As I worked through Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I found myself struck by something far more corrosive than colonial violence itself: the psychological addiction to race. Fanon diagnoses it, but he also reveals its trap. And if we are honest, this trap is destroying modern South Africa.
There is a point where thinking about race stops being analysis and becomes a kind of mental imprisonment. You circle the same wound, touch the same scar, rehearse the same grievance until race becomes the only lens through which you interpret the world. Everything shrinks.
I have seen this.
I have lived inside a country suffocated by it.
When race becomes your centre of gravity, everything falls into it:
failures become racial
disappointments become racial
conversations become racial
politics becomes pure blood and emotion
identity becomes trauma, not character
This is not liberation.
This is psychological captivity posing as consciousness.
One of the greatest dangers Fanon exposes — though perhaps unintentionally — is how racial obsession kills personal agency. Once you believe that your dignity depends entirely on the oppressor’s behaviour, you stop building your own life. You outsource your worth. You wait for history to apologise, or society to correct itself, before you move.
A nation built on this mindset becomes a nation addicted to grievance.
It is a terrible truth:
Racial obsession feels empowering while it hollows you out from the inside.
It blinds people to their own abilities.
It keeps communities emotionally locked in 1950 while the world moves on.
It turns leaders into merchants of anger who must keep the wounds open to stay popular.
It transforms politics into permanent mourning rather than creation.
I have watched South Africa sink deeper into this trap — people endlessly yapping about whites on social media instead of developing capacity, sharpening skill, or building anything of substance. Racial fixation has replaced imagination. It has replaced responsibility. It has replaced excellence.
And all the while, we call this “consciousness.”
But it is not consciousness.
It is emotional intoxication.
It is paralysis masquerading as identity.
Fanon warns us — loudly — without using these exact words: If you make race the foundation of your identity, race will become the prison of your mind.
A person who cannot think beyond race cannot grow.
A nation that cannot think beyond race cannot develop.
A generation that cannot think beyond race cannot heal.
Yes, we remember the past.
Yes, we confront injustice.
But the obsession with race is a sickness — one that turns human beings into permanent victims, into shadows of their own potential.
That is what I lament in Fanon’s book, and that is what I lament in South Africa today.