“White Skin, Black Masks: Teaching
Francophone Culture in Arkansas”
By Phillip Bailey
A white student in an advanced French class asks: “Dr. Bailey, why do you want to be black?”
During an office visit, an African-American student looks at her curly brown-haired, blue-eyed, pale
pink-skinned professor and asks: “Are you all white? I mean, where are you from?” A day after
listening to an hour-long introductory lecture for a course entitled “Issues of Cultural Identity in the
French-speaking World” a student returns to discuss the class further and reports: “You know, as we
left your office yesterday, one of us said: ‘His wife must be black.’” These comments represent some
of the thoughts that have occurred to students in my office and classroom. The fact that these
thoughts were vocalized makes one wonder about the countless others that have gone unexpressed as
students are asked, perhaps for the first time, to explore the issue of race in the classroom and their
home communities.
The title of this essay attempts to crystallize these and other experiences that have arisen as I
have taught issues of cultural identity and race in Francophone cultural studies classes at the
University of Central Arkansas. Specifically, in reversing the terms of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks, I wish to highlight what I see as the suspicion in several of my students’ reactions to
my interest in examining the impact of race on the cultural identities that exist in, for instance,
Martinique or Guadeloupe. In suspiciously accusing me of “wanting to be black,” in suggesting that
my wife must be black, or in naively asking if “I am all white,” the various students I quoted earlier
were expressing an assumption based on the premise that it is unnatural or at least unusual for a
white professor to express an interest in exploring the racial issues that characterize the post-colonial
cultures of the French Antilles and Francophone Africa, much less try to extend this analysis to
Arkansas. These students were suspicious that I had some ulterior motive that stemmed either from
an excessive desire to be black or from a personal relationship with a black person. The AfricanAmerican student who questioned my racial background presents a similar, if sadder, case of
suspicion. To place her question in context, I should state that she was in my office to discuss a
class I was teaching that did not have anything to do with French or Francophone culture. Because
of my fondness for jazz and my penchant for sticking up postcards all around my office and on my
door, she probably noticed the images of Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Bessie Smith among
the numerous photos on the walls, and this may in part explain the inspiration for her question.
However, I fear that the real reason she could not believe she was speaking to a “white” professor,
was because I had just spent a half hour asking her about her academic goals trying to help her make
the transition to college life. In so doing, I may have been showing her a personal attention she had
perhaps never before received from a white person and thus despite all physical evidence to the
contrary, she was moved to question my racial origins. Even factoring in the perhaps “exotic” sound
of my Minnesota mumble to a southern ear, I concluded that her surprise at my simply treating her
as I do all students, of recognizing her as an individual in whose success I was willing to invest my
time and energy, arose because she was unaccustomed to having her humanity recognized by whites.
She thus logically questioned my background, because in her experience, my actions could not be
explained except through the prism of race.
I compare this experience with an African-American student to the more accusatory suspicions
of the white students whom I quoted, because both call into question the origins and motivations of
one’s ability to empathize with people of other races and cultures. In response to the student in a
French course who accused me of “wanting to be black” because I tend to bring up race-related
issues of cultural identity in the Francophone world, I simply stated that I do not think it is honest to
discuss “le rayonnement du français dans le monde,” without examining the issues of assimilation,
alienation, and cultural exploitation that define so much of the history of what it means to be a
French speaker in Guadeloupe, Martinique, Niger, or Senegal.
After teaching units or courses on Francophone culture to several groups of students both in
French and in translation, I have become keenly aware of the difficulty and the importance of raising
the subject of race in my classes. I hope that my attempts to make sense of my students’ reactions to
the discussion of certain texts and films will inspire others, who have perhaps not yet explored the
issues of race and cultural identity in their French classes, to turn to the works of Aimé Césaire,
Frantz Fanon, Joseph Zobel, and others as a means of providing students with the critical vocabulary
necessary to discuss matters that they all too often avoid, because of a combination of ambivalent
feelings born of guilt, anger, ignorance, and fear.
The psychological dynamics I have noted in my classroom closely parallel the critical reflection
one sees in the literature on discussing diversity in the classroom. While my interest lies in
discussing how the study of Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism or Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
can free up an otherwise reticent group of students to explore their own culture’s racial prejudices,
stereotypes, and blind spots, it is clear that my analysis will not revolutionize the field. I do,
however, believe that I have found this material so effective in breaking down barriers in my
classroom, in student journals, or in my office, because of several important aspects inherent in the
process of American, and perhaps specifically Arkansan,1 students studying Francophone culture.
