White Skin, White Mask

I had a very good time working on a project using Google Earth. I previously enjoyed Google Earth to "fly" to France or other places when subject to nostalgia attacks. This time I had an assignment in which I was asked to create an autobiography, or a narrative, using video, pictures or any other multimedia.


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I decided to concentrate this story on some places I traveled to that shaped my mental, political and social inner-landscape. Ultimately what came up was the issues of identity and physical reality. I became very aware of myself when I traveled to far places where all the cultural codes I embraced while growing up became then meaningless. The way I had to describe myself was much more complex than back home where the way I dressed and the way I talked was just enough to show to which group I belonged. But in other places my subculture was not relevant to the local way of life, in fact it did not mean anything to them because they were simply not familiar with these codes. For example In Burkina-Fasso (West Africa) the fact that my clothes were not expensive, that I had tattoos and piercings and that I worked as a dishwasher to pay for my trip was not very meaningful; I was from Europe and what people thought of Europeans was that they were rich. Their idea of Europeans is right because even with my “poorman job’s” income from France, there I was able to have a very comfortable life for few months. What I understood is that abroad, issues of economic and social status are intricately related to ethnic issues. My skin is white but my dad’s skin is brown. I never understood that my skin color gave me access to a particular status until my traveling experiences. Indeed I come from an under-privileged background on both sides of my family as for example none of my parents have a high-school degree. So even though at home I had all the tools and codes to resemble that who I am, once in a foreign place all these codes became obsolete, I had to make myself all over again.
I decided to call my exploration of Google Earth White Skin, White Mask in homage to Frantz Fanon who wrote Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. He was a black man born in a French colony of the Caribbean. When he traveled to France he studied psychoanalysis and worked in mental health clinics. He was then sent to work in Algeria, another French colony at the time. He became a very important voice in the independence movement of African colonies and an important thinker in the psychology of colonization. The white mask Fanon refers to in his book is the colonized mind of the colonized black man. Fanon described the phenomena of assimilation of the colonizer’s cultural codes and the inferiority complex inherent to it.

I believe that I use the term white mask in a more literate sense than Fanon does because I do not address the colonized mind as much as the perception others have of me due to my white skin despite my brown heritage. On the contrary, I have to say that my mind is well on its way in term of decolonization.