Paralysis occurs when you lose a function in an area of your body, or even your entire body. Your muscles slowly wither away. Physical therapy can help prevent muscle deterioration, but it still doesn’t help with your mobility most of the time. In Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” he speaks of his anger towards the world that view him as ‘the other”,  he shows anger to the fact that the world judge him based on his color,  shows anger to the world that views him as something “wrong”; because he is a black man in a white man’s world. And Fanon also shows sadness, sadness because the world he lives in won’t change, at least not in his lifetime. The white man’s world paralyzed him in every aspect possible, paralyzed in his mind to be subjected as only  a “negro”, paralyzed because of the box bestowed to him from birth. That he must act on the basis forced upon him and only them.

Fanon starts out straight to the point stating  “‘Dirty N*****!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a negro!’ I came into the world imbued with the will to find the meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other things,” (Fanon, p.1). Here, Fanon illustrates how in a white man’s world all that they see is a negro, but Fanon criticizes that, he questions it because he knows it isn’t right. Because why is it right that a person can be stripped of their humanity and described as an object because of their skin color? Fanon shows dreams and aspirations, but you see that he comes to a realization that those dreams are blocked because of how the world views him. Fanon states “My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that winter day. The Negro is an animal, The Negro is bad, the Negro is mean,” (Fanon, p. 3). Fanon illustrates descriptions that were put into people just because they have a dark complexion. No one is born with these thoughts; it was society that put those conceptions in place. Similar to Du bois he explains his confusion on how it is possible that he is a problem he states  “And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, peculiar even for one who has never been anything else,”(Dubois). Fanon, states how the white man’s world views black people, but he repeats these words as if he knows deep down they’re wrong. As he waits  for someone to say that he is beautiful, that he is a person, and everything that makes him who he is, makes him good. 

Fanon constantly tries to show that his color doesn’t define him, but society wants to put him in that box. It wants to keep him there because that’s where he should be. Fanon states “ The crippled veteran of the Pacific war says to my brother, ‘Resign yourself to your color the way I got used to my stump; we’re both victims.’ Nevertheless, with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has power to expand without limit. I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the cripple…I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep,”(Fanon, p.9). This illustrates that Fanon wants to fight the prejudice, he wants to be able to prove to the world that he is more than his color, he can soar into the sky and accomplish the unlimited because he can. But the world, and even some black people want him to accept the world for what it is, and stay in the box so we don’t become a problem. Fanon later weeps in defeat, because no one was there to tell him that he doesn’t have to stay in the box, he’s trapped; he’s paralyzed. 

Have you ever seen a caged bird? People have birds to look at them, stand still in that cage; paralyzed. Clip their wings to prevent them flying; so they can sit and sing for them. The bird does the same thing every day, 

“good bird”.

You’ve never allowed the bird to fly for so long that when it does you get surprised. 

“It’s soaring!It’s flying! Look it’s flying!” 

It continues to fly, it flaps its wings, it breathes the air of freedom, and it continues to fly. 

“Wait! Come back!” 

The bird continues to fly. The next week, you get a different bird and you put it in the cage,

 “This time you won’t leave.”

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