In a recent article on teaching Francophone culture in translation in the American Association
of Teachers of French National Bulletin, Elizabeth A. Blood notes that she “quickly discovered that
students at [her] institution [Mercyhurst College] sometimes found it difficult to discuss politicallycharged subjects in the classroom, such as race and religion.” (34). Her suggestion that it is often
“easier for students to talk about things like the effects of colonization, language prejudices, racism,
and independence movements in Martinique, rather than to talk about these topics in relation to
Puerto Rico, which hits closer to home” could not be more to the point (34). Experienced
practitioners of multiculturalism in the classroom such as history professor Peter Frederick
underscore the importance of providing just this sort of cultural, emotional, and psychological
distance when he quotes a white professor lamenting: “With diversity issues I enter into a mine field.
I’m groping for a way to connect students with different backgrounds. But how do you open a safe
place for talking?” (83). Several of Professor Frederick’s helpful strategies for creating a “safe”
environment for discussion include using “powerful visual images” (85), the necessity of providing
students with “analytic frameworks to shape the material” (88) and “a common language”(88) to be
used in discussing several “good texts,” which serve to stimulate analysis at a safe distance.
Frederick suggests a wide array of visual imagery including cartoons, photos, and film. Few
films I know of can more quickly and effectively provide students with the common ground they
need to begin exploring race than Euzhan Palcy’s masterful interpretation of Joseph Zobel’s Black
Shack Alley. Having first taught a course in Francophone culture during my university’s three-week
May Intersession, I found that the film, Sugar Cane Alley,2 quickly makes a powerful impression on
students and provides numerous visual examples of cultural themes that we explore more in depth
in, for instance, extracts from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. In the typical college classroom,
one can easily overestimate the apparent shared cultural experience of African-American and white
students. White and black students appear to enter college in Arkansas with little prior experience
with discussing race. One student said that attempts to discuss race in high school “always led to a
big argument,” so he preferred to avoid the subject. Although students often acknowledge the racial
tensions that exist in their home communities, stating, for example, that African-American students
in one local high school all had their lockers in the same hallway, which by “general consensus” was
called the “ghetto,” or that students called one dormitory on campus the “ghetto” because it housed
so many African-Americans, many, if not most, do not even consider that these names and
segregationist traditions are derogatory. And yet these are the topics that inevitably arise during the
course of discussing the film. On one occasion, a student from a city in western Arkansas, stated
after watching Sugar Cane Alley in my home, that it reminded her of something that happened a few
years before at a homecoming event in her high school gym: “That reminds me of the time someone
threw a lynching noose out onto the gym floor as our black homecoming king escorted his white
princess across the floor.” The sad truth of the matter is that no one in the gym said a word in
protest. Perhaps the even sadder truth is that the student was surprised that watching the film had
triggered that memory, which apparently might have otherwise not stood out in her past.
One of the great assets of Palcy’s film is that it presents students with the framework in which
to discuss the issues of cultural identity that appear in the works of so many Francophone writers:
assimilation, alienation, exploitation, and cultural resistance and affirmation. Carmen, who
prostitutes himself with a rich white woman as he dreams of becoming a great actor in Hollywood;
the movie theater cashier, who, at the sight of a thief, cries that she is ashamed of her race and will
marry a white man to whiten her children’s skin; José, the hero; Ma Tine, his grandmother; and
Médouze, the griot and spiritual father to José, all provide vivid examples that make the discussion
of more difficult texts such as Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism or Notebook of a Return to
the Native Land more accessible.
The film’s clear presentation of the racial hierarchy of 1930's Martinique, where the haughty
béké rides his white horse while French-speaking mulattos play overlord to the inhabitants of Black
Shack Alley greatly reduces students’ resistance to and difficulty in understanding the selected
chapters we read in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. While one can refer to the pathetic figure of
Michael Jackson in order to bring home the reality of a modern-day sufferer of the racial inferiority
complex Césaire and Fanon describe, it does seem that students are much more willing to make this
connection, and others, when first exposed to the film and the theoretical framework of Césaire and
Fanon. The importance of providing students with even the simplest terminology can be seen in one
student’s thanking me for teaching her the term mulatto, because it allowed her to have a “name” to
call her nephew. It was as if the grateful student was saying, “Ah, he’s not a monstrosity, he’s a
mulatto, he’s a boy.” Although most would balk at calling a “success” the realization represented by
this student’s sense of relief at having a racially-based name to call her nephew, in a family where
the mother of the child had become a total pariah, it was an important first step, for at least one
relative, to see the family with the emotional distance provided by the class subject matter. I will
return to the role of the students’ family in their ability to discuss race in the classroom, because this
is clearly an essential aspect of the “distance” students are confronted with when they are asked to
take that giant step back away from their mother or grandfather to acknowledge and come to terms
with a family member’s no longer acceptable stereotyped or racist world view.
