IB Philosophy 10.4.4 Psychological Effects of Racism and Colonialism Key Definitions

a condition in which a person is estranged from the products of their own activity and from their own human capacities. In Fanon's application, alienation names the psychic and social condition of the colonized person who is estranged from their own body, culture, and selfhood by the imposed meanings of the colonial racial order, a condition that can only be overcome through the transformation of the social structures that produced it.

In Fanon's analysis, epidermalization is the process by which colonial power inscribes racial inferiority directly onto the body, making skin colour a visible marker of subordination rather than a natural biological fact.

In Fanon's analysis, lactification refers to the colonized person's unconscious drive to whiten oneself, whether through interracial relationships, the adoption of European language and culture, or other forms of proximity to whiteness. It is not simply personal preference but a symptom of the colonial inferiority complex, an attempt to escape the stigma of Blackness by assimilating into the dominant racial order.

Fanon coins the term sociogeny to insist that a person's psychological condition must be understood primarily through their social and historical situation, not through biology or individual psychology alone. The psychopathology of colonized peoples is socially produced by colonial structures of power, not by inherent racial characteristics or private neuroses.