Raising the Race Question: A Reading of Fanon, Du Bois and Hooks

Nineteenth century European discourses, even when they were staunchly critical of the

transcendental paradigms, were located within the subjectivities of a particular racial vision: the

European white perspective. Moreover, these strands of philosophical moorings were uncritical

of the colonial and imperial heritage that allowed their existence. Even the most well-thinking of

discourses that arose as liberatory aspirations—most keenly observed in Marx—were

circumscribed by the empire’s limitations and could only deal with the European conditions.

More particularly, the Western paradigms emerged by throttling the voice of another significant

space of the world: Africa, mostly by denying the legitimacy to its self-description and historical

existence. Fanon, Du Bois and Hooks challenge this long-standing racial bias that harangues

intellectual productions to demonstrate an alternative worldview from the perspective of the

Black/African. This essay proposes to study the prescribed sources to underscore the methods in

which these scholars engage with the existing traditions of thought to carve out newer

possibilities for the human, especially the colored person. To put it another way, this essay will

interact with the limitations of the European humanism, by scrutinizing the voice of the

Black/African/African American. To put it another way, the essay will be an appraisal of the

transformation brought in the idea of philosophy, where experience becomes the central node

from which the world is defined and understood.

Fanon’s prime pursuit is to redescribe the “consciousness” of the Negro in opposition to the

“third-person” view that the “man of color” takes of himself. He situates the problem of the

Negro as one where their “originality” is “torn out” and a “sui generis” description is forcefully

“thrown” on them. In other words, he tries to generate a new perspective on the history of the
Blacks where they are not necessarily “primitive” and in extension “half-man.” In doing this,

Fanon is at once able to register a critique of the Hegelian historicism which displaced African

history into the netherworlds of nowhere and seeks to reconstruct a new world-history— which

he defines as “...race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago...”

and claims that the “...white man could not understand” this. He establishes that this history is

about putting the “white man back into his place.”

For Fanon, this historiographical reconstruction takes place by reading against the Western

epistemic grain of “Reason” that perpetuates exclusion of the Blacks. He outlines the challenges

of being “typically” a Negro, as well as the “joke” of wanting to be a white—that is, the

dilemmas of holding the two threads of the Black’s being. This condition, he writes, raises the

question of “real reason” for the Blacks, who are rounded by the “ailment,” on one hand, of

being tied to their own identity for it has been degenerated into a “savagery”; and, in the same

breath, any relational attempt to the Western world had to be made by accepting them as a

“superior” force.

In enunciating these thoughts, Fanon switches between the personal pronoun “I” and the Negro,

seamlessly. This is noticed not simply in the language, but also when he situates the debate by

critiquing Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of subjectivity. In other words, he establishes a continuity

between his existence and experience to the sensibility of a collective race, thereby allowing a

new perspective on Western philosophical problema of “body” and “mind.” In essence,

therefore, Fanon raises a philosophical question that lies in the intersections of experience and

history—one that interrogates the construction of European humanism and shows how it is

incomplete, based on reducing a vast race into a “toy” in the “hands of the white.”
 In a similar vein, Du Bois, too, outlines this problem of the “self-consciousness” in the

context of American Negro. He expresses that the American Negro exists with a “veil” that

separates him from “his own house” and at the same time allows him a “second sight.”

Moreover, the debate of identity rises out from the individual to encompass the relationships

between Africa and America, where the Negro is places within a “unreconciled striving” to

belong to either of them. In Du Bois’ understanding, too, the Negro in the American context

provides a “mighty prophecy” which has a “new determination for all mankind.” In other words,

he proclaims that the experience of the Negro has the potential to transform the philosophical

reckoning of the world by bearing on the world a possibility of a different “Truth.”

However, both Fanon and Du Bois construct their claims on the idea of Blacks from the

perspective of a “manhood.” In other words, their claims are grounded in the body of the male

Black, who witnesses a specific “double consciousness” with respect to their European

counterpart. It is arising out of this context that bell hooks—with her engagement with the post-

structuralist movements—envisages a “critique” to the “master narrative” among the Black

militant movements. Although she is aware of the dangers that “textuality” creates in the realm

of academy, for hooks it is an attempt to create a “real connection between postmodernism and

black experience.” In other words, she uses the opportunity of the “Otherness” that floods the

American discourses—much in the same way as Fanon and Du Bois did—to depict her

experiences as a methodological intervention into the so-called existing “authority.”

hooks' careful assessment of the post-modern condition underscores the threat on

“essentialism.” She reminds us that it is the time when some identities are voicing their opinions

and states for the first time, and the “obscure” attributes of post-modernism terms these

aspirations of the Blacks as “outmoded.” However, her central focus lies on being able to use this
new vocabulary of post-structural felicity of textuality to bring the debate back to the African

Americans. She proposes two most crucial ways in which it can be used: a) that the notion of

“class mobility” can be used to rupture the “collective black experience” wherein racism can be

seen to have differing effects across the spectrum of black lives; and b) that the breaking of an

“authentic” Black experience will be able to destabilize the “primitive” association of the blacks

and break “stereotypes,” thus liberating the burden of a lop-sided history from their shoulders. In

that sense, for hooks, the engagement with this discourse still lies in the capacity of the discourse

to “connect with habits of being...”

In Fanon, Du Bois and hooks, the most crucial aspect of the Black experience is

searching for an identity in the realm of languages available to them. A cursory glance at their

different groundings and contexts reveals that to each one of them the consciousness of their own

subjective experience was a useful starting point. In their varying ways they sought to place that

experience in a method. In other words, the philosophical basis of such an endeavor lies in

bearing importance to the “I” that writes and being able to place that as the collective experience

of “We,” albeit by being aware of the specifiers of class, gender and geographical locations that

have deep impact on the self-fashioning of that person. Moreover, their historiographical work

lay in a curious dilemma: of unearthing the already existing truths that were either discarded, or

that they attempted to resurface it so that the memory might create more robust systems of

identity formation. One can also be tempted to see this kind of history-writing as an trans-

nationalist, all-encompassing historiography—one that holds within itself a regard for liberation

beyond boundaries of national consciousness.