I have found that Black Skin, White Masks’ introduction, first chapter—“The Negro and
Language”—and final chapter, “By way of Conclusion” are sufficient to provide the theoretical
framework that students need to apply the lessons of Sugar Cane Alley to other works and their own
lives. Indeed, after reading Fanon’s discussion of the role of language in the Martinican’s desire to
assimilate into French culture, one student came to my office to tell me of a high school friend
whose father was African-American and whose mother, Hispanic. The friend was attending the high
school in town that my student described as the “white” school. Ashamed of her Hispanic surname,
she asked the principal not to use it during the commencement ceremony. In this case, Fanon’s
analysis illuminated the alienation behind my student’s friend’s shame.
By providing the “powerful visual images” that Frederick recommends, Sugar Cane Alley
illustrates the chapters we read in Fanon to build the common ground needed for further classroom
discussion. Although one can certainly argue that I am presenting students with a truncated version
of Fanon’s writings and even of this one book, I believe that there is a strong justification in doing
so. The white student who asked me whether I wanted to be black was manifesting a very common
defensive reaction to the perception that she was being asked to feel guilty about the racial injustices
that we were discussing in class. As Frederick explains, many students, “mostly white or male” need
help getting over “their instinctive first response . . . which is the expectation that they are going to
be made to feel guilty by how badly minorities have been treated. This leads them to feel a degree
of defensiveness, resentment, guilt, or self-loathing, which blocks their learning rather than helping
it” (89).
Similarly, in presenting the five stages of Hardiman’s and Jackson’s (1992) “social identity
development model,” Diane Goodman highlights the fact that members of a dominant group who are
in stage two, the “acceptance stage,” in which they are confronted with the underlying inequality of
the dominant group’s discriminatory behavior, will often deny that there is a problem and express
“anger at having to deal with it or somehow be implicated in it” (48). Such reactions are common in
my classes and usually follow the paradigm: “Why should I feel guilty about this? What can I do
anyway? It’s not my problem. My grandfather didn’t have any slaves. Why can’t those people just
get over it and get on with life? We’re all equal now!” Of course such comments do momentarily
put a damper on classroom discussion, but they also characterize the most entrenched obstacle to
overcome in discussing race in the classroom and explain why the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks
is particularly well suited to liberate young people of good will from their soul-stifling feelings of
guilt. As such, attempts to reject the discussion can and should be highlighted as starting points
since many students easily see through these defensive dismissals and are thus inspired to confront
the real motivations behind them in others and in themselves.
Fanon has proven the key in helping many students in my classes set aside their feelings of guilt
and anger in order to better explore the true sense of social responsibility that we might wish to
instill in them. Goodman makes a strong case for what is at stake in the classroom when she writes:
“By shifting the emphasis from guilt to responsibility, we can help move people from feeling
immobilized, to seeing ways that they can change themselves and society” (51). Fanon, for his part,
provides the emotional distance and space students need when he purposely follows his teacher
Césaire in focusing on the colonial relationship as a malady or complex that dehumanizes both the
colonizer and colonized. When students read in Black Skin, White Masks that “The white man is
sealed in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness,” (9) and that Fanon hopes to destroy a
“massive psychoexistential complex” from which both whites and blacks suffer, he offers whites and
blacks a way out of the vicious circle of guilt trips and hypocrisy (12). His belief that “the
individual should tend to take on the universality inherent in the human condition” (10) reinforces
the sincerity of his hope “to persuade my brother, whether black or white, to tear off with all his
strength the shameful livery put together by centuries of incomprehension” (12). Reading such
thoughts for the first time allows many white students to set aside the thought that they are being
attacked in class and instead allows them to listen to and ponder ideas that are often much different
from what they may have been exposed to in their homes and hometowns. Fanon’s generosity of
spirit frees them to be more generous.
I came to understand better the nature of the generosity in question when a French major wrote
in her final paper of an experience she had had at home over the Thanksgiving break. This particular
student whom I shall call Mary was finishing up her French degree in a course of mine studying
issues of cultural identity. In her final paper she began with appropriate references to Césaire’s
Discourse on Colonialism and Fanon before stating that she had grown up in a white neighborhood,
but had crossed through a black neighborhood all her life on the way to school. The experience she
related after this preamble describes the challenge she faced in confronting her mother’s fear of her
visiting a home in this black neighborhood.
She had been invited Thanksgiving night by some African student friends of hers to visit the
home of an African-American family in the neighborhood where Mary’s mother did not want her to
go. Indeed, Mary had always been told that “one doesn’t go there.” Mary wrote of the strangeness
of chatting with a family in a neighborhood that for all her life had been off limits. She concluded
by saying that taking such a small step made her realize that she “had been living with her eyes
closed.” Reading her thoughts, I could not help but think that the courage she needed to confront her
own fears paled in comparison to that she needed to set aside her mother’s. Obviously, much of the
guilt that inhibits a classroom discussion of race arises from the conflict of the child who must
recognize and, if he or she is to participate in the discussion, reject a loved one’s racial blind spots.
