Status Updates From Peau noire, masques blancs

Fanon begins the third chapter discussing the self-imposed nature of the alienation the black Frenchman experiences, and their own dependence on relationships with white women to assert their equality.

Pulls a terribly sad poem snippet from a novel by René Maran:
“When you fall in love, you must never say so,
Better to keep it a secret from oneself.”

Fanon does a great job building out why racial alienation affects both ends of the colonial black-white conflict: social inferiority alienates black people while social superiority alienates white people. This even impacts “mixed-race” people, whose proximity to whiteness leaves their identity almost more fragile, with any connection to being black seen as an affront against the (social) whiteness they pursue

“One is white if one has a certain amount of money.”
“I am white… I embody the beauty and virtue which have never been black… I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos”, which the white man is incapable of.
“Unable to blacken or negrify the world, [Mayotte Capécias] endeavors to whiten it in her body and mind.”

The use of pidgin to reinforce the colonized’s inferior status - “Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him” - the colonized must recognize their reality, in order to be able to change it. Lack of this recognition furthers alienation of the colonized, and within them between those who strive to learn the colonizers language and those who reject it.