OK, let's start with a paradox, a real living,
breathing contradiction that in a lot of ways
really defines the 20th century. Imagine a man.
Right. And this man dedicates his entire life
to healing the human mind. He's a doctor. A clinically
trained psychiatrist, someone who literally took
an oath to do no harm. Yeah. A man whose entire
job is to put broken people back together. Exactly.
But this same man, he looks at the world and
specifically he's looking at the colonial world
of the 1950s and he makes a diagnosis. Right.
And he decides that the political structure itself,
this whole system of colonization, is a form
of mental illness. And the prescription he writes
isn't therapy. No, it's not medication. It's
revolution. And we're not just talking about,
you know, peaceful protest. He prescribes violence
as a necessary, almost a medical treatment for
the soul of the oppressed. It's such a striking
image. Yeah. And it's not just some metaphor
he's using. For Frantz Fanon, the violence wasn't
theoretical. It was... So today we are diving
deep into the life, the mind, the revolutionary
fire of Frantz Fanon. And looking at this stack
of research we have here, I mean, we've got biographies,
military records, his own psychiatric case notes,
and of course, his two monumental books. It's
clear we aren't just talking about a history
lesson. No, not at all. We're talking about the
man who basically became the intellectual godfather
of just about every. major revolutionary movement
from the 1960s onward. Absolutely. You can trace
a direct line from Fanon's writing to, say, the
Black Panthers in Oakland. Right. Or the anti
-apartheid fighters in South Africa, people like
Steve Biko. To the Iranian revolution and even
to the academic debates on race and identity
that are happening right now today, he is somehow
the common thread through all of it. He really
is. But the question that just jumps out at me
from all these sources is, how? I mean, how does
a comfortable middle -class kid from the Caribbean,
a guy who grew up believing with all his heart
that he was French, end up becoming the ultimate
enemy of the French Empire? That is the journey,
isn't it? It's a tragedy in a way, but it's also
this incredible story of awakening. We're going
to see a man who... tries just desperately to
fit into a box. The box of the good French citizen.
The perfect French citizen. Yeah. And the world
just keeps smashing that box over and over again.
So we've got a roadmap for this deep dive. We're
going to start in Martinique to really understand
his upbringing. Then we'll look at the trauma
of World War II, which I think you could argue
is the first huge pivotal moment where that mask
he talks about starts to slip. For sure. And
then we have to really dig into his psychiatry
practice. I mean, how he completely revolutionized
mental health care in North Africa is a story
in itself. And then finally, the writing of The
Wretched of the Earth. Which he wrote while he
was dying of leukemia. Yeah. And we can't ignore
the end of his story. His death is, it's shrouded
in this Cold War mystery and involves the CIA.
It's a rabbit hole we definitely need to go down.
Okay, so let's rewind the tape. It's 1925, Fort
-de -France, Martinique. The source material
paints a picture that honestly was a bit surprising
to me. I think a lot of people assume a revolutionary
leader has to come from, you know, abject poverty,
from the bottom of the barrel. But Fernand? Not
at all. Fernand was comfortable. He was born
into the Martinican middle class, what they called
the bourgeoisie de couleur. His father was a
customs inspector. His mother ran a hardware
shop. They lived in a house where they spoke
French, not Creole. And that distinction, the
language, that matters immensely in that context.
Oh, it's everything. It's the dividing line.
In Martinique at that time, speaking proper French
was a huge status symbol. It separated the civilized
from the quote unquote primitive. Fanon was raised
from birth to believe that he was French, not
West Indian, not black, but French. So in school,
he's learning about the French Alps. The French
Revolution, our ancestors, the Gauls. Right.
And the colony was legally a department of France.
So the middle class, they completely bought into
this idea of assimilation. They clung to it.
He attended the Lycée Victor -Chauchat, which
was the most prestigious school in the entire
island. And when you look at the faculty list
from that time, there is a name that just junks
off the page immediately. Aimé Césaire. Yes.
And this is such a crucial intersection in his
life. Aimé Césaire was one of his teachers. Césaire
would go on to become this. massive political
figure, a poet. But more importantly, he was
one of the founders of the Negritude movement.