The liberating nature of Fanon’s logic does not only lie in it’s urgent proclaiming the need to
set aside guilt, but also in his subtle restatement of Karl Jasper’s notion of metaphysical guilt as one
of universal responsibility. In his understatedly entitled final chapter “By way of Conclusion”
Fanon returns to a footnote earlier in the book in which he quotes from Jasper’s “On the question of
German Guilt.” Jasper argues that “There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity
through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the
world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be
ignorant. If I do not do whatever I can to prevent them, I am an accomplice in them” (89, quoted in
Fanon). Although he does not mention Jasper by name, Fanon is obviously referring to the above
quote when he states in his conclusion: “I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past
of the world. I am not responsible solely for the revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has
contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to
subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act” (226).
And in a crescendo of passion, Fanon lays out the rights that he has and does not have as “a
man of color,” among which: “I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man
there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the
right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master” (228). He continues, “There is
no Negro mission; there is no white burden” (228). And finally, “I find myself in the world and I
recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other” (229).
Whatever cynics might say about the pomp and circumstance of such grandiose proclamations, I
have seen both white and black students respond to his call in ways that fully demonstrate the
liberating effect of his message on a self and societal-imposed taboo concerning the discussion of
racial issues.
During the semester that the four students walked out of my office suggesting to themselves
that my “wife must be black,” I spent 15 weeks struggling via e-mail to get the students to come to
grips with Fanon, Césaire, and Maryse Condé. In one of his final journal entries a student, whom I
will call Michael and who, for all I know, was the one who made the quip about my wife, wrote me
an entry which described his having been frightened by some young Arab men outside a dance club
late one night. Having been whisked away by some American servicemen who told him that he was
about to be robbed, Michael reflected on the experience in the context of his reading for the course,
and decided that he deserved “what Fanon stated as ‘demanding human behavior from the other.’”
The next day he approached two Moroccan students in the school lobby and struck up a conversation
in order to overcome his fear from the night before. This textbook application of Fanon’s seemingly
naive question, “why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the
other to myself?”(231), illustrates how reading Black Skin, White Masks, especially the tour de force
of the book’s final chapter, can serve to inspire students to take a first step away from the racially
defined dead-ends that all too often characterize the attitudes and expectations they inherit from their
social and familial milieus. First steps such as Michael’s and Mary’s may be small, but they are
potentially life-altering for those students who are willing to take them.
Although Martinican cultural critics such as Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant mock
the universalism of the colonizer who would white wash all cultural differences for the purposes of
his assimilationist propaganda, it is clear that we can join with Fanon in idealistically encouraging
our students to aspire “to take on the universality inherent in the human condition” without betraying
Chamoiseau’s and Confiant’s commitment to “diversality,” the respect for the universality of the
diverse. For it is in the end Fanon’s appeal to the universal in Black Skin, White Masks that makes
his analysis so effective in facilitating the discussion of race and cultural identity in the college
classroom. In this respect, he joins with Ralph Ellison in his attempt to reveal the true “visibility” of
the “human universals” denied by the blinkers of racially motivated fear:
So my task was one of revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of
one who was both black and American, and not only as a means of conveying my
personal vision of possibility, but as a way of dealing with the sheer rhetorical
challenge involved in communicating across our barriers of race and religion, class,
color and region--barriers which consist of the many strategies of division that were
designed, and still function, to prevent what would otherwise have been a more or less
natural recognition of the reality of black and white fraternity. (xxii)
________________________
Phillip Bailey (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is currently Associate Professor of French and Chair of the
Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the
author of Proust’s Self-Reader: The Pursuit of Literature as Privileged Communication (Summa, 1997) and
has co-authored several articles on foreign language anxiety, learning styles, and foreign language
achievement.
_________________________
NOTES
1
One limitation of my analysis is that is difficult for me to judge to what extent Arkansans react to
discussing race in ways that might differ from other student populations in the United States. I suspect
that the general dynamics would be similar in any discussion of cultural identity in South Texas or
California. However, it is also likely that some Arkansans might feel that they have more reason to be
“defensive” when discussing race than people in states who perceive their histories as less racially
charged.
2
Unfortunately the English translations of Zobel's La rue cases nègres differ for the book and film.
WORKS CITED
Blood, Elizabeth. “On the Teaching of Francophone Cultures to Anglophone Students.” AATF National
Bulletin. 26:4 (2001): 33-34.
Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Charles Lam Markmann, trans. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1952.
Frederick, Peter. “Walking on Eggs: Mastering the Dreaded Diversity Discussion.” College
43:3 (1995): 83-92.
Teaching.
Goodman, Diane. “Difficult Dialogues: Enhancing Discussions about Diversity.” College
43:2 (1995): 47-52.
Teaching.