Whiteness and blackness are each lived as mythic, opposing existential essences

Evidence

I am white: that is to say that I possess beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of the daylight… . … I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. If I am black, it is not the result of a curse, but it is because, having offered my skin, I have been able to absorb all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth… . — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 165

Categorization

• DEFINE: Fanon models the two mutually exclusive worldviews the colonial subject oscillates between–the Manichean poles named earlier in the chapter.
• XREF: connects to: White solidarity as a racial identity was a myth obscuring shared exploitations — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 427; Blackness symbolizes Evil and Ugliness in white thought; White Americans distorted Black features, language, and culture to codify whiteness as its antithesis — Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype (+1 more)

Related

• White solidarity as a racial identity was a myth obscuring shared exploitations (similarity 0.82)
• White refusal to release the past drove blacks toward racial pride (similarity 0.82)
• The black man becomes black only in relation to the white man (similarity 0.81)
• The black man’s only perceived escape from insignificance leads into the white world. (similarity 0.81)
• White-imposed dehumanization drives the black subject to seek whiteness (similarity 0.81)
• Negritude writers inverted white stereotypes into self-affirmation (similarity 0.80)
• For the black man there is only one destiny, and it is white (similarity 0.80)
• Poor whites’ violent race consciousness reflects their own race-defined condition. (similarity 0.80)
• Black consciousness is immanent and whole, not a potential lacking universality (similarity 0.80)
• The racial epidermal schema replaces the corporeal schema under white regard (similarity 0.80)
• White acceptance of black intellectuals requires denying their genuine blackness (similarity 0.79)
• Black consciousness precedes the ego and resists external framing as a lack (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Blackness symbolizes Evil and Ugliness in white thought #expands (0.70)
• White refusal to release the past drove blacks toward racial pride #contradicts (0.50) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 444