A self seen through a racial order

A drawing and another question

Imagine Desmond, a Black architect, presenting a design for a neighborhood library at his firm’s internal review. He wants to discuss the light in the courtyard. He is also listening to himself: will confidence be heard as arrogance, or a pause as proof that he does not belong? The firm lets him prepare designs but sends white colleagues to lead client meetings, saying that clients feel more comfortable with them.

Desmond trusts his work. Yet he has to reckon with a judgment he rejects, and his attention is split between the building he hopes to make and the person others may believe they see.

How can a racial order shape the way someone experiences their own life? W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon both asked that question, in different ways and from different places.

Two settings within modern philosophy

Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, amid racial segregation and attacks on Black freedom in the United States. His opening asks what citizenship means when a country’s promise of liberty coexists with systematic exclusion. [1] [3]

Fanon, born in Martinique under French colonial rule, published Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. Drawing on psychiatry and philosophy, he examines racialized life, particularly the encounter between Black Antilleans and the white French world. His later work in Algeria went on to develop further questions of colonial liberation. [4]

Reading the two together means keeping their arguments, and the societies they describe, distinct.

Du Bois: measuring oneself through another’s eyes

Du Bois recalls a schoolgirl refusing his visiting card during a classroom exchange. The rebuff makes him aware of a boundary between himself and a world he had expected to share. He calls that boundary a veil, which divides a shared world and blocks recognition across the division. [1]

Double consciousness names a divided relation to oneself under this unequal regard: a person has purposes and commitments of their own, yet encounters themselves through a society’s demeaning measure. Du Bois connects the division with being both Black and American when American belonging is organized to exclude Black people.

This is more than switching manners between home and work; it is a conflict over whose judgment counts and which aspirations can be pursued. Desmond’s worry illustrates one part of it, since a racial stereotype can claim his attention even when he knows it is false. His case does not reproduce the whole of Du Bois’s account.

Du Bois seeks a life in which neither Black identity nor American belonging has to be surrendered, and his ambition includes a share in making a common culture. The chapter ties this aspiration to education, work and political power, so his account asks for more than a change in how individuals feel about themselves. [1]

Division is not a racial destiny

Du Bois’s language sometimes reaches toward a general account of Black life, but how far it extends is disputed: class, gender, community and personal history complicate any single description. Nor does recognizing another’s prejudice necessarily mean accepting it. How wounded self-regard relates to a critical view of the dominant society remains a question of interpretation. [3]

Desmond may see through his firm’s excuse, while a colleague experiences the same rule differently; neither response shows that the exclusion is harmless. And our example, like the authors we have chosen, cannot stand for a universal Black experience.

Fanon: when a body is made to carry a story

Fanon describes how a white child’s frightened attention turns him into a racial object. Ordinary bodily ease gives way to the awareness of being seen through inherited stories about Black people, and he is made answerable for a supposed racial character and history. [2]

Racialization is the process of assigning racial meanings to people and treating those meanings as grounds for expectation, status or exclusion. It makes a person’s appearance seem like evidence of a character already decided for them. Here the question of situated freedom returns: how do possibilities take shape through a body, a history and relations with others? Fanon’s colonial situation, though, needs its own account rather than a simple transfer of Beauvoir’s analysis. [4]

In Desmond’s case, the firm’s idea of who reassures a client may follow him into how he stands and speaks. Describing that burden helps us understand what the rule does to his experience, without implying that the problem starts inside him.

What a change of outlook cannot change

A psychological description concerns experience: Desmond’s vigilance, frustration or confidence. A structural explanation asks how an arrangement produces and sustains such pressures: who gets client contact, who gains the resulting reputation and who decides what counts as trustworthiness. The first asks what the pressure feels like; the second asks why it arises and persists.

Fanon explicitly connects inward effects with social and economic conditions. His introduction argues that liberation must address both, since change at one level does not automatically complete change at the other. Teodros Kiros, discussing Fanon, emphasizes the institutions that give the racial gaze its force. [2] [5]

We met a related distinction in Marx’s account of work. Desmond could feel better tomorrow while the firm still reserves lead roles for white colleagues, and letting him lead a meeting could open an opportunity without undoing years of vigilance overnight. The comparison connects two questions. It does not reduce racism to class or make the authors interchangeable.

