lamar’s song where I think he is portraying the range/duality of experiences of a black man. When Trayvon Martin was killed, the black community was in mourning, and rejecting gangbanging and activities that endangered the lives of their youth, but the reality is that despite this, the situation that he found himself in forced him to kill another black man. This shows that there exists a fine line between being angered at black deaths versus participating in them.

• I just want to make a note that the beginning of this discussion was in response to Cathy’s, however, it eventually transitions to my own analysis of the other readings and listening.