What Color Was the Blood? Frantz Fanon and Colonization from Within

I do not trust fervor ... fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent. --Fanon Frantz Fanon won my respect and made clear his intentions with one line when he said "Concern with the elimination of a vicious circle has been the only guidelines of my efforts" ... and so it should be ours as well. It is only through deconstruction of our fervor, understanding our own intentions, as best as we can, that we can even hope to make our actions anything other than guided steps in a vicious circle. Fanon ends his introduction to Black Skin, White Masks by speaking of a future book he might write concerning the Negro identity. He then adds of this unwritten book "Perhaps it will be no longer necessary--a fact for which we could only congratulate ourselves." We are here today to celebrate, and proliferate his work. In light of these words, however, the fact that we are here, and must be here, discussing his work, is no cause for celebration. It is a reminder that we are still walking in a vicious circle. I truly believe that "concern with the elimination of the vicious circle" exists within the heart and mind of everyone here today. When I first began to study sociology at this school some years ago, my rose-colored glasses led me to believe that increasing numbers of people worldwide wanted to end the vicious circle. I had, at first, altruistic hopes, then came the dangerous fervor Fanon speaks of, as I became angry and frustrated at the futility of my hopes. Then I became jaded, and began to hate, and feel that there was nothing I could do. Fervor was indeed the weapon of the impotent, and when it did me no good, all I had left was that impotence. Left to my own ill feelings I withdrew into myself, and it is there that I found new hope when a professor of mine helped me get out of an alcoholic and drug addicted spiral, and I began to study psychoanalysis alongside sociology. I realized I had very little power over myself at all, but that in the end, my self may be the only thing I have any hope of changing at all. I refocused my efforts on dissecting my hope, altruism, anger, frustration and hate ... and that is where I am now. I periodically, or perhaps daily, regress to each stage of the progression I just shared. It is always within my potential to be the bright-eyed idealist, the angry zealot, or the jaded misanthrope. But my hope is that I will always be able to return to the self-reflective calm that is the sum total of all three. The jaded part of me wants to tell you that any and all things I do are circular steps in the vicious circle, and that none of us will ever dissect our unconscious minds sufficiently to understand how to escape the destructiveness of our own natures. The bright-eyed idealist wants to tell you "love will conquer all." In the end, I need all those parts of myself to tell you the only truth I can recognize so far ... and that is: whether or not we can break the circle I will probably never know, but the fact that we are all here today attempting to locate ourselves and our social and personal structures within the construction of that circle means that we can at least try ... and for my money, that is cause enough to celebrate. Having said that one should examine oneself ... and that the only hope for breaking the vicious circle is to understand one's part in it, I shall have to admit to you that the original conception of this essay--the original paper I had planned to present--was written in fervor. When Fanon tells us fervor is dangerous I think I understand why, because my own fervor was as angry and hateful as that which it was directed against. I have retained the original title of the paper, "What color was the blood?" But I'll admit to you that I did not ask the question casually. If you could have been inside my head when I came up with it, you'd have been able to hear the real tone of my inner voice at that time. It was my last semester at UMass Boston. …