It is the position of this paper that current attempts

at the articulation of a Phenomenology of Blackness have

been largely unsuccessful as a result of their appeal to an

essential notion of “the black experience,” “the black

world,” or “the black subject.” Dominant approaches to a

Phenomenology of Blackness have used Frantz Fanon’s critique

of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the ground from which the whole

of black experience is theorized, and this paper will not

deviate from this trend. Against the dominant articulation

of Fanon, this paper will contend that Fanon’s assertion of

an unproblematic corporeal schema formation within “the

black world” is patently false and based on a narrow notion

of “the black world.” To this end, the “need” of a

Phenomenology of Blackness is the need of an articulation

that does not appeal to essentialism.

Despite its robustness, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the

formation of the corporeal schema has come under fire from

numerous philosophers who seek to articulate a

phenomenological account of the lived experience of the

oppressed. Sara Ahmed, Gail Weiss, Iris Marion Young, and

Linda Martin Alcoff, among others, have all articulated

positions contra to, or that seek to expand Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenology on the basis that it emerges from a privileged

account of being in the world. To this end, Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenology does not attend to the uniquely situated

nature of the black or female body in a world organized

around the lived experience of the white male subject.

In order to make inroads into a phenomenology of race,

one of the most commonly appealed to thinkers has been

Frantz Fanon, author of Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of

the Earth. The value of Fanon’s work for phenomenology of race

lies in his re-articulation of Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal

schema. For Fanon, and thinkers who take up his project, it

is not the case that the black man suffers difficulty in the

formation of his corporeal schema in the “black world,” but

that he suffers crippling difficulty forming a corporeal

schema in the “white world.” Thus, in order to provide an

accurate account of the lived experience of blackness, Fanon

must situate his discourse within the “white world.” The

characterization of the formation of the corporeal schema in

the “black world” as unproblematic is questionable at best:

this point will be returned to after explicating Fanon’s

addition1 of the “historico racial” and “epidermal racial”

schemas to Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of the formation of

the corporeal schema.

At the outset of The Lived Experience of the Black,2 Fanon

presents Merleau-Ponty’s construction of the corporeal

schema, making clear that the construction of himself as a

body is a settling of a dialectic between his body an the

world. In line with Merleau-Ponty, Fanon highlights that his

corporeal schema is not imposed upom him: it rises out of

his interaction between his body and the pre-personal world

in such a way as to give both definition and structure. Up

to this point, Fanon’s structure of the corporeal schema

follows Merleau-Ponty’s own: it is only the encounter with

1 Some authors, notably Jeremy Weate argue that Fanon’s historico racial and epidermal racial schemas completely overrun the corporeal schema. Others, like Dilan Manhendran argue that the corporeal schema can only be overrun in periods where meaning is at stake. I have chosen to interpret Fanon as adding onto Merleau-Ponty’s extant corporeal schema.2 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press) pg 89-119

the “white world” that forces Fanon to re-think the

constitution of his corporeal schema.

In the encounter with the white world, made particular

by his interaction with a white child on a train, the

historio racial schema is revealed to be operative beneath

the surface of his corporeal schema. Rather than being

constructed through the interaction of his body with a pre-

personal world as to give shape to both, the historico

racial schema is constructed by the white gaze out of the

material of the mythology of blackness as viewed by

whiteness. The child’s gaze, characterized by his statement

“Look, a Negro!”3 introduces an interruption in the

formation of Fanon’s corporeal schema, into which the

historical racial schema is forced.

Fanon is thus forced to take up this imposed history as

if it was his own, resulting in an “over determination” of

the black body by the gaze of whiteness. This over

determination forces Fanon to experience the construction of

his corporeal schema as a negation as a result of the

3 Fanon, 91

insertion of the historico racial schema as the mediating

structure between his body and the world. To this end, Fanon

has no choice but to fit his horizon of history into the

categories provided by the historio racial schema.4 In

essence, he must compress or negate his own corporeal schema

to fit into a structure imposed upon him by whiteness.

The continued necessity of forcing his corporeal schema

into the structure of the historico racial schema eventually

results in the collapse of Fanon’s corporeal schema to

reveal a second schema: the “racial epidermal” schema.

