Kevin Lamory
Professor Rudy
Paradigms of Violence
5/10/2012
Fanon, Du Bois, and the Dialectic of Self-Consciousness
1. Introduction
W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon both developed theories of race that understood an internal conflict within the psyches of Black people as an effect of colonialism. In The Souls of Black Folk Du Bois begins to grapple with this internal conflict which leads to his theory of ‘double-consciousness.’ In his later work Dusk of Dawn we see how how he is able to build upon the internal struggle of individual Black peoples to a similar analysis on the structural level of a world divided by race and class. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon analyzes his patients from Martinique leading him to an analysis of this internal conflict in the form of an inferiority complex within the mind of the colonized preventing their attainment of full consciousness. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon expands upon this analysis of the internal struggle of the colonized individual to develop his structural analysis of colonialism. Fanon and Du Bois analyze colonial situations in two different parts of the world, developing a similar analysis on the effects of racism and colonialism on the level of the Black individual while offering markedly different solutions on a more collective and structural level.
Fanon and Du Bois both analyze an internal struggle within the mind of the colonized which they associate with an inability to attain true self-consciousness. The problem of attaining self-consciousness is one presented in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The basis of this theory is a human’s need to be recognized by their fellow humans in a state of reciprocity. As Taylor states, “men seek and need the recognition of their fellows. The subject depends on external reality. If he is to be fully at home this external reality must reflect back to him what he is” (Taylor 152). When one forces another into slavery they are forcing recognition from the slave. The slave is therefore denied their recognition as a fellow human and thus their full attainment of self-consciousness. Left in a sub-human state of slavery, the slave exists solely for the benefit of the master. The overarching themes of this dialectic of self-consciousness are present in the works of both W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon as they try to work through the internal dilemmas of Blacks in a colonial world.
2. Du Boisian Double Consciousness
In The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois first presents his idea that a “double consciousness” exists among Blacks in the United States (Souls 7). The two consciousnesses that Du Bois speaks of are that of being Black and that of being American. These two identities exist in a state of contradiction whereby being Black in the U.S. is to be racially oppressed systemically while being American is to exist within the social confines that dictate this same oppression. Du Bois presents this dilemma as follows:
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world–a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consiousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul be the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,–an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (7)
For Du Bois, being Black and being American are ‘unreconcilable.’ By exhibiting a system of racial oppression, America maintains this contradiction, forbidding the ‘true self-consciousness’ Du Bois speaks of.
The African American dilemma that DuBois refers to as ‘double consciousness’ began when slaves were legally freed in the U.S. but were still, for all intensive purposes, shackled within the confines of Jim Crow and other forms of systematic racism. Du Bois notes the historic significance of this dilemma in stating that, “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,–this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost […] He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American” (Souls 8). The ‘history of strife’ and ‘longing to attain self-conscious manhood’ is akin to Taylor’s understanding of the dialectic of self-consciousness, which he summarizes stating that, “the dialectic of self-consciousness is thus a dialectic of human longing and aspiration, and their vicissitudes” (Taylor 148). A ‘dialectic of human longing and aspiration’ is present throughout The Souls of Black Folk and is first introduced with Dubois’ introduction on the dilemma of double-consciousness.
Taylor claims the goal of the dialectic of self-consciousness to be ‘integral expression,’ or, “a consummation where the external reality which embodies us and on which we depend is fully expressive of us and contains nothing alien” (Taylor 148). This goal of the struggle for self consciousness is similar to the integration of the ‘two-ness’ of which Du Bois speaks; to be both Black and American. The ‘external reality’ for the African American is America. A reality which is only expressive in terms of whiteness. At the most basic level both theorists speak of the need for the external reality to be reflective rather than hostile and antagonistic to the subject. This twoness that Du Bois sees embodied in the African American experience is a twoness embodied in a nation that claims to stand for freedom, yet denies a large segment of its population its humanity. America is hostile and antagonistic to Blacks who are all the while considered American. Du Bois claims that the African American strives for a synthesis of these two identities. In order for this to occur, America must no longer be synonymous with racial oppression.
