Black skins white masks by Franz Fanon

Abstract

"A feeling of inferiority?" asks Frantz Fanon, in his essay "The Fact of Blackness." "No," he says, "a feeling of nonexistence." Recently, South African students protesting for #Rhodes Must Fall joined a succession of liberation movements referencing Fanon over the past 50 years. Among many creative acts, students wore placards that read "recognize me." Mainstream media reported protests at formerly exclusively white universities most extensively; they also tended to portray protesting students at majority black universities as prone to violence—woeful evidence of Fanon's contemporary significance to race identity politics in education. His relevance to HCI, specifically, is simply illustrated by image searches using Google.com.na. Only two of the first 50 people in photos returned for "person using computer" are black unless the special filter category "black" is used. There is no filter for "white," but there are categories for "work," "office," "icon," and so on. Indeed, the black man is an "object in the midst of other objects," "black in relation to the white man," Fanon writes, and "has no ontological resistance." (Searches for "person with computer" using one of the languages in the country where I live, "nakulongifa okomputa," do not yet yield any image results.)