Unconscious Racism

In light of the recent events, I am compelled to write about the extent of racism that occurs daily even through the unconscious mind. It is a constant schema that is entrenched in our mind and which really becomes evident after the age of 6. As Fanon describes in The Fact of Blackness, a schema is sort of a set of stigmas that help us to perceive what we see, touch and hear. It brings up previous experiences to help us understand the current situation which we are in and understand the object and people that are around us.

However the stimuli or object may be perceived wrongly especially when we don’t allow ourselves time to analyze it.  In the case of the man in the text the people around him straight away give him a generalization before he has a chance to define who he is. “The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean” As Fanon described the psychological processes for the formation of a black person goes down two possible schemes the corporeal one and the historical racial schema which could create a plausible split identity for the person who is subject to these generalizations.

 Unfortunately I still believe that even today many of us are still subject to these schemas when it comes to races that are different from our own. As Bob said in class the other day, after what occurred last Friday now you can see straight away that people will revert straight back to generalizations when they are scared. For example in the metro as soon as someone who looks of middle eastern descent walks in they immediately and unfortunately are analyzed to see if they are a potential threat. A person I know believed that now because of his looks he must be careful to not alarm anyone, he said that now that he must smile to more people and be more polite and not look to serious for fear of people believing that he might be a terrorist.  There have been a number of shootings especially in America where innocent people have been killed on account of their race. Because during a time of panic when a policeman has to make a quick decision they revert to generalizations and stereotypes of people and hence act upon that even if they may be wrong.

Their have been numerous psychological experiments that have shown that children at the age of 6 are already associating white with good and black with bad and what’s more when asked to associate which object would a white or black person have, they are more likely to associate the black person with a weapon. As Fanon says “Sin as Negro as virtue is to white all those white men in a group guns in their hands cannot be wrong, I am guilty”.  The fact that he was given these generalizations no matter what he does; he could be a lawyer or a doctor.  But at first glance people may judge him wrongly and for that he feels hopeless. At this point not even he can separate himself from these schemas, which are formed even before he was born. This creates a chilling ending to this text in which he struggles to decide whether he should just accept his fate or refuse it.