Frantz Fanon in the Era of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

This chapter reads Black Lives Matter together with Frantz Fanon’s work on the struggle for the dignity of Black people around the world. It demonstrates how, in addition to the work of Négritude thinkers (Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon Damas, and W.E.B. Du Bois), Fanon’s writing offers the historical background necessary for understanding the Black Lives Matter movement and, more broadly, the Black American experience during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Fanon was among the first to articulate enduring questions about the Black condition in the world and his theoretical insights establish why there is no peace, as long as the dignity of Black men, women, and children are ignored.

What matters is not to know the world but to change it.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (Fanon 1967, p. 17)

Frantz Fanon is regarded by many as one of the greatest revolutionary thinkers of the twentieth century.

—Teodors Kiros (Rabaka 2015, p. 251)