Unlike the historico racial schema, which merely forces a

history upon Fanon, the racial epidermal schema functions

metonymically. It allows Fanon, as “the black man,” to stand

in for the whole of the black race, implicating the entirety

of blackness in the mythological history constructed by

whiteness. Fanon’s skin becomes the sign of his degenerate

nature, a nature shared by the whole of the black race.

Fanon is thus “responsible at the same time for my body, for

4 Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York:Routledge, 1999) pg 27

my race, for my ancestors”5 all of whom are implicated in

the mythology that is constructed by whiteness.

Fatalistically, Fanon asserts that the only response

for the black subject who has internalized these schemas,

and the mythology that goes along with them, is “shame.

Shame and self-contempt. Nausea.”6 Finally, the source of

the negation in the construction of the corporeal schema has

become clear: the only recourse left to the black subject

who is forced into the schemas provided by whiteness is

self-loathing, a rejection of his very being in the world as

fundamentally flawed as a result of his embodiment in a

black body. Says Fanon: “My body was returned to me spread-

eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white

winter’s day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the

Negro is wicked, the Negro is ugly.”7

Even in the state of over determination, of having the

historio racial and epidermal racial schemas forced upon

them, the possibility of choosing for oneself exists for the

5 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 926 ibid, 927 ibid, 93

black subject. Fanon allows for the possibility of black

doctors, black teachers, black statesmen, yet they all exist

under the mythology forced upon them by the historico racial

and epidermal schemas. Their existence in the white world is

peculiar, in the sense of an anomalous defiance of the

historio racial schema. Further, it is precarious for, as

Fanon articulates, the slightest misstep means confirmation

of the mythology that the white world has forced upon the

black body.8

The primary consequence of the imposition of the

historico racial schema and the epidermal racial schema is

the closing off of the possibility for the creative uptaking

of the past for the black subject. “The black man, however

sincere, is the slave of the past.”9 However, this is not

the personal horizon of history, nor the inherited past that

Merleau-Ponty articulates: it is the mythological past

constructed by white racism that is forced upon the black

subject. Thus, the freedom that Merleau-Ponty articulates as

a consequence of the formation of our corporeal schema is 8 ibid, 979 ibid, 200

subsequently denied to the black subject. Not only is the

black subject un-free with regards to his social situation,

he is also un-free with regards to the denial of his ability

to even engage in the project of the constitution of a

corporeal schema. Freedom, in a world organized around

whiteness, is essentially impossible.

It is at this point that we can discern the value of

Fanon’s re-articulation of Merleau-Ponty for philosophers

interested in the construction of a phenomenology of race,

and provide criticisms that articulate the “need” for

phenomenology of race. As articulated above, Fanon provides

a concrete phenomenological description of the interruption

of the formation of the corporeal schema of the black

subject as a result of the encounter with the white world.

The encounter with the white world has subsequently become

the site of expansion by thinkers like Sara Ahmed and Gail

Weiss who take the position that the historico racial and

epidermal racial schemas are already operative, rather than

become operative, as a result of the organization of the

world by colonialism.

Reframed in this way, the encounter of the black body

with the white world is not merely a singular event that

throws the bodily schema into disarray: it is a fundamental

existential condition of the embodiment of the black

subject. To be black in a world oriented around whiteness is

to constantly encounter a world where the habits adopted by

the body never fade into the background. 10The black body is

subsequently always noticed in its enactment of its action,

it is always subject to the imposition of the historico

racial schema and the epidermal racial schema made manifest

in a thousand different encounters both large and small.

“Driving while black,” the stopping of a black person

for driving a vehicle viewed as outside of their means

serves as an apt example of the way in which the historico

racial and epidermal racial schema are applied upon the

black body. Because the black skin is the metonymic sign of

the mythology of blackness as poor and listless,

economically immobile, and ultimately associated with

criminality, the assumption by the white officer is that the

10 ibid 135

black person must have stolen the vehicle because they are

black. To this end, the officer has a reasonable suspicion

to stop the black driver and search for the “signs” of the

mythological history imposed upon the black body by

whiteness. The degree to which the black body confirms the

mythology and the historico racial schema effectively

legitimizes further actions by the white officer.

Despite the seemingly prima facie evidence provided for

Fanon’s articulation, his position is not without critique.

Gail Weiss, in Body Image: Embodiment as Intercorporeality, rightly

points out that Fanon’s phenomenology is an account of the

black male encounter with a world organized by whiteness. To

this end, Fanon does not account for the unique ways in

which the historico racial schema and the epidermal racial

schema cut short the development of the corporeal schema of

black women.11 Thus, the uptake of Fanon’s phenomenological

turn by phenomenologists interested in a phenomenology of

race suffers from the same pitfall that Iris Marion Young12 11 Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York:Routledge, 1999) pg. 2712 See, Iris Marion Young, “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Bodily Comportment, Motility, and

located in Merleau-Ponty’s original Phenomenology of Perception:

it cannot fully account for the embodied experience of women

without expansion.

This is also the limitation of the current project: my

heterosexual black male subjectivity restricts me to some of

the same limitations of both Fanon and Merleau-Ponty. The

overcoming of this limitation would involve a form of what

Paulo Friere calls “critical pedagogy.” Rather than engage

with the experience of black women from of a position of

epistemological or theoretical authority, the articulation

of black women’s lived experience through phenomenology

would have to be performed in conversation with black women

themselves, rather than with theoretical articulations of

their experiences. If phenomenology is to be the study of

the lived experiences of persons, black women in this case,

then this phenomenology must emerge in conversation with

black women.

Thus, the first “need” for phenomenology of blackness

is to reassess the way in which its articulation of the

Spatiality” in Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York: Oxford 2005)

lived experience of black subjects is restricted to an

articulation of the lived experience of black men. To this

end, extant phenomenological projects regarding blackness

have a “need” to incorporate the lived experiences of other

black subjects. This brings me to the second “need” for a

phenomenology of blackness: the phenomenological

investigation of the “black world” that Franz Fanon posits

as being unproblematic for the construction of the corporeal

schema of the black subject.

The assumption that the “black world” presents no

specific obstacle to the formation of the bodily schema of

the black subject can be refuted from within Fanon’s own

work. In his chapter, The Black Man and Language13, Fanon

constructs the “world” of the black man as being of “two

dimensions,” which he articulates as a direct result of the

colonial project. In so far as colonialism has constructed

the world in such a way as to be “ready” for the arrival of

the white body, the active resistance to the colonial

project by black subjects within the post-colonial world

13 Fanon, pg. 1-23

through culture, art, language, has resulted in the

bifurcation of the world for Fanon’s black subject.

Fanon’s assertion is that the more the black subject

assimilates “white culture,” in this case identified with

the French language, the whiter he gets. It is the

thoroughly colonized subject, “people in whom an inferiority

complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has

been committed to the grave,” that positions itself in

reference to the colonizing culture. Thus, the more the

colonized subject can assimilate the colonizing culture, the

more that subject can transcend his blackness. Fanon’s point

is thus: the incorporation of the language, customs, the

habitus of white culture represents a death of the habitus of

the black subject.

The death of the habitus of the black subject is marked

immediately upon his return to his native peoples: he adopts

a critical posture towards his former kinsmen, he does not

communicate in their language, his orientation towards the

world that he has returned to has changed. The presumption

here is that the incorporation of the elements of the “white

world” into the black subject’s habitus necessarily entail the

incorporation of the critical posture that the white world

adopts towards black subjects. Further, his kinsmen, the

members of the “black world,” turn upon him, recognizing in

him the signs of the “white world,” the signs of difference:

they assail his being, criticize him for his affectations.

The only alternatives for Fanon’s returnee are to “get rid

of his Parisian affectation or die of ridicule.”

