| Summary: | <p>I argue that Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic approach to antiracist critique provides a productive model for political theorists. Rather than treat racism as an ahistorical phenomenon, his analyses of racialization return the problem of ‘race’ to the social. In this respect, I read Fanon as a materialist thinker, one whose immanent critique combines two methodological moments. First, Fanon conducts a genealogical analysis of racial orders, thereby denaturalizing and problematizing the practices, institutions, and discourses that (re)produce them. Second, he adopts an existentialist phenomenology that uncovers the lived experience of racialized subjects. In doing so, he discloses how racial hierarchies can displace both White and Black subjects from ethical relationships to themselves and their actions. I assert that Fanon’s model of antiracist critique improves upon and corrects for the analytical pitfalls that bedevil both normative political theory and critical theory when it comes to ‘race.’ First, political theorists ought to follow Fanon in theorizing racisms as a problem for ideology critique, rather than as either epistemic mistakes or aberrations from egalitarian norms. While racisms do rely on mistaken ideas of hierarchical difference, they are both normal and normative in their contexts of use. Second, Fanon avoids falling back into a crude Manichean ontology that reifies racial categories and disconnects ‘race’ from other forms of social stratification like class or gender. Finally, Fanon provides a more nuanced conception of subject formation under racial oppression than many political and critical theorists do. He doesn’t treat individual agency as an a priori capacity, but instead thinks it as a problematic in its own right. In this respect, I point towards how Fanon’s reworked alienation critique might be productively deployed to understand how persistent exposure to anti-Black racism injures and disempowers Black people in the U.S. today.</p>
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