OK, so for anyone who might not be familiar with
that term, can we just quickly define Negritude
in this context? Sure. So Negritude was a literary
and ideological movement that really started
in the 1930s in Paris. Yeah. And essentially,
it was a profound rejection of French cultural
dominance. It was. Black intellectuals from the
Caribbean and from Africa coming together and
saying, wait a minute, we have our own history,
our own culture, our own soul, and it is valuable.
It was about reclaiming black pride. It was a
revolution in consciousness. So you have young
Fanon sitting in a classroom thinking of himself
as a French citizen through and through. But
the guy at the front of the room is the one saying.
Be proud of your African heritage. Reject the
French ideal. It's got to be planting some seeds.
Seeds, yes. But at 17, Fanon is still a patriot.
He believes in liberte, egalite, fraternite.
He really does. And when World War II breaks
out, that belief, well, it gets put to the ultimate
test. This is where the story takes a really
dark turn. The Vichy regime. When France falls
to the Nazis in 1940, the colonial government
in Martinique sides with Vichy. So they were
pro -Nazi collaborators. Yes. And this was the
first profound shock for Fanon. Thousands of
Vichy sailors were stationed in Martinique, and
suddenly that polite veneer of French republicanism
just evaporated. These sailors were openly, violently
racist. Fanon watched as the colonial authorities,
the Frenchmen he was taught to admire, started
behaving, as he later put it, like authentic
racists. It's like the mask came off before the
racism was maybe more subtle, more systemic.
But now you have white men in uniform literally
pushing black civilians off the sidewalk. Exactly.
And Fennin's reaction is so telling. He doesn't
just get angry and, you know, write a poem about
it. He decides to fight. He escapes the island.
And the escape story is just wild. He literally
runs away during his brother's wedding. He does.
It's the perfect cover. I mean, everyone is distracted,
celebrating, drinking. And Fennin just slips
away, gets on a boat to the neighboring island
of Dominica to join the Free French Forces. He
wants to fight the Nazis. He wants to save Mother
France. It's almost heartbreaking in hindsight.
Yeah. He is risking his life for a country that
is at that very moment treating his people like
dirt on his own island. But he believes in the
ideal of France. He really does. But that belief
starts to crumble pretty quickly. Yeah. He trains
in Morocco. And this is where the disillusionment
really starts to deepen. The Free French Army
was completely segregated. You had the white
officers at the top. Then you had the black African
troops, the Tiroars at the bottom. And then you
had the West Indians, like Fanon, sort of stuck
in the middle, considered more civilized than
the Africans, but certainly not equal to the
whites. So there's a hierarchy of oppression
even within the oppressed. Precisely. And then
he gets to Algeria. And for the first time, he
sees how the French settlers, the Pied Noir,
treat the local Arab and Berber population. He
witnesses this intense Islamophobia, this intense
anti -Semitism. He's starting to realize that
the liberators are also oppressors. But he keeps
fighting. I mean, he fights in the Battle of
Alsace. He takes shrapnel in the chest near Montbéliard.
He gets the Croix de Guerre, which is a major
medal for bravery. He's a war hero. You would
think at this point he has proven himself. He
is a hero of the Republic. He bled for France.
And that is where the ultimate betrayal happens.
The whitewashing. This is a historical event
called Blanchement. And it really explains Fanon's
entire future trajectory. I read about this in
the notes and I just had to pause. It feels like
such a cold, calculated erasure. It was absolutely
calculated. So you have to picture the scene.
It's late 1944. The Allies are pushing the Nazis
back. They are about to cross the Rhine into
Germany. This is the big moment, the symbolic
victory lap. The liberation of Europe. Right.
And Charles de Gaulle and the Allied command
decide that the liberating army that marches
into Germany needs to look. Well, French. And
by French, they meant white. Explicitly. They
ordered the Senegalese and Caribbean units, the
units that had been the tip of the spear that
had bled all the way across North Africa and
Italy, to be stripped of their uniforms and equipment.
No. Yes. And they gave that gear to white recruits,
some of whom were former resistance fighters,
but many were just fresh volunteers who had barely
seen combat. They literally replaced the experienced
black soldiers with inexperienced white soldiers
just for the visuals. Just for the photo op.
They sent Fannin and his comrades south to Toulon,
away from the action, away from the glory. Fannin
was sitting in a holding pattern while the white
troops marched into history. That has to be the
breaking point. The cognitive dissonance just
snaps. It did. We have a letter he wrote to his
brother, Joby, around this time, and he's just
devastated. He writes, I've been deceived and
I am paying for my mistakes. I'm sick of it all.
