Race, reflection and perception: a dialogue between Frantz Fanon and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenological dimensions of racialization

Gillett, Antoine Ian (2024) Race, reflection and perception: a dialogue between Frantz Fanon and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenological dimensions of racialization. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

What does it mean for human beings to be perceived as belonging to a race? And how does the process of racialization—becoming raced—function for human beings? In this thesis, I aim to develop a formal account of racialization by putting Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1968) and Phenomenology of Perception (2012) into conversation with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (2008). My analysis engages with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of reflection, in which he argues that reflection distorts the relationship between perceiver and perceived by misconstruing our perception of things, thereby obstructing our ability to grasp them as they are or recognize how they might differ from the constructions imposed by reflection on them. I extend this critique to what I call “racist reflection” to discuss how race is used to interpret the materiality of the body in two ways: 1) by categorizing it as belonging to a race; and 2) by laying the groundwork for racial bias, which then serves to judge individuals perceived to belong to that race. I then turn to Frantz Fanon’s concepts of the historical racial schema and the epidermal racial schema to explore how racialization disrupts the body schema by altering the body’s intentional arc and producing a raced subject. In this process, the body’s capacity for habitual action is denied, forcing it into a reflective mode of engaging with reality. Finally, I apply this framework by reflecting on the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, considering how racialization shaped his encounter with Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and William Bryan and its tragic consequences.

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