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FOREWORD TO THE 2008 EDITION xix

outlook of Africa and Asia. The old European empires have been
replaced by a new Empire, a hyperpower that wants to rule and
mould the world in its own image. Its “war on terror” has become
a license to fl out every international law and notion of human
rights. Racism, both in its most blatant and incipient forms, is
the foundation of Fortress Europe—as is so evident in the re-
emergence of the extreme right in Germany and Holland, France
and Belgium, as well as Scandinavia, and the discourse of refugees,
immigrants, asylum seekers and the Muslim population of Europe.
Direct colonial rule may have disappeared; but colonialism, in its
many disguises as cultural, economic, political and knowledge-
based oppression, lives on.
So Fanon’s voice is as important and relevant today as it
was during the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, in many respects it is
even more so. For Fanon, the nature and mode of operation of
oppression is irrelevant. It is utopian to try to ascertain in what
ways one kind of inhuman behavior differs from another kind
of inhuman behavior. The inhumanity of today is not different
from the inhumanity of yesteryears for all sources of exploitation
resemble one another; they are all applied against the same
“object”: man. We need to do much more, Fanon insists, than
simply be aware of this reality: we need to take continuous action
to transform and transcend this reality.
As a critique of the West, Black Skin, White Masks has few
equals. But its true value is as a clarion call against complacency.
Fanon warns us to be perpetually on guard against the European
unconscious where the most shameful desires lie dormant; against
modern society where life has no taste, in which the air is tainted,
in which ideas and men are corrupt, and which spells death;
against the idea of progress where everyone climbs up towards
whiteness and light and is engulfed by a single, monolithic notion
of what it means to be human. And, most of all, he warns us
to be vigilant to the constant and perpetual refashioning of
hate: hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be
brought into being, in confl ict with more or less recognized guilt
complexes. Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to

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