I've been deceived. I mean, that's the key phrase
right there. It is. He realizes that to France,
his body was useful for catching bullets, but
his face was unacceptable for victory. He realized
that no matter how brave he was, no matter how
French he spoke, he would never be French in
the way a white man was French. He was permanently
other. He was disposable. So the war ends. He
has his medal. He has his scars. And he has this
profound disillusionment. He goes back to France,
specifically to Lyon to study. And he just dives
into. Everything. Medicine, psychiatry, but also
literature, theater, and philosophy. This is
the intellectual incubation period. He's reading
Hegel, he's reading Marx, and he's attending
lectures by Maurice Merleau -Ponty. Okay, let's
stop there, because phenomenology is listed as
a major influence, and that's a heavy philosophical
term. How do we explain that to someone who hasn't,
you know, spent four years in a grad school seminar?
Right. Think of phenomenology as the study of
experience from the first -person perspective.
It's not just about what exists objectively out
there in the world. It's about how it feels to
exist. How do I experience my own body? How do
I experience the world? How do I experience you
looking at me? So for Fanon, it's not just an
abstract idea like racism exists. It's what does
it feel like in my gut, in my head, when a white
person looks at me with fear or disgust? Exactly.
It gives him the language to describe the internal
lived experience of racism. And this is what
leads directly to his first book, Black Skin,
White Masks. Which, and this is a fun fact from
the notes, was originally submitted as his medical
school dissertation. It was. He submitted a draft
titled Essay on the Desalination of the Black
and the faculty at the University of Lyon. They
rejected it. Too radical. Too subjective. They
basically told him it wasn't scientific enough.
It broke all the rules. It was mixing psychoanalysis
with philosophy and personal anecdotes and poetry.
So he quickly wrote a very boring, very technical
thesis on a neurological condition just to get
his degree. Just to check the box. Right. And
then he took the real work and got it published
as a book in 1952. So let's get into the meat
of black skin, white masks. The title itself
is such a powerful image. This idea that to survive
in a white world, the black man has to wear a
white mask. He is analyzing what he calls the
performance of whiteness. Fanon argues that in
a colonial society, the default setting for human
is white. So for a black person to be recognized
as human, they have to constantly perform to
distance themselves from their own blackness.
Right. They have to master the colonizer's language,
adopt their manners, their values. It's all about
trying to prove you're an exception. He talks
about language specifically. He says that when
a black Caribbean man speaks perfect Parisian
French, the white Frenchman is shocked. They
say, oh, you speak so well. Which is such a backhanded
compliment. It's totally backhanded. Because
what it implies is, I didn't expect a creature
like you to be capable of sounding like me. This
is what Fennan calls the zone of non -being.
Okay, this is the core concept we need to land.
The zone of non -being. It's an ontological hell.
It's a state of being where you are not granted
full humanity. Fanon argues that a white man
is just a man. He has the privilege of just existing.
But a black man is always a black man, first
and foremost. He is trapped by his skin. He is
defined by the white gaze. He exists in this
zone where his humanity is constantly up for
debate. He isn't fully being in the eyes of the
world. There is that famous gut -wrenching anecdote
in the book, the look a Negro moment. Yes, it's
devastating. Fanon describes being on a train
or in a public space, and a little white child
points at him and screamed to its mother, look
a Negro, I'm frightened. Wow. And in that moment,
Fanon says he is shattered. He ceases to be a
doctor, a war hero, a philosopher. He says, I
was an object in the midst of other objects.
He's reduced to nothing but a scary object. He
is just his skin. And the mask is the lifelong
attempt to escape that reduction. But Fanon's
ultimate conclusion is that the mask always fails.
It never works. It never works because the system
is rigged. No matter how much culture you absorb,
no matter how perfectly you speak the language,
the skin remains. The gaze remains. Now, when
he tried to get this published, he sent the manuscript
to an editor named Francis Jensen. And there's
a story here that I think really shows Fanon's
personality. He wasn't exactly looking for a
pat on the back. No, not at all. Jensen loved
the manuscript. He was blown away by it. So he
calls Fanon into his office to praise it. And
Fanon, sitting there, he's defensive. He's scarred
by all these experiences. He just snaps at him.
He says, not bad for a nigger, is it? Talk about
testing the waters. He's basically daring the
guy to be racist. He was waiting for the condescension.