Decolonization means ending colonial domination and transforming the relations it sustains, and Fanon’s work contributes to that larger inquiry. This early text, though, does not supply a complete political program, and its diagnosis does not by itself justify any method of struggle. [4]

Try separating the explanations

A colleague tells Desmond, “Once you stop thinking about race, the problem will disappear.” Another says, “Letting you lead one meeting will settle everything.” Explain what each claim misses, and name one limit of using Desmond’s case to understand Du Bois or Fanon. This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

The first claim makes Desmond’s attention responsible for an exclusion maintained by the firm: he can reject the stereotype and still need to anticipate its consequences. The second recognizes a practical barrier but assumes that removing it once will transform both the whole arrangement and its inward effects. To judge that, we would need to know whether his access to clients, authority and future opportunities had changed. Confidence and opportunity both matter, and neither can substitute for the other.

The case helps us distinguish a divided relation to oneself from the arrangements that can sustain it. It cannot establish how all Black people feel, how an actual firm operates or how either author’s whole argument should be read. Du Bois’s concern with Black and American belonging and Fanon’s account of colonial racialization have distinct histories that no contemporary workplace example can contain.

Carry this forward

Equal standing means that a person’s freedom and interests make claims on how others may treat them. Ask what has to change for that standing to take effect. The next lesson, Freedom, caste and the terms of reform, turns to Ambedkar and Gandhi on caste and asks what reform must change when personal goodwill leaves a social hierarchy intact.

Sources and limits

[1] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), for the veil, double consciousness and Du Bois’s aims. The lesson draws on the complete “Forethought” and chapter I, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in Project Gutenberg eBook 408, updated 11 August 2021. The visiting-card episode, the double-consciousness passage and the account of Black and American belonging that follows it come near the chapter’s opening; its closing paragraphs connect education, work, liberty and political participation.

Du Bois wrote in English. The transcription’s underlying print edition was not established, so no printed page numbers are claimed. The chapter’s racial typology and broad historical generalizations are not all adopted here.

[2] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press, 2008 (French original 1952; English translation copyright 1967), for racialization, bodily experience and the social conditions of liberation. The complete introduction, pages 1–7, and chapter 5, pages 82–89, were read.

• Social conditions: pages 4–5.
• Racialized bodily experience: pages 82–86.
• Not used: the final quotation on page 89, which continues onto an unread page.

These are printed page numbers; add 39 to find the corresponding PDF page. Markmann titles chapter 5 “The Fact of Blackness.” The Philcox title, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” is discussed in source [4]; that translation and the French original were not compared. Selected page images and bibliographic pages were checked. No whole chapter or book was read.

[3] John P. Pittman, “Double Consciousness”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 16 February 2023, for the concept’s historical setting and the disputes over its scope, gender, class and relation to critical awareness. Read the complete main text of §1, §2 up to subsection 2.1, and §3. Works quoted there were not separately read.

[4] John Drabinski, “Frantz Fanon”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 14 March 2019, for the context of the 1952 book and its relation to Fanon’s later work. Read the opening biographical paragraphs and complete §1, “The Problem of Blackness.” The entry also discusses limitations of Fanon’s accounts of language and sexuality; the primary texts behind those accounts were not read.

[5] Teodros Kiros, “Frantz Fanon (1925–1961),” chapter 14 in Kwasi Wiredu, ed., A Companion to African Philosophy, Blackwell, 2004, pages 216–224, for the connection between racial recognition and colonial institutions. Read the introduction and complete section “The Racial Gaze,” pages 216–219, stopping before “Violence.” The section’s discussion of Fanon’s later work serves only as context. A mistaken statement in the introduction, that all four major books appeared after Fanon’s death, is not relied on.

Sources consulted 19 September 2026. Desmond, the firm and the library design are original teaching material. No whole book, original-language comparison, independent scholarly review or learner testing is claimed.