In Dusk of Dawn Du Bois brings the idea of double-consciousness onto a more structural level, arguing that certain classes or ‘worlds’ exist within and are governed by larger worlds that don’t reflect their image. Du Bois presents this idea of layering worlds in the following passage:
A man in the European sixteenth century was born not simply in the valley of the Thames or Seine, but in a certain class and the environment of that class made and limited his world. He was then, consciously or not, not fully a man; he was an artisan and until he complied with the limitations of that class he was continually knocking his hands, head, and heart against and environment, composed of other classes, which limited what he could and could not do and what he must do; and this greater group environment was not a matter of mere ideas and thought; it was embodied in muscles and armed men, in scowling faces, in the majesty of judge and police and in human law which became divine. (135)
Dubois then takes this understanding of class and folds into it a race concept, arguing that a Black world exists within the larger white world. The introduction of race into his class theory is presented in Dusk of Dawn in the following excerpt:
The Negro American has for his environment not only the white surrounding world, but also, and touching him usually much more nearly and compellingly, is the environment furnished by his own colored group. […] He fits into this environment more or less willingly. It gives him a social world and a mental peace. On the other hand and especially if in education and ambition and income he is above the average culture of his group, he is often resentful of its environing power; partly because he does not recognize its power and partly because he is determined to consider himself part of the white group from which, in fact, he is excluded. (173)
With these two passages Du Bois explains the strivings of the oppressed to be a part of the larger world which oppresses them. Here the internal dilemma of the individual finds its correlation in a Black world striving to be a part of the white world.
Double-consciousness contains within it the beginnings of an inferiority complex where the Black man realizes that he is deemed less than by those whose image the world is crafted around (173). As Du Bois says it is more than just an idea, it is an idea backed with “muscles and armed men” (135). It is an idea with real material ramifications. He elaborates on the omnipresence of this feeling of inferiority at the behest of the white world stating, “I was not an American; I was not a man; I was by long education and continual compulsion and daily reminder, a colored man in a white world; and that white world often existed primarily, so far as I was concerned, to see with sleepless vigilance that I was kept within bounds” (135). The Du Boisian ‘double-consciousness’ follows Taylor’s understanding of the dialectic of self-consciousness where the subject exists within an external reality that does not reflect back their being. We find this similarity on both an individual and a collective level. At the individual level, two unreconcilable consciousnesses are trapped within one body. Collectively, a Black world made up of African Americans embodying this contradiction exists within and is constantly contained by a hostile and enveloping white world.
3. The Fanonian Colonial Complex
In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon, much like Du Bois, sees a struggle within the consciousness of his colonized patients. He analyzes his patients’ dreams and nightmares and concludes that they have an inferiority complex that is tearing them apart internally (Black Skin 80). He argues that his patients are “overcome to such a degree by a desire to be white” and that this inferiority complex is only made possible “in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race over another” (80). Much like the Du Boisian double-consciousness, Fanon recognizes this internal conflict of being Black in a white world. For Du Bois the dilemma is being Black and American; For Fanon this contradiction is that of being Black and wanting to be white. However both reach the diagnosis of an inferiority complex caused by white supremacist society.
What Fanon explores on the individual level in Black Skin, White Masks he brings to the collective level in The Wretched of the Earth in his examination of the process of decolonization. While Du Bois sees a Black world existing within a white world, as is the case with race in America, Fanon sees one world split and pitted against itself. Fanon explains this concept stating that, “this compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species […] looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to” (Wretched 5). Both theorists believe in a higher unity, but for Fanon, this unity comes from removing the colonizer from the picture. As he states, “Decolonization unifies this world by a radical decision to remove its heterogeneity, by unifying it on the grounds of nation and sometimes race” (10). The process of decolonization removes the colonizer and replaces them with the colonized.
4. Comparing and Contrasting Solutions
Du Bois’s idea that there is a black world that exists within the white world has its logical correlation in Fanon’s examination of a world compartmentalized between the colonized and the colonizer. The differences are that of circumstance; Both are examining race in very different contexts. Both are colonial situations, but in the American context the colony exists within the country while in the Europe and Africa context, the colonies exist without the colonizing nation. However, as Fanon says, “all forms of exploitation are alike […] colonial racism is no different from other racisms.” (69) The crisis of consciousness that both populations witness are similar for this reason, yet the conclusions that they draw from it are at the same time different and more fitting to their relative circumstance.
Du Bois never offers a solution to the internal dilemma of double-consciousness on the level of the individual like the way in which Fanon guides his patients through their inferiority complex. However, through his intersecting class and race lens in Dusk of Dawn he presents a two pronged solution through which to solve this dilemma on a structural level. In this work he explains the problem of black oppression to be the product of economic oppression coupled with racist ideology. For this he offers two tactics. The first involves attacking the economic hold that the white world has on the Black. Du Bois elaborates on this strategy stating that, “the first point of attack is undoubtedly the economic. The progress of the white world must cease to rest upon the poverty and the ignorance of its own proletariat and of the colored world” (Dusk 172). The second is an attack on the racist ideology. Knowing that Blacks are not inferior to whites in anyway, Du Bois argues for a new understanding of the world that places Blacks at the center of class struggle. Du Bois elaborates as follows:
To attack and better all this calls for more than appeal and argument. It needs carefully planned and scientific propaganda; the vision of a world of intelligent men with sufficient income to live decently and with the will to build a beautiful world. […] The colored world therefore must be seen as existing not simply for itself but as a group whose insistent cry may yet become the warning which awakens the world to its truer self and its wider destiny.” (172)
For Du Bois, the contradictions of class and race are what is holding the world back from its ‘truer self’ much in the same way that double consciousness is holding the African American back from their ‘integral expression’.