He assumed Jensen was just another white liberal
who was going to patronize him. But Jensen didn't
do that. He got angry. He stood up and threw
Fanon out of his office. He kicked him out. Kicked
him out. He said something like, how dare you
speak to me like that? And that reaction, that
authentic anger, that refusal to play the game,
convinced Fanon that Jensen was real. They became
lifelong friends and allies. Real recognizing
real. Now, we do have to pause here and address
the critique of this book. We're reading this
now, but it was written in 1952. And the notes
highlight some pretty serious issues, especially
around gender. It's crucial to be honest about
this. I mean, black skin, white masks is a masterpiece
of race theory, but it's gender politics are.
They're deeply flawed by today's standards. Fanon
is often very dismissive of black women. He critiques
them for wanting to marry white men as a form
of social climbing. But his analysis of black
men who desire white women is much more sympathetic
and complex. And there are passages about homosexuality
that are, they're rough to read now. Very rough.
He equates what he calls negrophobia with repressed
homosexuality in a way that is medically and
socially offensive by modern standards. He was
a man of his time. And while he could see the
cage of race with his incredible clarity, he
was still trapped in the cages of sexism and
homophobia of that era. It's a reminder that
these thinkers are complex, not saints, but humans
grappling with their own limitations and blind
spots. Absolutely. OK, so he's got his medical
degree. He's got the book published. Now he needs
a job. And in 1953, he accepts a position as
the chef de service, the chief of staff at the
Bleda Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria.
And this is where the theory just smashes into
reality. You have to understand what psychiatric
care was like in the 1950s, especially in a colony.
It was basically custodial. It was about warehousing
people. Straight jackets, heavy sedation, grim
cells. Exactly. And the prevailing theory among
the French doctors there was famously racist.
The Algiers School of Psychiatry actually taught
that North Africans had primitive... underdeveloped
brains. They literally medicalized their own
racism. They argued that the nadir was violent
because his brain stem was more developed than
his cortex. Shocking, but yes. And Fanon walks
into this system and says, this is all garbage.
He starts a revolution inside the hospital walls.
He introduces what was then a radical idea called
sociotherapy. What does that actually look like
in practice? It means treating patients like
human beings with a culture and a history. He
unchained them. He got rid of the straitjackets.
He set up a cafe inside the hospital. He organized
football matches between wards. He brought in
traditional Algerian storytellers and musicians.
He even created a newspaper for the patients
to write in. So he was trying to rebuild the
community that the asylum and, by extension,
the entire colonial system had destroyed. He
believed that mental illness wasn't just some
biological defect. It was social. He argued that
if you treat a patient with dignity, if you reconnect
them to their culture and their social world,
they start to heal. And it worked. The whole
atmosphere in the hospital transformed. But while
he's creating this little oasis of sanity inside
the hospital, the world outside is going completely
insane. November 1954, the Algerian War of Independence
begins. The FLN, the National Liberation Front,
launches its first attacks against fresh rule.
The French army responds with absolutely brutal
crackdowns, torture, collective punishment, and
Fanon is caught in the ultimate double life.
This is the part of the story that feels like
it's straight out of a suspense thriller. He
is a French government employee running a state
hospital. But secretly... Secretly, he's part
of the rebellion. He's treating the FLN fighters.
They're sneaking into the hospital at night,
or he's hiding them in the wards, disguised as
patients or orderlies. He's patching up bullet
wounds, teaching them how to manage the psychological
trauma of being hunted. But, and here is the
core paradox of this period, he's also still
treating the French police officers and soldiers.
By day. The French torturers, the police and
soldiers who were interrogating the FLN suspects,
are coming to Dr. Fanon for therapy. They are
traumatized by their own violence. Wait, just
let's sit with that for a second. He is treating
the victim of torture and the torturer in the
same building. Sometimes on the same day. He
describes a case in his writings where a French
police inspector come to him complaining that
he can't sleep because he keeps hearing the screams
of the men he tortured. And what does the inspector
want? He wants Fanon to cure him. to make the
nightmares go away so he can go back to work
and torture more effectively. That is just sickening.
And for Fanon, that must have been the moment
of absolute clarity. You can't cure the inspector.
The inspector isn't the one who is sick. The
entire system is sick. That is the profound realization.
