The Wretched of the Earth, Introduction

Reading the Preface

I’m going to try a new thing. Since I’m reading The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon with a book club, I’m going to try to write down my thoughts each week as I read just a few chapters, and maybe bring in some of the insights of my fellow readers. My intent is to have a deeper analysis of the whole book, with regular posts about each section. I should have done this as I was reading The Jakarta Method, because I have so much to say about it and it will take me a long time to get my thoughts down and reread passages, but you live and you learn. I’m hoping that these extra posts will allow me more time to work on other posts and intersperse them throughout. I’m making myself very busy now with the many projects I’m working on, and I’ve come to viscerally understand the trap of social media which is frustrating to me.

I noticed that since I’ve had more time over the past few months and spent more time on Substack commenting on other posts, writing notes, and sharing posts, I’ve gotten more subscribers and followers faster than before. The same is true of my game development Blue Sky account. The more I interact and post frequently, the more people find the account and follow it. This, of course, is exactly what social media is intended to do. Create a feedback loop where the more you engage, the more interactions you get, and the more you feel you need to engage.

However, research published recently on the psychology of social media found many distorting factors of social media and the human-created algorithms that run it. The researchers referred to it as a “funhouse mirror” when it comes to societal norms. According to the paper:

Research on social media has found that, while only 3 % of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33 % of all content [4]. Furthermore, 74 % of all online conflicts are started in just 1 % of communities [5], and 0.1 % of users shared 80 % of fake news [6,7]. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online. This can lead to false polarization and pluralistic ignorance.

Working and volunteering with people who are actually getting things done has made me realize that social media really is the last place one should go for social change. The flip side of the research quoted above is that often the people who are making the most impact in the real world spend the least time on social media. The major exception to this rule are buffoons like Musk who have been granted huge power because of the wealth they have, and their every decision influences the jobs of hundreds of people, but because those hundreds of other people are doing the actual work, the CEO can spend all his time on social media. On a slight tangent, Tik Tok executives promote “solutions” to app addiction that they know to be ineffective, and had their algorithm retooled to make prettier people appear more often in user’s feeds (the beauty standards they chose could probably take up another 3 blog posts).

All this to say, I appreciate the people who read this, and I’m going to repeat myself 100 times. Don’t get trapped in the idea that social media is worth your time. Thinking of campaigns of influence, anyone with money can hire armies of bots/trolls to repost content and make more people see their posts and make it seem like their ideas are popular. The real work of improving things often happens locally, where you can go out right now and volunteer for something. The internet is a good tool to connect people with similar views and learn about new topics, but if you want to convince others who don’t agree with you, you need to work with them, get to know them, and understand where they’re coming from.

Below are some good articles I’ve read recently, and then my thoughts on the first few sections of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.

Reading Recommendations

1. An excellent opinion piece and review of the new book The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers (which is now on my list). The author notes the racist history of vouchers as a response to school desegregation, and how that was bolstered by Milton Friedman’s (incorrect about so many things) expression of free-market ideology. Vouchers are just another way for the wealthy to turn public goods into personal gain and amplify the austerity policies that destroy our trust in public institutions.

2. More positive news about decarceration, this Fast Company article details how juvenile prisons are being turned into community centers and housing to serve a useful purpose for their communities. This is happening while some states are closing youth prisons following youth justice reforms and declining youth incarceration rates:

Also, states typically tend to take any savings from running these facilities—which can run in the millions of dollars annually—and plug other budget holes. New York and Utah, said Rovner, were some of the rare exceptions that repurposed the savings from shuttered juvenile facilities into programs for kids and teens…

Advocates hope that examples like the Dream Center and Peninsula, and state programs supporting such redevelopments, can help spur on more efforts to find second lifes [sic] for these facilities. “The potential is out there, and it’s the right thing to do,” said Porter. “What’s the community benefit to establishing assets that can support, as opposed to traumatizing and punishment? There’s a number economists can come up with, but there’s also a moral obligation.”

3. This compassionate, impactful, and heart-wrenching article from The Marshall Project is about Nikolas Cruz, the teenager responsible for the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. It’s a long piece, but worth reading all the way through as it gives insight into the complex questions we as a society need to deal with to prevent such crimes, rather than just focus on retribution afterward. It centers on the defense team which fought for a life sentence rather than death and succeeded in proving adequately for the jury that Cruz was failed by many people at many points in his life. Unfortunately, many politicians in Florida were upset by this outcome and pushed through a new bill which requires only 8 jurors to agree to the death sentence for it to be applied, rather than the unanimous 12 that was originally required. From the piece:

“I haven’t met somebody that is just a murderer for the sake of being a murderer,” O’Shea said. “I don’t know that that person even exists…

Justice requires that a defendant, whatever the nature and scope of their crimes, gets what they deserve. Mercy is something different, O’Shea believes. It is an act of grace, separate from the notion of justice.

“Mercy is a gift that is defined by the giver and has little to do with the worthiness of the recipient,” she said. “Bestowing mercy does not mean that a person should be free from consequences.” To grant mercy, she said, requires a certain letting go of vengeance and retribution, however understandably felt. Doing so can be liberating to those who give it.

“Anger is a burden on the soul,” she said.

And one more section:

"Casey Secor has long believed that prosecutors too often don’t fully level with victim families in death penalty cases: about how long the appeals process will be if a jury decides in favor of execution; that when the executions happen devastated families often don’t feel the satisfaction and relief they might have imagined; that victim families should dearly hope that the accused killer has the very best defense, for anything less will invite appeals alleging inadequate assistance of counsel. Seeking death, Secor said, was typically a political decision by elected prosecutors concerned about seeming tough on crime."

