The Lived Experience of Social Construction - Vol XXX No 2 (2022)

Aug 26, 2026

Uploaded by Aditya

The article examines how Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs articulates the lived experience produced by the social construction of race, treating racial identification as both fictional in origin and completely determinative of subject experience from recognition onward. It explains how racialization operates through an “epidermal racial schema” and the internalization of imposed inferiority complexes, turning social categories into embodied, affective realities. The discussion extends the relevance of these insights to contemporary anti-racist thought and practices, including later developments such as digital epidermalization.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages10

Reading Time25 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Race as Social Construction and Its Limits

Affective and Intellectual Project in Fanon’s Text

Lived Experience and Racialization

Epidermalization and Contemporary Relevance

| | | --- | | The Lived Experience of Social Construction
Anthony Alessandrini
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy-Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XXX, No 2 (2022) pp 78-86.
Vol XXX, No 2 (2022) ISSN 1936-6280 (print)
ISSN 2155-1162 (online) DOI 10.5195/jffp.2022.1025 [www.jffp.org](www.jffp.org)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This journal is operated by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press | The Lived Experience of Social Construction Anthony Alessandrini Kingsborough College “So wait, basically Fanon is saying that race is a social construct. Right?” I’ve gotten this statement, or a version of it, a lot. Often it has been spoken by students during class discussions, but just as often by colleagues and, once, in pretty much the exact form above, by an earnest audience member after a screening of Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask at a venue in Brooklyn. I get it. And it’s not wrong: after all, Fanon isn’t not saying that race is socially constructed. If you just stop there, then what’s most amazing about Fanon is that he said this so long ago—in the case of Peau noire, masques blancs, seventy years ago and counting—long before the culture wars and the science wars, back in the days of the non-metaphorical decolonization wars. But basically, he’s not telling us anything that we don’t already know about race and racism today. Right? The first problem, of course, is that “basically.” The difficulty of Peaunoire, masques blancs—and I mean “difficult” in every sense—is not just a constitutive part of the text but, I would insist, is ultimately determined by Fanon’s larger intellectual and political project. Prior to the publication of the book, Francis Jeanson, Fanon’s editor, asked him to clarify a particular passage in the manuscript; Fanon wrote back: “I cannot explain this sentence. When I write things like that, I am trying to touch my reader affectively, or in other words irrationally, almost sensually. For me, words have a charge.”1 One reason why Peau noire, masques blancs continues to astonish seventy years later has to do precisely with this affective charge, which has not diminished with time. But returning to the question—Isn’t Fanon basically saying that race is asocial construct?—I’ve come to develop a ready response. What Fanon reveals in Peau noire, masques blancs is not simply the social construction of race but, to quote the title of the book’s most famous chapter, l’expérience vécue du Noir. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy | Revue de la philosophie française et de langue française Vol XXX, No 2 (2022) | [www.jffp.org | DOI](www.jffp.org | DOI) 10.5195/jffp.2022.1025 A n t h o n y A l e s s a n d r i n i | 7 9 Fanon speaks to us of racial identification as, at the same time, utterly fictional, not to say psychopathic, and simultaneously as completely determining of the subject’s experience from the moment of racial recognition—which is to say, in the U.S. context at least, from the moment of birth.2 The most horrific racial epithet or the blandest, most“polite” descriptor (“Sale négre!” ou simplement: “Tiens, un négre!”): equally socially constructed and equally all-determining.3 What we find in Peau noire, masques blancs, then, is something that remains useful for anti-racist thought and action today: an extended analysis of the lived experience of social construction. Such an analysis moves us beyond the mere declaration that race is asocial construct, a fact sometimes trotted out as though its simple assertion will itself dissolve racism. In the opening pages of the book, Fanon remarks, almost off-handedly,“what is called the black soul is a construction by white folk” [un

FAQs

Why does the article argue that saying “race is a social construct” is not enough?

It argues that Fanon’s central contribution is not the general claim alone, but the specific, affectively charged analysis of how racial recognition shapes lived experience and identity from the moment of recognition onward.

What concept does the article use to explain how racialization determines the subject’s experience?

It emphasizes Fanon’s idea of “an epidermal racial schema,” where imposed racial meanings collapse into an embodied, systemic framework that structures perception and selfhood.

How does the article connect Fanon’s ideas to present-day anti-racist thought?

It highlights how the analysis of epidermalization remains useful for anti-racist work, extending the framework to later scholarship, including Simone Browne’s account of “digital epidermalization” through biometrics.

Aug 26, 2026

Uploaded by Aditya