He saw that psychiatry was useless, even fraudulent,
if the society itself was designed to produce
trauma. You cannot heal a man's mind if you are
just going to send him back into a world that
is fundamentally trying to break him. He realized
that the colonial system was a pathogen. So he
has to make a choice. And in 1956, he resigns.
And he writes this letter to the resident minister
that is basically a declaration of war. It's
one of the most powerful resignation letters
in history. It's just electric. He writes, there
comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty.
Silence becomes dishonesty. It gives me chills
every time I read it. He says he can no longer
be responsible for sending back to the oppressor
a man who has been made whole. only for him to
be broken again. He resigns his post, and the
French government obviously expels him from Algeria.
But he doesn't go back to Paris to sip coffee
in a cafe and write memoirs. He goes to Tunis,
which had become the headquarters of the rebellion
in exile. He joins the FLN officially and becomes
their voice to the world. He becomes a journalist
for their newspaper, Al Mujahid. But he's not
just a writer, is he? He becomes a diplomat.
He serves as the ambassador to Ghana for the
provisional Algerian government. Yes, he's traveling
all over Africa, Accra, Addis Ababa, Cairo. He's
meeting with leaders like Kwame. and Nkrumah.
What was the strategy there? Was he just trying
to get political support and recognition? It
was that, but it was also highly logistical.
He was trying to open a southern front. The French
Navy had the northern coast of Algeria completely
locked down. Fanon's idea was to run supply lines
of weapons and medicine across the Sahara Desert
from countries like Mali and Ghana into southern
Algeria. He was trying to unite the African continent
against imperialism, practically speaking. He
was. And while he's doing all this, he writes
another book, A Dying Colonialism. Yeah. And
there's a section in there that I think is just
fascinating with the sociology of a revolution.
He talks about two objects, the veil and the
radio. This is Fanon the analyst at his best
looking at how culture changes under pressure.
Exactly. So take the radio. Before the war, the
average Algerian peasant didn't own a radio.
They saw it as the voice of France, this foreign
object broadcasting in a language they might
not even speak. But once the FLN started broadcasting
the voice of fighting Algeria from Tunis... Suddenly,
everyone needed a radio. It became a lifeline.
The object itself completely changed meaning.
It became an instrument of liberation. And he
does the same analysis with the veil, which is
such a loaded symbol, especially today. It really
is. So Fanon analyzed it tactically. The French
colonizers were obsessed with unveiling Algerian
women. They would hold these big public ceremonies
where women would take off their hakes. And the
French would frame it as liberation. We're saving
you from your oppressive culture. Exactly. So
naturally, the Algerians resisted by clinging
to the veil even tighter. It became a powerful
symbol of national resistance. But then it flips
again, doesn't it? It flips again. The FLN realized
that the French soldiers at checkpoints were
less suspicious of women who looked westernized.
So female revolutionaries started taking off
the veil, putting on makeup and European dresses,
and carrying bombs and messages in their handbags
right through the checkpoints. Wow. Then later,
they'd put the veil back on because now the French
were suspicious of the westernized women, and
they'd hide submachine guns under the flowing
cloth. Danon shows how the culture was never
static. It was fluid. It was a weapon of war.
So decolonizing the mind isn't just some abstract
idea. It's about repurposing the very tools and
symbols of your own culture to fight back. That's
it. Exactly. But as he is doing all of this,
I mean, the man is traveling constantly, writing,
strategizing, running guns. His body is failing
him. It's 1960. He's just completed this exhausting,
dangerous trip across the Sahara to try and open
that southern front. He returns to Tunis completely
wiped out. losing weight, and he gets the diagnosis.
It's leukemia. He knows he's dying. He's only
35 years old. And what does he do? He doesn't
rest. He decides he has one last fight in him.
He has to write his magnum opus. The wretched
of the earth. And he didn't even have the physical
strength to type it. He dictated it. Yes, he
dictated to his wife, Josie Fannin. He was in
a race against the clock, pacing the room or
lying in bed, just pouring out all his final
thoughts. He wanted to leave a manual for the
revolution before he died. This book is... Well,
it's been called the Bible of decolonization,
but it is also, without a doubt, his most controversial
work. And that's primarily because of that first
chapter concerning violence. This is where we
have to be very precise. Bannon is so often caricatured
as this, you know, prophet of bloodlust, someone
who just wanted to kill white people for the
sake of it. And that is a fundamental misreading
of his argument. He's not celebrating violence.