4. There’s this review of a new book detailing the effects of the Covid pandemic on prisons and prisoners. The quotation below relates to the quotation in the image at the start of my last post, namely that we lock people away and turn both incarcerated people and their victims into abstractions rather than real people and policy decisions are often made by uplifting specific victims that wish for retribution over others who wish for forgiveness and community healing.

Prison abolition has become a mainstream concept, but the lives of those held in jails, prisons and immigrant detention facilities remain far too abstract…

“reforms [have] become increasingly central to political debate — and are even scapegoated to resurrect old, ineffective ‘tough on crime’ policies.” A “return to normal” in public health has coincided with a “return to normal” in the U.S. carceral system — which continues to hold more people per capita than any other country.

Preface

Before I get to the first chapter entitled On Violence, I want to highlight the original 1961 preface written by Jean-Paul Sartre. He makes a serious effort to explain why someone should read this book, especially someone who benefits from the colonial (now some might say neocolonial) order. This preface is an excellent place to start because I think its message still rings true today and is a strong call to those who benefit from systems of oppression to not look away and to do what they can to change or even upend the system. Seeing, understanding, and acknowledging a problem is just the start of the solution, but it goes much further than that.

Fanon's work is all about decolonization, part of which can be brought about by the colonized, but which, by its nature, must involve the colonists. In On Violence he lays out the daily violence of the colonial system, violence perpetrated by the colonizers, and also structural violence baked into the system of colonization that does not depend on the actions of any individuals (for example, starvation of workers due to the export of food to Europe and the subsequent high cost of food). He explains why colonized subjects would believe that violence is the only way to decolonize as Europeans have not given any other option, and when they do give concessions it is with the goal of maintaining their structural advantage.

The power of Sartre's preface is in its biting critique of colonizers (in this case his fellow Europeans). He directly calls them out and makes the prediction, correctly it seems, that Fanon and other intellectuals from colonized Africa have moved beyond the European audience. They are writing to the colonized and they are writing truths that Europe can ignore only at its peril.

Sartre starts as any powerful argument starts, with a brief overview of the history that has led to this point. His first line is, "Not so long ago the Earth numbered  2 billion inhabitants, 500 million men and 1.5 billion 'natives'." Alluding to Fanon's distinction between the native African people and the European colonizers, as well as to the hypocritical "humanism" of European intellectuals who included a minority of the world's population in their definition of human.

He notes that after learning Western culture and values, chosen natives would be sent back to Africa and Asia to serve as colonial elites and spread Western ideology to their people. But after a time "the mouths opened of their own accord; the black and yellow voices still talked of our humanism, but it was to blame us for our inhumanity." At that point Europeans paternalistically ignored the criticism. But the next generation of writers found they couldn't integrate the European values at all. "Your humanism wants us to be universal and your racist practices are differentiating us," they said. But now, Fanon (in 1961) is saying "Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacred him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world." To Sartre, this is a qualitative different moment and Europeans would do well to pay attention, even though the audience of the writing as shifted from the European to the colonized masses, to those "wretched of the Earth."

Sartre calls for Europeans to pay attention, a call which echoes across the years and could apply to many issues today saying,

"And if you mumble, sniggering awkwardly: 'He's really got it in for us!' you have missed the true nature if the scandal, for Fanon has got nothing "in for you" at all; his book, which is such a hot issue for others, leaves you out in the cold. It often talks *about* you, but never *to* you."

After detailing the hypocrisy of the West that Fanon highlights, Sartre makes the prediction (not clear how true this turned out), that decolonization is inevitable and European tactics can only delay it, but not prevent it.

The final part of the preface I want to discuss, which will lead into my future discussion of the chapter On Violence, is Sartre's assertion that, "I believe we once knew, and have since forgotten, the truth that no indulgence can erase the marks of violence: violence alone can eliminate them." I'm conflicted on this statement and will dive into this idea of violence more in the future, but I will note that the foreword of this edition includes an essay by Homi K. Bhabha which provides an excellent analysis of the nuance of Fanon's arguments while disagreeing with the conclusion that violence is necessary. I also think that at the very least, a claim that violence is the method to end violence should be highly qualified. Recent research on generational trauma and cycles of violence has shown that violence often begets more violence and without breaking the cycle somehow it can go on without end. The U.S. learned this lesson the hard way (though it may have already forgotten) in the 9/11 attacks which were provoked by our neocolonial violence around the world. We believed ourselves to be safe as the largest military superpower in the world, but our military might and the threat of violence does not beget long term peace.

We also see this cycle of violence in the U.S. punishment bureaucracy, a system which incarcerates more people than any nation in the world (except for El Salvador recently), and yet which has not solved the problem of violent crime (or other types of crime) which the U.S. uniquely suffers from. The obsession with punishment, with taking an eye for an eye, continues to inflict violence on the communities we claim to want to teach that violence isn't the answer. This punitive system continues to break up communities and fuel cycles of violence while offering far too few chances for rehabilitation and ignoring the promise of supportive communities in actually reducing and preventing violence in the first place.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. See below for the link to my book recommendation list, including Wretched of the Earth. And like I said in the beginning, there are so many ways to get involved in your community. If you haven’t already, sign up to volunteer, or think about running for something. If you’re worried you aren’t the best leader, that self doubt can prevent you from abusing power and make your work more effective. Try it!

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:

When you select your local bookstore on the map above and visit their Bookshop.org page, we place a cookie in your browser that identifies you as that store's customer, and the store will get the full profit from all your Bookshop.org purchases (30% of the book's list price).