The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon: On National Consciousness and National Culture
Red Menace
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Code Switching Is a Defense Mechanism Crafted in the Face of White Suprematist Violence
Fanon talked about how he, growing up in Martinique, a Caribbean island, and French colony, conceived of himself not as a black person, but as a Martin ique national. When he went to France, he was devastated to realize that in the eyes of the white French, he was nothing but a black man. This resulted in what W.E.B. Du Bois calls double consciousness; one sense of self is internally divided,. We see this all around us in our Western liberal societies to this very day. The stab of self-consciousness of having to apprehend yourself through the macabre prism of the white gaze makes a mockery of bourgeois pretensions to universality.
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