He's diagnosing it. He's analyzing it structurally.
His argument starts from a simple premise. Colonization
is violence. It is not a polite agreement. Right.
He says the settler's town and the native's town
are divided by barracks and police stations.
The only thing holding the colony together is
force. The colonizer didn't show up with flowers
and debate points. He showed up with cannons
and guns. So for Fanon, the colonial world is
a world of violence in its natural state. It's
already violent. So when the native finally fights
back, it's not the introduction of violence into
a peaceful situation. It's a response in the
only language the colonizer has ever used, the
only one he understands. Exactly. And this is
where it gets psychological. He compares the
colonized person to a man who is being held down,
muscles constantly tense, filled with this repressed
rage. Violence, for Fanon, is the release of
that pressure. He calls it a cleansing force.
That's the phrase that scares people, a cleansing
force. It's a deeply uncomfortable phrase. But
what he means is that for the colonized man,
who has been told for centuries that he is weak,
that he is stupid, that he is submissive by nature,
the act of striking the master is a profound
psychological liberation. It proves to himself
that the master isn't a god. He's just a man.
He's mortal. It restores the native self -respect.
It shatters that zone of non -being. If I can
hit him, he is human. And if he is human, then
so am I. But, and this is the part people who
criticize him often skip, the wretched of the
earth is not just about fighting the white man.
The second half of the book is this desperate,
passionate warning about what happens after the
revolution succeeds. This is the concept of neocolonialism.
and what he calls the national bourgeoisie. And
this is where Fanon becomes prophetic. Absolutely
prophetic. He looks at the newly independent
African nations around him, and he sees a new
class rising up. It's the local middle class,
the lawyers, the doctors, the bureaucrats, who
are educated by the colonizer. And he says they
just step into the shoes of the white colonizers.
They move into the governor's mansion, they drive
the limousines, they wear the suits, but the
oppressive system stays exactly the same. Fanon
calls them the national bourgeoisie, and he is
scathing. He says they have no original ideas.
Their only ambition is to become the business
agent for the Western powers. They facilitate
the extraction of their country's resources,
just like the colonizers did. But now they take
a cut for themselves. So for the peasant out
in the village, the flag on the flagpole changes,
but the poverty remains. The police are still
brutal, but now the policeman looks like them.
And Fanon hated this class. He called them lazy.
and useless. He warned desperately that if the
revolution didn't truly empower the rural masses,
the actual wretched of the earth, it would all
be for nothing. It would just be replacing one
master with another. Which is depressingly accurate
for so much of the post -colonial history of
the 20th century. It is exactly what happened
in country after country. And that's why the
book is still read so widely today, not just
for the part about revolution, but for the part
that explains what went wrong afterwards. So
he finishes the book. It's an incredible achievement.
He even manages to travel to Rome to meet Jean
-Paul Sartre. Right. And Sartre is so impressed
he agrees to write the preface, which is a huge
endorsement. It puts Fanon on the global intellectual
map overnight. But Fanon himself is fading fast.
He needs specialized treatment for the leukemia.
He goes to the Soviet Union first. And they put
him on some experimental drug that actually induces
a brief remission. He feels better for a moment.
He thinks he might have beaten it. But then he
relapses hard. And his comrades in the FLN tell
him, look, the best leukemia treatment in the
world is in the United States. Specifically.
the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda,
Maryland. This is the twist that just feels like
it's out of a John le Carre novel. The United
States, the heart of the capitalist empire he
despised, is the only place that might save him.
And who arranges the trip? The CIA. It is just
bizarre. A CIA agent named Oliver Iceland handled
the logistics. Finan was flown to the U .S.,
but when he got there... He wasn't admitted immediately
to the hospital. And there's a huge controversy
here, right? A massive one. He was kept in a
hotel room in Washington, D .C. for several days.
During that time, he developed pneumonia. He
was weak, freezing and untreated. Some biographers
and historians like Lewis Gordon note that it
has become orthodoxy in some circles to suggest
this was deliberate. That the CIA wanted to debrief
him or maybe just let him die? Exactly. Others
argue it was just bureaucratic incompetence that
they were figuring out logistics. We'll probably
never know the full truth. But eventually he
is admitted to the hospital under a fake name.
Ibrahim Omar Fanon. But by then it was too late.
