They told him his work was too controversial and rejected it from the academy.

But he knew black people worldwide needed to know the truth.

So he published it on his own.

What was so important that he could not keep quiet?

This is two-minute black history, what you didn't learn in school.

It was the stairs that hurt.

Franz Fanon had moved to Paris to study psychiatry, but was struck by daggered white gazes.

In him they saw a monster, a nigger.

So he gazed back and studied them, and in doing so, he changed forever how we understand

white people and racism.

Fanon was a subject of the French.

They did not truly know him, and still they had the power

to define him. As long as they were in control, his existence was based on their whims.

Revolution rang in Fanon's ear like a bell, but how? He used his primary tool, his pen. He wrote critically and forcefully about anti-blackness,

but his French school of psychiatry found his first work too controversial and rejected it.

He published it anyway as a book and changed the world. Black-skinned white masks ushered in a revolution in understanding, transforming how we talk even today about racism. It used psychoanalysis as well as political and literary analysis to explain anti-blackness and colonization.

It especially opened the eyes of black people by showing us that acting white would never

save us from white terror. To this day, Fonin's work is used to shape our understanding of race

and oppression.

His honesty was a mirror to the world, and only through honesty can we hope to change it.

In order to move towards the future, you've got to look to the past.

This has been Two-Minute Black History, a podcast by Push Black.

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