Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty & the Interracial Experience, by Zahraa Scott
Introduction
Ideas function as the lenses through which we understand our lives. As a trainee existential psychotherapist from a mixed racial background, I have often found that the philosophical ideas that underpin psychotherapy (and academia more generally) have an implicit white bias. These ideas are taught to us as universal, but as human beings in a racialised society, we experience ourselves differently depending upon our own proximity to whiteness.
This essay is my attempt to explore the phenomenology, which means the lived experience, of people of Afro-European descent. I use the work of Franz Fanon, a black decolonial theorist, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a white psychologist, and apply these ideas as frameworks to understand my own, uniquely mixed racialised experience.
The aim of this piece is to shine a light on creative ways we might understand ourselves and others within a racial context. It is an academic piece of writing, so the language used is the language of philosophy and the social sciences. I hope to introduce these ideas to people who may not have heard of them before, and so include a list of terms below:
Key Terms & Definitions:
Dialectic: how opposing forces or ideas interact with one another
Gestalt: an organised whole that is experienced as more than the sum of its parts, such as our social contexts
Pure potentiality: a human being's freedom to choose what to do and who to be
Subject: a person understanding the world from their own, unique perspective
Historicity: the development over time of ways of understanding the world
The lived body: our experience of living within and through our bodies
Weltanschauung: a particular worldview
Phenomena: perceived things in our experience
Phenomenology: the study of how, as human beings, we experience life as lived
Decentered subject: someone who experiences themselves as outside of social norms
Socio-cultural: combination of social and cultural factors
Claiming the Border as Central:
Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty & the Interracial Experience
Human experience is both immanent, that is to say subjectively grounded within the body, and transcendent, which is to mean the capacity to take a distant view of oneself, as in recognising one’s self in the mirror, or executing personal reflection. This very statement is evidence of both points, as the ability to reflect on the phenomenological nature of human experience is both to be fundamentally within it and to take a certain stance by which to view it / oneself.
This idea is put forward in ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’ by phenomenologist and child psychiatrist Maurice Merleau-Ponty when he writes:
“The essence of consciousness is to provide itself with one or several worlds, to bring into being its own thoughts before itself, as if they were things, and it demonstrates its vitality indivisibly by outlining these landscapes for itself and then by abandoning them. The world-structure, with its two stages of sedimentation and spontaneity, is at the core of consciousness,” (Merleau-Ponty, p150)
Here Merleau-Ponty articulates the dialectic at play in the sedimentation of unconscious, habitual knowledge gained over time and the spontaneity of the present moment that characterises human experience. This essay will explore the complexities at play within this understanding of consciousness, in collaboration with the racialised understanding of experience put forward by psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon, and explore how both can elucidate the interracial experience from a phenomenological standpoint.
But what is it to be an ‘interracial’ person? Generally speaking, an interracial person is someone whose racial background stems from two or more different racial experiences, and in the Western world, is most commonly associated in media and literature with someone belonging to both Afro, or ‘black’ heritage and caucasian or ‘white’ heritage. Due to constraints, this essay will primarily focus on interracial individuals of Afro-European decent, as they represent a unique liminal juncture between racial discrimination and racial privilege that has yet to be explored phenomenologically in depth.
It is pertinent to point out that within post-colonial literature, the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ have been seen by some as problematic, stemming as they do from the justification of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the1600’s (Braveman, Dominguez, 2021) and the now obsolete categories of ‘red’ and ‘yellow’ peoples, all of which were placed in a subordinate hierarchy to whiteness. Defended by a racist version of Darwinian evolution, ‘whites’ were seen as the most human, and ‘blacks’ the least (Hannaford, 1996). It is therefore relevant that scholars have questioned these categories, some citing the inherent opposition that such categories create within identity politics and therefore arguing for their dismantlement (Anzaldúa, Keating, 2002).
