Fanon countered racial reification by performing the stereotype back.

Evidence

“I have incisors to bare,” Fanon remarks cuttingly, in response to a white French child exclaiming as he might at the zoo, “Look, Mama, a Negro!” Fanon’s incisive response – “I bite” – signals acting on, and out, the reifying stereotype, here both racial and racist, and undercutting it, bringing the reader up short, raising the stakes not just of visiting but of creating the zoo or zoo-like environment. If you think there are animals here, the animals bite back. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 76

Categorization

• BMF: Fanon’s ‘I bite’ — performing the stereotype to disarm it — echoes the trickster-step in Things Fall Apart where Okonkwo’s hard masculinity both mirrors and mocks colonial expectations, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Changez narrating himself into the role America fears.
• DEFINE: Fanon’s zoo anecdote is the anchoring scene for the chapter’s whole argument about ‘weight of race.’