Page 7 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

FOREWORD TO THE 2008 EDITION

Ziauddin Sardar

I think it would be good if certain things were said: Fanon
and the epidemiology of oppression

The opening gambit of Black Skin, White Masks ushers us
towards an imminent experience: the explosion will not happen
*
today. But a type of explosion is about to unfold in the text in
front of us, in the motivations it seeks, in the different world it
envisages and aims to create. We are presented with a series of
statements, maxims if you like, both obvious and not so obvious:
I do not come with timeless truths; fervor is the weapon of choice
of the impotent; the black man wants to be white, the white man
slaves to reach a human level. We are left with little doubt we are
confronting a great deal of anger. The resentment takes us to a
particular place: a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and
arid region, where black is not a man, and mankind is digging
into its own fl esh to fi nd meaning.
But this not simply a historic landscape, although Black Skin,
White Masks is a historic text, fi rmly located in time and place.
Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo. It is the silent
scream of all those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the
hinterlands and vast conurbations of Africa. It is the resentment of
all those marginalized and fi rmly located on the fringes in Asia and
Latin America. It is the bitterness of those demonstrating against
the Empire, the superiority complex of the neo-conservative
ideology, and the banality of the “War on Terror.” It is the anger
of all whose cultures, knowledge systems and ways of being that
are ridiculed, demonized, declared inferior and irrational, and, in
some cases, eliminated. This is not just any anger. It is the universal
* Direct quotations from Black Skin, White Masks are set in italics.

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