It Don't Matter If You're Black Or White (Except For When It Does)

This book should really be called 'The Second Race And Its Discontents', because I'm seeing a lot of Beauvoirisms and Freudisms, though perhaps Fanon was just trying to appeal to the adolescent boy market with all those references to genitalia.

Here's some Second Sex quotes that could easily be applied to 'Black Skin, White Masks', just replace women with 'Blacks' and men with 'Whites'.

"Woman has to be compared with man in her becoming"

"It is very difficult to give a generally valid description of the notion of female"

"Woman is her body ... but her body is something other than her"

"Woman's nature as suffering from natural defectiveness"

I find it interesting how it mentions that language can be used as a mask, especially after learning in Psychology how our language affects our perception of colour and time, and leaning in Anthropology how vital it is to learn the language of whatever culture you are studying, in order to become more immersed. The fact that colonised countries are still speaking English, French, and Spanish is an ugly reminder of Europe's past; Europeans took these countries' languages away from them, and they won't be getting them back.

Saying that having black skin is only a surface level thing and not symbolic of any black identity sounds quite controversial. It reminded me almost immediately of the 1969 White Paper, which proposed to eliminate the legal status of 'Indian'. It caused quite a bit of controversy, mainly because the Aboriginal community wanted to keep their identity, as assimilation would've meant the destruction of their culture.

Still, it makes me glad that this book was written over 50 years ago, and now racism is gone forever.

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Wait, it's not? Darn.

Like Downton Abbey, But In Book Form

I swear in the first 100 pages of this book, nothing actually happens. I can summarise the first 100 pages like this:

Catherine: likeable, if really, really naive and innocent. "A woman in love with one man cannot flirt with another" (140),  sorry to disappoint you Catherine but...
Her brother: nothing much going on there.
Isabella: seems nice enough (OR IS SHE?) and truly loves Catherine's characterless brother (OR DOES SHE??).
Her brother: I want to punch him in his stupid face.
Henry: dreamy, sarcastic love-boat (OR IS HE?).
His sister: nope, nothing much here either.

And X fancies Y but Y fancies Z while X's sister fancies Y's brother. But this takes 100 pages! And I still don't know what happens in a pump-room.

(pg. 5) Catherine is fond of "base ball"? I never even knew they had it back then. I mean, what did they put on their hotdogs?
(pg. 140) And I think many people would take issues with the statement that "No man is offended by another man's admiration [i.e. flirting] of the woman he loves". I think you'll find they usually are.

I'm having trouble connecting Shaun of the Dead to this book though. Is it just that outside influences (gothic novels) are dictating Catherine's actions without her thinking? If so (and that claim seems a bit dubious), I though Shaun of the Dead was more about satirising modern consumer day-in-day-out-everything-stays-the-same culture. I guess Northanger Abbey's characters do seem to be doing a lot of pump-rooming and not a lot else, but what else was there to do back then? You couldn't exactly go hand gliding or quad biking, your options were quite limited.

Great film though. Anyone who hasn't seen the films in the 'Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy' (as it's grown to be called) really should, they're three of the funniest films I know.