Me vs. someone else’s fabrication of me vs. the world.
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Fanon says : “His [the Black man’s] metaphysics…were wiped out becasue they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him. Being in the White man’s world, there is an inherent flaw and impurity outlawing any ontological explanation that the Black man is subject to. Subject to a standard of Blackhood imposed by the White man, an identity unknown and foreign to the Black man himself : “for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.” Fanon is not only subjected to the characteristics imposed by the other, but by every inch of his identity, responsible for his body, race, and his ancestors. He is, in a way, subject to his pwn appearance : “I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.” His appearance is pretext to his being as his body is one, and he is another. The black man is subject to the imposed characteristics, object of unfair classifications, and barred from the external world : “I shouted greetings to the world and the world slashed away my joy.”
“Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution : to make myself known.” Fanon expresses the sentiment that the suffering his race experienced(experiences) is ignored. Under the condition that the world would quit its prejudices, the history of the suffering of the Black person is swept under the rug. Though when Fanon wishes to stand against hate, to despise the oppressor, he was rejected despite begging and imploring. He was denied recognition. And so, if the world is denying recognition of the struggle of his own people, he takes it into his own hands. And so, he asserts himself and declares to be “a BLACK MAN.”
I find Sivanandan’s discussion on Britain’s foreign labour policy on the same field as that of Fanon. The Black person is a subject of the White discourse. Sivanandan highlights that British policy essentially “prevented the integration of migrant labour into the indigenous proletariat and thereby mediated class conflict.” Foreign workers—who in this case are people of colour from the many British colonial territories—are now pieces in the lucrative game of the the indigenous employers. The workers too are simply seen through an identity fabricated on their behalf. They are seen as workers who live in poor conditions stuck in an unfortunate cycle, with an inevitably continuous cycle of racism.
How does one reconcile with the these fabrications of the self from those who are anything but the self? Are these stereotypes and fabrications internalized and therefore institutionalized, even in the mindset of the racialized community?