Against type

The existentialist philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon offer important insights into the nature of prejudice

https://aeon.co/essays/what-existentialist-philosophy-reveals-about-prejudices


Afro-Caribbean immigrants arrive at Waterloo station in London, England, in 1964. Photo by George Rodger/Magnum



Boarding a train in France a few years after the Second World War, a medical student specialising in psychiatry at a prestigious university, a man who had previously volunteered and fought for the Free French forces against the Nazis, found himself being pointed out by a small child: ‘Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!’

For the student, those words triggered a psychic storm of associations and identification that crystallised the racism of his society into one intense episode of distress. ‘I cast an objective gaze over myself,’ he later wrote of the incident, and was ‘deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders’ and, above all, the pidgin refrain of the grinning cartoon character in adverts for a banana-flavoured breakfast cereal. These associations that made up the stereotype of un nègre carried with them an incoherent mix of condescension, pity, fear and disgust. The child was amused, then scared. The student’s distress was in seeing himself through this cluster of negative associations and feelings.

That student was Frantz Fanon, and his description of this incident is central to his analysis of the psychic distress caused by racism. He initially wrote this as the dissertation for his medical degree, but his supervisor thought such an unusual work was unlikely to pass. Fanon submitted a dissertation on spinal degeneration instead, and his theory of the psychological structures and effects of racism became his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Fanon’s theory rests on the idea that we unwittingly inherit aspects of our worldview from our society. In this way, it bears important parallels with Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of gender in The Second Sex, published only three years earlier. Both these philosophers argue that ideas and values instilled in us through childhood shape our adult lives, often in ways that we are unaware of. They agree that these aspects of our outlook can remain quietly influential on our thought and behaviour, even after we have rejected them. Both consider the tension between our own ideas and values and those inherited from our society to be a source of difficulty and distress.

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