For Fanon, neurotic solutions to racism displace political ones
Evidence
Capecia is a mulatto. She has only one possibility and one concern, Fanon writes: to turn white. She is barred from herself, and he adds, may she add no more to the mass of imbecilities. Veneuse is a neurotic intellectual, and for him his color is only an attempt to explain his psychic structure. If this objective difference did not exist he would have manufactured it out of nothing. Everything about him can be explained by his devaluation of self (self-hatred) consequent on his fear of maternal abandonment. The “crime” of both patients for Fanon is thus that they have both epidermalized colonial ideology and found neurotic rather than political solutions to their internal conflicts. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1346
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies what epidermalization means practically: internalized colonial ideology expressed as pathology rather than politics.
- QUESTION: Does Fanon’s dismissal here prefigure critiques of contemporary therapy culture as depoliticizing?
- XREF: connects to: Fanon’s analytic aim is freeing blacks from colonial-produced complexes