In at least two of the essays we’ve read so far, the authors have annotated the first time in their lives when they realized they were different, or that they were “Other” than what was widely acceptable. These essays include “The Souls of Black Folk,” by W.E.B. Dubois, and “The Fact of Blackness,” by Frantz Fanon. Similar to the slave narrative literary device of writing “I was born…” at the beginning of each narrative, these moments attempt (and succeed) in humanizing the authors and in turn the subject of the black body. All humans have a beginning, all of them are born from a family, all of them have values, and have the sense of self that the word “I” entails. DuBois and Fanon describe their state of consciousness before they came to the realization of their “otherness,” in pan-palatable ways, so that there is a lack of racial “inscription” they write upon themselves; in other words, they write themselves as the “every-person” for whom race isn’t a discriminating entity in their lives, up until a certain point.
Fanon writes of a harsh realization of his otherness when he looked at himself through the eyes of Caucasians. “The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other…Together we protested, we asserted the equality of all men in the world… And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes… The real world challenged my claims.” (Fanon) Although having fought for equality implies inequality, realizing his otherness came about later in life, when the world would “challenge” his claims of sameness. It represents a turning point in the way Fanon saw himself as a objectified in the Caucasian Western gaze. It implies that racism is a construct, a man-made ideology used to subjugate and partition people, and that otherness is not a natural phenomena (within humankind). If it were natural, it would not have to be taught or realized – there would be no need for a cognitive shift.
On the part of DuBois, he dictates his first encounter with otherness when he was a young boy interacting with a young Caucasian girl his age who refuses to accept a card he made because of his skin color. “It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first burst upon me, all in a day… The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card…Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others…” (DuBois) Before it “dawned” upon DuBois that he was different, he describes a typical “boyhood” and innocence. Similar to Canon’s account, a first-hand reality check began the fermentation process of otherness and separation from “good”.
We’ve seen delicate and careful rhetoric in both W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folk” and Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” in which both authors write on their first experience of racism; or awareness of their “blackness”. These accounts conclude that racism is unnatural and that every human being is inherently and irrevocably the same.