While Du Bois doesn’t offer a solution to the dilemma of double-consciousness presented in Souls of Black Folk in Dusk of Dawn he highlights the steps needed to end black oppression in America. The end goal of combating American racist ideology and systematically racist economic exploitation would be the creation of an environment that stands in reflection of Black existence rather than in opposition to it. This creation of more reflective environment would intern work to dismantle the internal contradiction manifested in the Du Bosian double-consciousness.
Fanon, on the other hand, takes this internal struggle that he witnesses in the colonized individual and offers something of a solution that allows us to bridge the gap from the level of the individual to collective action in a way that Du Bois does not. Fanon argues that the individual must be let known of his unconscious desire to be white and be made to understand that he is not inferior to whites. He elaborates on this call for action as follows, “What emerges then is a need for a combined action on the individual and the group. As a psychoanalyst I must help my patient to “Consciousnessize” his unconscious, to no longer be tempted by a hallucinatory lactification, but also to act along the lines of a change in social structure” (Black Skin 80). This concept of ‘consciousnessizing’ the unconscious is an awakening of the mind of the colonized to an understanding that they are not inferior, and that the path forward is creating a new world that reflects this simple truth.
Fanon examines a much more intense process of breaking through the internal dilemma of the colonized subject in the act of violence during the decolonization process. Where Du Bois calls for a campaign of scientific propaganda aimed at convincing everyone, Black and white, of the ridiculousness of the concept of race, Fanon calls for a campaign of violent action on the part of the individual against the colonizer to prove in a very real manner the falsehood of claims to inferiority. Fanon explains the significance of these individual acts of violence as follows, “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence” (51). This act of violence is a material follow up to the initial step of ‘consciousnessizing’ the individual. It takes something that is merely an idea, and gives it a physical reality.
Taken a step further, this individual act of violence, while working to dismantle the inferiority complex within the mind of the colonized and therefore breaking the internal dilemma, also functions very practically on the collective level in the overall struggle for African liberation. Fanon explains this process stating that, “this violent praxis is totalizing since each individual represents a violent link in the great chain, in the almighty body of violence rearing up in reaction to the primary violence of the colonizer” (50). The violence that meets the colonized subject everyday to maintain the colonial system and thus this inferiority complex is turned back on the colonizer, cleansing the colonized of the complex while allowing participation in the larger revolutionary struggle. Fanon explains that the colonized unconscious mind must first be ‘consciousnessized’, awakening them to the existence of this internal dilemma. From here they are given the option to act on this knowledge or not. If they choose to act, then the decolonization of their mind will take place during the decolonization of the nation through acts of violence.
5. Conclusion
Analyzing colonialism in two different parts of the world, Fanon and Du Bois offer a similar understanding of the internal effects of colonialism on the colonized mind, while presenting differenet solutions on how to work through them. Both theorists recognize an internal dilemma within the psyches of colonial subjects similar to the internal struggle present in Taylors understanding of Hegel’s dialectic of self-consciousness. In the work of Du Bois, this internal struggle is explained through his theory of double-consciousness. For Fanon, the struggle is an inferiority complex caused by the colonized subject’s unconscious desire to be white. Despite the similarities in their analysis, the two theorist offer different solutions to this dilemma. Du Bois claims that scientific propaganda aimed at dismantling racist ideology coupled with economic reform will pave the way for Blacks to be seen as equals in America. Fanon, on the other hand, offers violent action on the part of the colonized to clense themselves of their complex while taking part in the larger revolutionary struggle.
The diferences in these solutions may be seen as the result of differing circumstance. For Du Bois, the struggle takes place in a nation divided in two by race. The struggle for him is to end this divide and change the country in such a way where to be Black and American is no longer a contradiction. For Fanon, the struggle is that of ending the foreign occupation and economic exploitation of an entire African nation. Fanon’s struggle is global and has a global solution that doesnt understand there to be a possible merging of worlds. Fanon doesnt wish to change the world to be more reflective of the Black experience, he wants to destroy the colonial world and create a new world in its ashes; a world created in and through the revolutionary Black experience. Although Du Bois claims to have a global understanding of race, he can’t break out of the idea of a synthesis of two worlds that comes from a very American understanding of racism dividing one nation in two. Fanon on the other hand is forced to see the global structure of race due to the global structure of European colonialism. For Dubois, a higher unity is possible, for Fanon, the colonizer is superfluous.
Work Cited
Du Bois, W.E.B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept.
New York: Schocken, 1968. Print.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. NYC: Pocket, 2014. Print.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto, 1986. Print.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 2004. Print.
Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. Print.