However, the fact remains that these categories did exist in a very real sense for the millions of enslaved Africans and indeed all subjugated peoples, and because of this, the haunting echoes of which still persist today as structural racism. To dismiss an ideological framework on the grounds of prejudice is not to dismiss the lived experience of prejudice itself, which persists, and which therefore requires our nuanced attention. Merleau-Ponty himself writes of the ‘intermundane’ space between people, “where our gazes and perceptions overlap…there is only an elaboration world…there is only a signification world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p48). These ‘worlds’ are co-created by our engagement with ourselves and one another. Correspondingly, Linda Martín Alcoff, in using the Combahee River’s ‘Black Feminist Statement’ as her key text in understanding racialised identity, highlights that identity politics exists because there is a fundamental relevance of identity to politics itself (Alcoff, 2006). The two both inform and situate each other, and therefore no discussion of either can be complete without an exploration of both.
Therefore, the relevance of racialised identity to phenomenology and psychotherapy is emphasised, as the political, Gestaltian context within which we live our lives as subjects, as Merlau-Ponty argues, is what continually manifests us as such. As Lee emphasises: “Race does not function as a superficial cover over the surface of the primary layer of humanity; one lives race through the immediacy of the body” (Lee, 2012, Berfrois). What might an interracial person’s unique, phenomenological qualities be in contrast to someone from a racially homogenous background? Is this a relevant question? This essay seeks to begin the long journey into answering these queries.
Fanon writes of the unique black experience in Europe: “I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, and utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this decent into a real hell.” (Fanon, 1952, p10) Here Fanon addresses Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal work Being and Nothingness, which argues that as its fundamental heart, what it is to be a person is to have the nothingness of pure potentiality at one’s disposal (Sartre, 2003). Fanon suggests that: “this decent into a real hell” is not a freedom afforded to black people, as the black subject, in the paradoxical designation as both ‘person’ and ‘black,’ as both ‘subject’ and ‘subjugated,’ is placed in an impossible identity neurosis. Fanon’s critique of Sartre is emphasised therefore, by his understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s claim that: “we never experience two worlds at once” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p218), Fanon however, also shows that: “in the colonial setting, the “white world” is the only “true” world,” thus assigning a “political historicity to Merleau-Ponty's “world of meanings,”” and turning it “into a critical tool” (Mercier, 2023, p20), further analysis of which is forthcoming.
The relevance of Fanon’s work to this essay therefore, lies in his powerfully nuanced articulation of the differences within racial experience. This tallies with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of consciousness, as in placing the lived body as the primary site and subject of experience, his work opens up questions as to how different bodies might participate in and therefore come to understand the world. Merleau-Ponty writes of objects in the world as: “a collection of things which emerge from a background of formlessness by presenting themselves to our body as ‘to be touched’, ‘to be taken’, ‘to be climbed over’” (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p512), and in so doing opens up the question as to how the world and therefore oneself is to be experienced when subject to radical political or social constraints, such as those faced by enslaved peoples. Fanon answers this question beautifully, citing a deep alienation from the self: “that feeling of inferiority or that Adlerian exaltation, that overcompensation, which seem to be the indices of the black Weltanschauung” (Fanon, 1952, p.42). Characterising Fanon’s text is a passionately creative use of language, where he:“articulated a phenomenal and phenomenological, existential, ultimately political conception of language, without which his conception of subjectivity remains unintelligible” (Mercier, 2023, p15). It is through his unique use of language therefore, that he reveals himself authentically.
So how might people of Afro-European decent use language to better understand themselves? Mariana Ortega writes extensively on the liminality of “multiplicitous selves,” inherent within the interracial experience, and argues for a worldview she terms “hometactics,” which aim to: “produce a sense of familiarity in the midst of an environment or world in which one cannot fully belong, due to one’s multiple positionalities” (Ortega, 2016, p.182). Here we find a decentered subject, at odds with Merleau-Ponty’s claim of an inherent oneness of being. A conciliation of these two viewpoints could claim that while an interracial person’s sedimented socio-cultural experience is one of multiplicity and ambiguity, with two contrasting historicities at play within the self, nevertheless the interracial’s present-moment capacity for spontaneity, which is to say, their capacity to creatively blend these sedimented experiences at each moment, remains singular.
