Current Reading

This blog is primarily for me to blog my responses to books that I'm reading. Sometimes I blog about other stuff too, though.

Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond.

Word cloud

Word cloud

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Black Skin, White Masks, Chapters 2 and 3

 These chapters mostly talk about interracial romantic relationships from the perspective of a black person, how status and skin color interact, etc. I think if I tried to summarize that fraught topic I'd just get myself in trouble. Also, a lot of chapter 3 is an analysis of some characters from a literary work who help illustrate his points.

I'll just note that Fanton gets to a very important issue on pages 50-51 when discussing a black character who had spent so much time in mainland France that he was, in many ways, a thoroughly French person. A white character encourages the black character to accept that fact and stop agonizing over being different from white people. That is a laudable sentiment as far as it goes, but the white character further implies that the black character is not "really" black. One needn't see color as everything to see that comment as troubling, because it implies a binary choice. Either the black character is "really" white or "really" black, rather than being a person with many experiences and relationships and affiliations.

I think this is building towards the individualist take promised in the intro.

No comments: