The anti-antiracism of Frantz Fanon

 "The [Frantz] Fanon we encounter in [Schatz's] pages rejects every form of racialist essentialism and envisions a future in which 'savage self-interest is [not] the sovereign principle of human conduct.'  His target is neither the West nor the Global North but all attempts to divide us through counterfeit categories in order to convince us that politics amounts to tribal struggles for power.
     "Schatz's portrait of Fanon does what superb biographies always do:  send the reader back to the original texts.  They provide a startling challenge to that recent antiracist ideology that routinely dismisses appeals to universalism as intellectual imperialism, fraudulent attempts to impose European ideas on non-European peoples.  The versions promoted by Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo may be simplistic, but their simplicity and success lay bare assumptions also held by more thoughtful writers.  The very expression 'identity politics' assumes what is never proven:  that our identities are most fundamentally determined by aspects of our selfhood over which we have no control.  The inherited victimhood, or perpetratorship, that much current antiracist literature presupposes is just what Fanon sought to renounce. . . .
     "Common as it is today, th[e] claim [that 'universalism [is] itself a construct designed to veil the imposition of European values and institutions on the rest of the world'] was never made by Fanon.  His fury at the ways in which the ideals of the French Revolution were unrealized in the successive republics that proclaimed them never led him to jettison the ideals themselves.  Rather, he saw universalism as a promise whose fulfillment must be demanded.
". . . Fanon's goal was, according to Sekyi-Otu, 'not the death of the colonizer, but the death of race as the principle of moral judgement'. . . ."

     Susan Neiman, "Fanon the universalist," a review of The rebel's clinic:  the revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon, by Adam Schatz, and Fanon's dialectic of experience, by Ato Sekyi-Otu, in The New York review of books 71, no. 10 (June 6, 2024):  21 (19-21).  It should be added that Nieman goes on to apply this Revolutionary "never been tried-ism" to Fanon's communism as well.