“ In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigaretters lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all of these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world - which seems to be the schema… . Below the corporeal schema I had sketched [there is] a historico-racial schema. The elements I had used had been provided for me … by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a psychological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more.
‘Look, a Negro!’ It was an external stimulus that flicked me over as I passed by. I made a tight smile.
‘Look, a Negro!’ It was true. It amused me.
‘Look, a Negro!’ The circle was drawing a bit tighter.
I made no secret of my amusement.
‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ Frightened!’
Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears but laughter had become impossible.”
- Frantz Fanon, “The fact of Blackness”, in Black Skin; White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 111-2.
