Fanon on the Gaze, Antiblackness, and Lived-Experience

A discussion of Chapter Five from Black Skin, White Masks, with attention to how the white gaze both structures lived-experience in an antiblack world and is a primary site of the reproduction of an antiblack world. Fanon's claim that the white person (child, in his example) naming his raced body - "Look, a Negro!" - is the equivalent of shouting a racial slur underscores the proximity of everyday language to the racist structure of the interracial world. That racist structure flows through, and is dependent upon, the power of the white gaze to organize the epidermal structure of lived-experience - we are embodied in our relation to one another - around terms of hate, subjugation, and abjection. In other words, the power of the gaze to see and reproduce the location of the Black body in the zone of non-being.