A reviewer recently criticized me for “thinking more of Camus than of Fanon.” This was shared as though it’s damning, which confuses me. I find Fanon brilliant, but yeah, I do think more of Camus. His vision of life resonates with me. Why should the color of my skin change that?
As Baldwin pointed out, this thinking chokes out our individuality as well as what is universal, and fails to treat non-whites as particular human beings, insisting “that it is [man's] categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”
It’s the same kind of thinking that can’t fathom why, for example, not all women automatically preferred Elizabeth Warren against her male competitors: vox.com/2020/3/10/2116…
And it’s so easy to write off the woman who votes for Sanders or the black man who prefers Camus as having internalized internalized self-hate. That explanation can’t be answered. Anything you say is further evidence of your failure to grasp the one truth your identity mandates.
Anyway, to all these identitarians and essentialists, I just ask: aren’t there moments when you simply lose track of yourself? Unconstrained moments when it slips your mind that you are black or a woman or gay or straight or white or a man, and you’re you just you, just alive?
