Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is a very interesting read for anyone into African American Studies or critical race theory. I say it’s merely “interesting” and not “good” or “great” because a lot of the ideas expressed in it now seem terribly dated (this was published in 1951). Basically, Fanon’s main thesis is that the black man’s destiny is to be white. That kind of flies in the face of what critical race theorists of today believe and apparently, Fanon’s own position on this topic changed a few years after the book was published.

Some of what’s in this book is accurate at least to the extent of what I’ve seen happen in the black community (I won’t go into specifics here because some of it is a tad racist); however, Fanon wasn’t writing from the experience of a black man in America, but as a black man in Africa/Europe so to say that his writings spoke for the black experience as a whole would be misleading. Anyway, Black Skin, White Masks is an oftentimes harsh look into race relations that occasionally hits the mark with valuable insight, but is also sure to offend.