Out of the vignette of Fanon’s returnee, the beginnings

of a phenomenological investigation into the “black world”

may be mounted. Foremost, Fanon’s bifurcation of the “black

world” and the “white world” seems to presuppose the

existence of one black world over against the white world,

rather than a plurality of “black worlds,” each representing

the unique uptaking of the historical horizons of the black

race. Eugene Robinson, in his text Disintigration: The Splintering of

Black America, characterizes these “black worlds” as four

distinct Black Americas: the Mainstream middle-class, the

Abandoned, the Transcendent Elite, and the Emergent which

comprises recently arrived immigrants from the African

Diaspora and biracial individuals. As if anticipating my

critique of Fanon, Gordon anticipates the need for

distinguishing among Black Americas:

We could not, it seemed to me, expect to convince anyone that all of black America still suffered equallyfrom its unique history, not when black Americans were plainly visible in positions of supreme power and influence. It was increasingly clear to me that there was no one black America—that there were several, and that we had to distinguish between them if we were to talk intelligently about African Americans in the twenty-first century.14

As each of these “black Americas” emerges out of the

collective history of blackness in America, or arrives with

its own collective history in the case of the diasporic

immigrant, the subjects that emerge out of these black

Americas take up that history in unique ways according to

their situatedness in the social world constituted by their

black America. As a consequence, each of the black Americas

will result in the emergence of a distinct black subject

whose habitus and corporeal schema will be different than

those who occupy the other black Americas. In light of this

cultural reality, the assertion of a singular black world, 14 Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (NewYork: Anchor Books 2010) pg. 20

even on the basis of a common history, is to ignore the

unique way in which that common history is taken up and made

manifest in the splintering of “the black community.”

As a consequence, the way in which the historico racial

and epidermal racial schemas are applied to the black body

will be markedly different among subjects who emerge out of

the distinct black Americas. The difference in the

application of the schemas is, largely, a result of the way

in which the way in which racism functions within the

immediacy of perception as organized by the horizon of

history of the perceiver. By virtue of the fact that any act

of perception occurs within a gestalt framework, the

cultural contexts and prejudices already operative within

the social world orient our perceptions in particular way.

Hence, the historico racial schema applied to a “non-

threatening black man,” like Barack Obama, will be different

than the historico racial schema applied to a “threatening

black man” like Terry Crews. A Barack Obama has a different,

yet still racist, mythological past thrust upon him than

Terry Crews.

Despite the social reality, perhaps even in opposition to

it, extant discourse on blackness presents the

disintegration of the black world as an essentially negative

result. In line with Fanon’s articulation that the adoption

of elements of the dominant culture is to lose one’s

“original” culture, Black Nationalist thinkers have

characterized assimilation as the ultimate denial of self,

tantamount to an act of “race betrayal” or derascination.

Thinkers like Derrick Bell and Cornel West have even gone so

far to say that the Barack Obama’s presidency emerged only

as a result of Obama’s distance from “the black community.”

West, in particular, has accused Obama of being

“deracinated:15” Barack Obama’s emergence out of a

predominantly white, upper middle class environment has, in

West’s eyes, produced a black subject fundamentally

disconnected from the historical horizon of the black race.

For West, this “rootlessness” produces in Obama a kind of

nervousness when confronted with the presence of a black 15 Chris Hedges “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic.” Truth Dig, http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516

subject who fully takes up the history inherited by virtue

of being black in the world: an authentic black subject.

Authenticity, for West and others who hold his

position, becomes a problem of connection to a culture. In a

black subject that is deemed “in-authentic” there exists a

disconnection between the idea or image of Black Culture,

and the embodiment of that black subject. Emily S. Lee draws

attention to this position through her discourse on

authenticity and women of color: “The physical embodiment of

women of color exhibits, beckons, provoked immediate ties

with non-Western cultures, and yet the activities of these

women, the active embodiments of these women, apparently do

not correspond with understandings of the various cultures.”

16 Within this framework, the way in which a particular

subject takes up and expresses the history of his or her

race can stand in defiance of the expected understanding of the

embodiment of the race. To be a member of a particular

culture means to take up and express the history and the

16 Emily S. Lee, “The Epistemology of the Question of Authenticity, in Place of Strategic Essentialism” Hypatia 12,no. 2 (2011): 260

culture of that race in ways that correspond with the

communal understanding of that culture.

