Fanon Weighs in on the Culture Wars
Wretched of the Earth, Chapter 4
I passed 100 subscribers! My sincere thanks to everyone who reads this blog. I know it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers game, so I have explicitly set my goal to be a personal journey of learning (but number go up is still fun). This series on The Wretched of the Earth has really pushed me to think more deeply about the book and the deep parallels of colonialism in 1950s Algeria to racial capitalism in the U.S. This blog will always be free for anyone to read. If you like any of my posts, feel free to share them. If you really like a post, I now have a Ko-Fi page set up where you can send me a tip and a note on what you liked.
Mini-Review
I recently listened to Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange. I really enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it, but I’m also sympathetic to the many negative reviews. It was pretty dense, and not all of the sections were equally interesting. Had I read it instead of listening I might not have enjoyed it so much. Here’s my mini-review
I'll admit I was in the "malls = bad" camp before reading this. I grew up with some somewhat nice malls which declined through my teenage years until one had a gaping hole in the ceiling for quite some time after storm damage. I mainly saw them as a commercial enterprise that co-opted public space to offer only paying customers somewhere nice to be.
After reading this book, I understand malls a lot better, both what they are and what they can be. The author does not shy away from the racist history of the mall. They were initially developed to bring the downtown experience to middle-class white people who had fled the cities and didn't want to have to see/interact with poor people or people of color. This development was bolstered by both racist housing policy which subsidized homeownership mostly for white people, and public investment in roads and car infrastructure. Malls were created to fill the need for a communal space in the privatized suburbs where people lived in layers of bubbles - their houses surrounded by fences, their neighborhoods cut off from public transit/access from the city, and their cars taking them to and from work. The suburbs created complex zoning laws to prevent poor people and people of color from moving there and to segregate businesses from housing. On top of that, Malls often are designed explicitly to prevent public transit from entering so that only people with personal vehicles can enjoy them. So you might see why I think malls are bad.
However, the author's love of malls really shines through. In spite of all the bad, malls have been a somewhat public place and generations of people have been able to make connections, build independence, or benefit from climate-controlled spaces. Other countries in the world have acted more democratically and integrated malls into communities through easy rail and transit access (the Philippines), having them all over the cities with mixed uses (South Korea), and even subsidizing cultural events and the inclusion of libraries inside malls (Chile). The author makes a compelling case that the problem isn't malls per se, it's the private developers in the U.S. focused on individual profits and creating a space designed primarily for white, middle-class women while excluding many others. It is this narrow-minded approach - part capitalist profit-seeking, part racism and classism, that fueled the decline of many malls in the U.S. There are notable exceptions that thrive precisely because they do not follow this formula.
The U.S. has more square feet of retail space per person than any country and Meet Me by the Fountain proposes many ways to repurpose dead and dying malls into truly public spaces that everyone can benefit from. The above examples from the final chapter show a more international perspective and reveal the arrogance of U.S. capitalists who attempted to export their dying U.S. mall model to keep draining other communities for personal gain. Other countries have already learned from the U.S. and made many improvements on the mall that we could learn from if we had a stronger culture of democracy.
Reading Recommendations
Since this post centers on the culture wars, this article from Inquest is a great companion which describes how the rhetoric of culture wars is used to erode civil rights and increase incarceration.
A brief primer on the “power of the purse” -
“This sort of leverage over policy still matters. American presidents today exercise vast powers. Over time, Congress has conferred extensive regulatory authorities on administrative agencies that operate under the president’s supervision.
Congress has also established a large Army, Navy, and Air Force over which the president is commander in chief. Presidents, moreover, have claimed the power to employ these armed forces in significant ways even without a declaration of war or other specific authorization from Congress.
Congress’ power of the purse gives it a say in how these powers are exercised. If Congress doesn’t like what an administrative agency is doing, it can cut its budget or deny funds for enforcing certain regulations – something it does regularly.”
Relatedly, one executive order which unconstitutionally froze funding and is already increasing energy bills for Americans.
This good piece from education reporter Peter Greene on the flood of nonsense from the new administration and what to do. “Resistance means not becoming that. It means caring for other humans, looking out for other humans, feeling for other humans (even less-than-delightful other humans).”
See the following links for my last posts on the earlier chapters of Wretched of the Earth.
On the Culture Wars
To fight for national culture first of all means fighting for the liberation of the nation, the tangible matrix from which culture can grow. One cannot divorce the combat for culture from the people’s struggle for liberation (p 168).
Now I know there is a certain subset of folks who always see themselves as oppressed, even while they are currently holding power. These are the same folks who emphasize the “culture wars” and use their vast media power to boost their messaging and simultaneously pretend the “mainstream media” is out to get them. Culture wars are a great way to pretend to be on the losing side of a power struggle while controlling vast resources, think tanks, legal societies, and many public and private institutions.
The above quotation, and all of The Wretched of the Earth, is historically situated in the context of colonial Algeria and the Algerian people’s fight for liberation from the French colonizers and the local collaborators who gained their power and wealth by exploiting their neighbors. That is to say, Fanon’s idea of a fight for culture and the importance of culture is basically reversed from that of those today who most ardently fan the flames of the culture wars. For Fanon, it is the colonizer who strips the people of their culture and constantly degrades and dehumanizes them through the indignities of racism, police brutality, segregation, and overall colonial control which takes away their agency. As he defines it, “National culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong (p 168).” Through this lens, national culture is neither good nor bad. In a society which justifies segregation and the rule of one race over another through a cultural narrative, it is obviously bad. However, in a society which has liberated itself from bondage, the new national culture that forms can be a positive force which overcomes the old colonial narrative based in eugenics and hate. The new national culture can give a formerly colonized people a reason to be proud and a reason to work together to create a more prosperous, egalitarian, and less hateful society than that born of colonization.