Latin America is an excellent locus for an exploration of interracial identity, possessing as it does a long history of racial mixture reflected in its language: e.g. ‘mestizo,’ ‘mulato,’ ‘indio’ etc. (Rappaport, 2014), all of which designate a different ethnic mixture category. It is in this context that Gloria Anzaldúa in her later writings, conceives of the nuanced concept of ‘nos/otras,’ from the Spanish ‘nosotras,’ meaning ‘us’ divided into the binary terms ‘nos,’ a feminine form of the word ‘we,’ and ‘otras’ meaning ‘otherness.’ In this way she describes the paradoxical state of the interracial subject (Ortega, 2016), as both an inherent part of their parental legacy and radically different from it.
It should be mentioned on this point that in the U.S.A, the policy of hypodecent is followed, whereby an individual with one black, African ancestor in their family tree is seen as black (Zack, 1993), which in turn prioritises the black experience in the way Afro-European interracial American individuals experience themselves. In contrast with Fanon’s experience of being alienated from his blackness by the colonial dominance of French culture; in the largely monolingual U.S.A, it is not language that designates identity, but that the ideology of racial category maintains ultimate race divisions. The policy of hypodecent echoes Nazi ideology as one that carefully gate-keeps ‘white’ as the locus of the few in power, yet it also is responsible for greater sense of connection between people of black African heritage in the United States (Degler, 1971), yet also disconnection; as in the assumption that to even identify as an interracial person is to deny one’s own blackness (Sundstrom, 2001). It is therefore challenging to point definitely towards a generalisable phenomenology of such a large demographic of people under so many differing political systems that dictate the sediment of their identity in such different ways.
And it is here that I will break traditional academic form to present myself as a phenomenological case study. For the majority of this essay I have been writing in the formal third person, the mode of academic speech of my English, French and German ancestors. I have talked of black and interracial people as “them,” disguising my inherent relation to them as a person of interracial heritage myself and holding them in ‘objective,’ disembodied language. So it is here that in the name of phenomenology I will situate myself as myself as the one who swings and sits between, as both, as neither. My political horizon is both of privilege, as when I speak to people over the phone with an English accent in Received Pronunciation and pass as ‘an old white woman,’ as a woman of colour who saw me for the first time only having ever spoken to me over the phone before noted, and yet as a definitely brown-skinned person who probably would not have passed the paper bag test.1 Wherever I go I am asked, ‘where are you from?’
I sit in a liminal space; Piarco International airport, Trinidad, the home of my maternal ancestors, waiting to head back to England, the home of my paternal ancestors. I feel at home here in the Caribbean, and yet it is the first time I have ever visited the island that I always understood, in colonial fashion, as “over there” (Spivak, 2010). The sediments characterising my experience are multi-coloured, multi-faceted and vague, as language speaks in absolutes and mine is a fluctuating, integrated experience of both extreme privilege and depravation; privately educated my entire school career, yet born on a Council Estate in inner-city Manchester; I have fourth-hand experience of the wounds of slavery, with deep disconnections from my Caribbean family due to trauma and displacement, yet I also have an English family crest replete with Latin motto: ‘recte faciendo neminem timeas,’ the rough translation of which reads: “do right and fear no one,” and from which I draw a subconscious sense of social and personal pride, reflected in my casual, relaxed physicality in the world.2 When I speak, I expect to be heard. My pain tolerance is high, both emotional and physical. I am relatively physically tall and powerful, and feel thirst only rarely, like my field-labouring ancestors. I am a person most easily in touch with world of ideas and the mind, to which my ancestors fled during slavery and subsequently, the ongoing traumas of WW1 and WW2. I cannot conclude myself; sometimes, the above does not explain me at all, for language is: “the subject's taking up of a position in the world of his meanings” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p225), and I have many positions with many meanings unified creatively in this paragraph.
And there you see that language itself, in its binaries and colonial categorical designations, has not yet developed enough to be able to articulate the ‘both-at-once’ experience of the Afro-European interracial individual, and yet this essay is a new articulation towards that. Phenomenologists must resort to hyphens, as in English translations of Martin Heidegger, and neologisms, as Anzaldúa presented; to almost poetic language that seeks to combine what has been politically divided for centuries, as Fanon brought us, and my new addition, self-referential academic writing that seeks to bring forth the pressure towards creativity afforded by such a dynamic and complex identity.
Learn more about Zahraa Scott and her work here
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