In the context of blackness, we can see this as the

imposition of a historico racial and epidermal racial schema

that emerges out of blackness in response to the continued

threat of whiteness. The historico racial schema that

emerges from blackness constructs a particular mythology of

blackness, typically one of resistance to whiteness, which

is tied metonymically to the black subject by a epidermal

racial schema. The black subject, to be authentically black,

must fit his personal historical horizon into the “racial

categories” provided by blackness. The unwillingness or

inability to fit one’s personal historical horizons into the

category provided by blackness results in the perception of

the subject as “not-black” or “white,” in the sense that

Fanon’s returnee is viewed as “more white” than his

compatriots.

The first time I was made aware of my blackness in the

third person, as a negation, was not at the hands of

whiteness or white supremacy, but at the hands of someone

who looked like me, had similar hair to me, whose skin was

close in hue to mine. The first time I was made fully aware

of my blackness was through the word “oreo.” Colloquially,

“oreo” is a pejorative intended to indicate a person who is

black but white on the inside: it is to call attention to

the way in which a person could perform whiteness while being

materially black. Up to that point, I had been a thirteen

year old black boy who did not have to reflect critically on

what it meant to be black: I simply was black. Blackness was

my inheritance from my father, from my mother, from the

aunts and uncles that I saw on holiday, yet here was another

black boy telling me that I wasn’t really black.

Like Fanon, my body was returned to me in pieces,

disjointed, out of place. I was brought into full

consciousness of the way that my taking up my horizon of

history, my corporeal schema did not fit into the neat box

of “blackness” that had been constructed for me. Through the

word “oreo,” I discovered that my very existence negated the

material of my body: the epidermal racial schema, the

metonymic connection that meant I should have particular

attributes, should like particular music because of the color

of my skin was in conflict with who I was. Whoever the “I”

was, it certainly was not black, not really.

This project is incomplete, subjective: it is a

prolegnomena to a larger work that would, and should, seek

to incorporate phenomenological accounts of the lived

experience of black women, biraciality, homosexuality, and

transgender identity. A complete Phenomenology of Blackness

would situate blackness firmly within the ambiguity of black

existence: it would present blackness as something that can

be taken up, creatively transformed within the bounds of

particular social contexts, but ultimately not reducible to

any one experience or part of an experience.

The contribution of a Phenomenology of Blackness, as an

articulation of multiple lived experiences of being black,

to understandings of racism should promote a more nuanced

conceptualization of anti-black racism. As the experiences

of being black in the world become more varied, even within

a world organized by whiteness, the way in which racism acts

upon black bodies also becomes more varied. “Jim Crow” has

evolved to “Stop and Frisk,” the expression of anti-black

violence signified by the Rodney King assault emerged in a

different form in the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the

presence of a growing sect of Black Conservative and Neo-

Conservatives aligned with groups known for the

institutionalization of racism requires that we admit that

forms of racism evolve and change.

In terms of advancing African philosophy and Africana

scholarship, the need for a Phenomenology of Blackness is

all too apparent. A Phenomenology of Blackness could serve

to provide the experiential ground for the postmodern

blackness that bell hooks argues is necessary for the

advancement of the exploration of black consciousness. In

Postmodern Blackness, hooks puts forwards the need for

critiques of essentialist formations of black subjectivity

in order to recognize the possibility for diverse cultural

productions.17 To this end, a Phenomenology of Blackness can

serve as a polemic against the essentialization of “the

17 bell hooks “Postmodern Blackness” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, pg. 28

black experience” and serve as a bulwark against the

propagation of an “authentic blackness.”

By keeping open the possibility for a multiplicity of

blackness, a Phenomenology of Blackness sets the stage for

moving beyond narrow conceptions of blackness, while

avoiding the loss of history that is feared with

assimilationist rhetoric. It enables the black community to

view itself as such by illustrating the ways in which the

multiplicity of blackness emerges out of a creative taking

up and transformation of the history of the black race in

America. A Phenomenology of Blackness can thus work towards

healing the wounds in the black community that have opened

as a result of class strife within the community itself. In

short, the need for a Phenomenology of Blackness is the need

to make us whole again.