Fanon believes the nation is the foundation from which culture grows. A people without a nation is a people easily divided. Similarly, an unfree people’s attempts to create culture will constantly be broken down, which is why he emphasizes the importance of liberation and the material conditions in which culture thrives. A hollow focus on words is just a distraction designed to benefit those in power:
Once again, no speech , no declaration on culture will detract us from our fundamental tasks which are to liberate the national territory; constantly combat the new forms of colonialism; and, as leaders, stubbornly refuse to indulge in self-satisfaction at the top (p 170).
In the U.S., and likely many other places, the underdog often receives a lot of support. People like to hear an uplifting story of a downtrodden person making it big. This is why so many people and especially politicians frame themselves as the underdog, regardless of the actual situation. If you can make people believe you are at a disadvantage, then anything you take for yourself, any money or power can be framed as a good thing. Often, these claims hold a tiny kernel of truth - just enough that someone can latch onto it - even if the result is a continuation of the same power dynamics as before.
DISCLAIMER: the following is a work of fiction, any apparent likenesses to real people or places are purely coincidental.
For example, say there’s a person who comes from a poor region of the country. We’ll call this made up land “Apple-Atcha”. This Apple-Atchan likely faced many challenges due to the high prevalence of opioid addiction, lack of employment opportunities, and lack of government investment in the region. However, this Apple-Atchan likely didn’t face the added challenges due to their skin color, such as racial profiling and police violence, employers choosing not to hire them, and generational wealth inequality that continued from slavery to segregation to today.
It’s important to note here that this person faced real challenges and we should change policies to improve their living conditions. It’s also important to identify the cause of those challenges. Opioid addiction was proximately caused by Purdy Pharma and the absurdly wealthy Sacker family (all hypothetical people of course) and their explicit lies to doctors about the safety of their products, and ultimately caused by a system which encourages mass concentrations of unaccountable wealth and therefore unaccountable power. Lack of employment opportunities could have several causes, including government capture by corporations which ease their ability to outsource jobs to other countries where there are fewer worker protections, allowing them to abandon their factories in the U.S. Once those factories are gone, there is no concentration of wealth in the form of a company to lobby the government and the needs of the people often go unheard. Maybe these companies also encourage strict immigration laws so that they can continue hiring “illegal” immigrants who are forced to take lower pay and no benefits because they face the constant fear of deportation.
It’s pretty clear from this example that these problems are tied together in the accumulation of wealth, corporate greed, and the responsiveness of the government to money and land over people (i.e. capitalism). However, imagine that our Apple-Atchan is lucky enough to go to a fancy university and gets in good with some investors who provide him with great opportunities to get wealthy and work with the financiers who brought ruin to his community. Then those same wealthy folks support his run for political office. Even if he had made the connections and identified the power imbalances that caused his community’s problems, he now owes his wealth and power to that same system. He needs to find a different framing to continue to cast himself as the powerless outsider, the underdog coming to shake things up, without actually frightening the truly powerful. So he attacks others from his community and attempts to divide them. He relies on demonstrably false claims like, “It was actually the immigrants. They came and took our jobs while we suffered.” Or, “It was black people who benefited from a government program.” The challenges he describes in his community are real, so it is easy for some to believe the scapegoats he identifies are really the problem too.
This is what happens when power dynamics are not properly analyzed. A convincing speaker can turn people of very similar conditions against each other. Fanon speaks to us about this very situation when he says, “We cannot go resolutely forward unless we first realize our alienation (p162).” In identifying with the 1%, our protagonist above has alienated himself from 99% of people, all of whom have more in common with him than the 1%. In scapegoating his chosen others, usually based on race, nationality, immigration status, or a combination thereof, he foments the alienation of his former community members from each other.
To undo this alienation we must see past these flimsy claims and work together with our neighbors (yes even the annoying ones).
We believe the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists… This struggle, which aims at a fundamental redistribution of relations between man, cannot leave intact either the form or substance of the people’s culture (p 178).
In other words, the real culture war is the friends we make along our struggle to live together and prosper as a community. If we take on that task, we are fundamentally changed as we also change our friends, our community, and eventually our society. If we do not engage in a struggle, our culture stagnates as it is taken over by those with the most power and directed where they wish it to go for their benefit. However, “Culture does not come without making concessions… without conceding yourself to others (p162).” We cannot impose culture on others, as much as many try. It must be a give and take process.
It can be scary to see familiar things changing, and not all changes are for the better, but Fanon points out that,
“in a colonial situation any dynamism is fairly rapidly replaced by a reification of attitudes. The cultural sphere is marked out by safety railings and signposts, every single one of them defense mechanisms… [comparable] to the simple instinct of self-preservation (p170).”
The drive to prevent cultural change by those who benefit from the status quo is understandable, but ultimately a dead end. A culture that does not change is a dead culture. It is a culture that quickly loses relevance and cannot respond to the current needs of people, which are ever-changing. Because the creation of culture is a process of “conceding yourself to others”, those who refuse to work together and refuse to make any concessions may gain power for a time, but they will always be left behind as culture evolves beyond them.
The culture warriors in the U.S. today would rather destroy the very conditions of freedom and equality that make culture possible than concede the illusion of power that comes from standing atop a weaker group while the 1% crush us all down. Our challenge is to help those folks realize their alienation and how their actions dehumanize themselves as they seek to scapegoat others.
Purchase the Book
If you’d like, you can purchase some of the books mentioned in this post from bookshop.org. This is a way to support local bookstores (or me if you use the link below), and avoid the Amazon monopoly.
Here is the link to my store page, with all of my recommendations.
You can also use the store locator and select a local book shop for the profit of your purchase to go to. According to the website:
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