Frantz Fanon

A pyschiatrist, humanist, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was born in Martinique into a lower middle class, mixed race family and receiving a conventional colonial education sees the technologies of control as being the white colonists of the third world. Fanon, at first an assimilationist, thinking colonists and colonized should try to build a future together, quickly Fanon's assimilationist illusions were destroyed by the gaze of metropolitan racism both in France and in the colonized …

…with evil and sin. In an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly abstracted from personal appearance. Cultural values are internalized, or "epidermalized" into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between the black man's consciousness and his body. Under these conditions, the black man is necessarily alienated from himself.