He died on December 6, 1961. He was 36 years
old. 36, that is just, it's incredibly young.
And he died just months before Algeria officially
won its independence in 1962. He never got to
see the victory that he gave his life for. His
body was flown back to Tunisia, and then the
FLN smuggled him across the border into Algeria.
He was buried in a martyr's graveyard on Algerian
soil as he had wished. But if the man died, his
ideas were just getting started. Let's talk about
the legacy. Because the wretched of the earth
hits the shelves right after he dies, and it
just catches fire. Especially in the United States.
Oh, you cannot tell the story of the Black Power
movement in America without Frantz Fennel. It's
impossible. The notes we have mention that Bobby
Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party,
specifically brought the book to Huey P. Newton
when he was in jail. It became their handbook.
Yeah. The Panthers made it required reading for
all new members. If you wanted to join the party,
you had to read Phenom. So how did it shape them?
Was it just the concerning violence chapter?
No, I think that's a simplification. It was the
whole analysis. It was the community part. Look
at the Panthers' Ten Point Program. They demanded
an education that taught their true history.
They demanded an end to the robbery by the white
capitalists. This is pure Fanon's language. And
the community programs, like the Free Breakfast
for Children program, that connects back to Fanon's
sociotherapy, doesn't it? Absolutely. Fannin
taught that you have to restore the humanity
and dignity of the people first, feeding children,
providing free medical clinics. This was about
showing the black community that they were worthy
of care. It was about building that new man that
Fannin was always talking about. And his influence
wasn't just in the U .S., Steve Biko in South
Africa. Biko's black consciousness movement is
deeply, deeply indebted to Fannin. You know that
famous Biko quote, the most potent weapon in
the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the
oppressed. That is a direct riff on Fanon. Right.
Biko understood that before you can fight apartheid
laws on the books, you have to fight the inferiority
complex that apartheid puts in the black mind.
And Che Guevara. Che was a fan. He was particularly
interested in Fanon's theories on the peasantry
being the true revolutionary class, not the urban
proletariat like in classical Marxism. Even in
Iran. An intellectual named Ali Shariati used
Fanon's ideas to help frame the Islamic revolution.
The idea of rejecting Western cultural intoxication
and creating a new authentic man. That is amazing.
A secular atheist psychiatrist from the Caribbean
is influencing Islamist revolutionaries in Tehran.
That just shows you the power and universality
of his diagnosis of the colonial condition. It
does. And that legacy continues right up to today.
In academia, you have a whole field called Afro
-pessimism thinkers like Frank B. Wilderson III.
They take Fanon's zone of non -being and they
argue that it wasn't just a feature of colonialism.
They argue it's still the basic operating system
of the world. That civil society itself is structured
around anti -blackness. So Fanon is not just
some historical figure. He's a lens for understanding
our world right now in 2026. He absolutely is.
And that really brings us to the big so what.
Why should someone listening to this right now,
maybe you're driving to work, maybe you're at
the gym, why should you care about Franz Fanon?
For me, it brings us right back to the beginning.
It brings us back to the masks. It does. Fanon
asks us to look at the performances we all put
on. I mean, we might not be living in a formal
colony, but we all live in a world of hierarchies,
economic, racial, social. How often do we code
switch? How often do you change your voice, your
clothes, your opinions, just to fit into a zone
of being that has been defined by someone else?
And that warning he gave about neocolonialism
is just haunting. We see it play out every time
a man of the people gets elected and then proceeds
to sell out his country to the highest corporate
bidder. The national bourgeoisie is alive and
well. And Fanon's ultimate question remains completely
unanswered. Once you defeat the monster, how
do you make sure you don't become the monster?
That is the heavy thought we're going to leave
you with. On his deathbed, dictating his final
words, Bannon said this, Let us not pay tribute
to Europe by creating states, institutions, and
societies which draw their inspiration from her.
For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity,
comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must
work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a
new man. He wanted us to invent something new.
Not to copy the West, not to just react against
the past, but to create a completely new definition
of what it means to be human. And looking around
the world today, I think it's safe to say we
are all still working on that assignment. We
definitely are. Thank you for diving deep with
us into the revolutionary fire of Frantz Fanon.
It's a heavy topic, for sure, but an essential
one. It was a pleasure, as always. We'll catch
you on the next deep dive. Keep thinking.