Black Skin White Masks cover

Black Skin White Masks

by Frantz Fanon

What colonialism does to the mind of the colonized.

For you if

you want to understand racial identity as something imposed from outside rather than something that simply exists

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Fanon's earlier book — written as his doctoral thesis in 1952 — is more personal and more interior than The Wretched of the Earth. A young Black man from Martinique in France, experiencing racism for the first time, trying to understand what is happening to his sense of self. The dispatch from inside the experience of being looked at and found lacking by a civilization that trained you to see yourself through its eyes. The foundational text of postcolonial psychology and one of the most honest accounts of racialized identity ever written.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Martinique • Caribbean
Voice
Written by a Martiniquais author

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A Clockwork Orange poster

A Clockwork Orange(1971)

dir. Stanley Kubrick

State violence dressed up as your rehabilitation.

In a near-future Britain, teenage gang leader Alex is imprisoned for ultraviolence and subjected to an experimental state conditioning program meant to strip him of the capacity for violent choice. Adapted from Anthony Burgess's novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in refusing to resolve the discomfort — Alex is a monster, and the state's "cure" is its own kind of monstrous. Pedagogical in forcing the question of whether choosing evil is more human than being engineered into goodness.

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