ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how Fanon's thinking about blackness, as over determined from without; inform sociology of race and racism, including how blackness continues to operate as a vessel of otherness across the globe. Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), Fanon's examination of black identity, is an exemplar for considering the relationship between blackness, race, and colonialism. "The idea of the European excludes those categorically as non-European, as being not white. Frantz Fanon was born on July 20, 1925. He was educated in Martinique, where he counted writer Aime Cesaire as one of his instructors. Because of this background, as a youth he saw himself as French and the disavowal of that identity by French society later in life shaped his life's work. Blackness has historically been framed as a permanent otherness and inferiority in Western society. Black individuals are alienated not only from themselves but from white society.
