White Skin, Black Friend: A Fanonian application to theorize racial fetish in teacher education

Abstract

In Black Skin, white masks (1967, Grove Press), Franz Fanon uses a psychoanalytic framework to theorize the inferiority-dependency complex of Black men in response to the colonial racism of white men. Applying his framework in reverse, this theoretical article psychoanalyzes the white psyche and emotionality with respect to the racialization process of whites and their racial attachment to Blackness. Positing that such a process is interconnected with narcissism, humanistic emptiness, and psychosis, this article presents how racial attachment becomes racial fetish. Such a fetish reifies whiteness by accumulating fictive kinships with friends of color; hence, the common parlance of ‘But I have a Black friend!’ The article, then, overlays this theoretical interpretation onto the subject of teacher education in the US, specifically urban teacher education programs that are predominantly comprised of white middle-class females who claim a desire to ‘save’ urban students of color. Ending with the dangers and hopes of a more humanistic friendship, this article offers emotional ways one can self-actualize the racialization process.

Keywords:

• whiteness
• race
• teacher education
• Fanon
• fetish

Notes

1. In order to recognize racialized language, this article will strategically capitalize words that reference people of color and recognize them as proper nouns. In an attempt to combat the white supremacy in language, racially dominant groups will appear in lowercase.

2. For the purpose of analyzing the systemic and individual nature of whiteness this article will use the term ‘whites’ both generally as a racial group who benefits from a structure of race and individually as white individuals who engage in or defy whiteness. I understand there are varying degrees of individuality, however, to understand both micro and macro levels of whiteness the analysis will engage both group and individual identities.

3. Just as Leonardo (2013) conceptualizes ‘raceclass’ as a process of analyzing both race and class in concert because one informs the other; motherscholar is a term I conceptualized because both terms inform the other and cannot be separated.

4. Per http://www.thefreedictionary.com/psychosis.

5. With respect to calling out hegemonic whiteness, I strategically employ Thandeka’s (1999) race game challenge by using the word ‘white’ in front of nouns in order to be race conscious instead of race blind.

6. Derived from personal communication with critical whiteness studies scholar Dr. Ricky Lee Allen.