THR WRETCHED OF THE EARTH
From The Wretched of the Earth Like Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 and died before his 40th birthday. Fanon's birthplace was Martinique, a Caribbean island which held high status in the French colonial hierarchy. Coming from a middle-class family, Fanon initially conceived of himself as French, like many intellectuals from the colonies. At 18, Fanon left home to volunteer for the Free French Army, which fought to liberate France from Nazi occupation during World War II. Fanon stayed in France after the war to study medicine and psychiatry on scholarship. There, confronting a white majority and vicious, overt racism for the first time, he found he needed to go beyond the Freudian theory taught in medical school. To understand his personal situation and inform his psychiatric practice, he studied the analysis of group dehumanization presented by the French left-wing philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his book Anti-Semite and Jew, along with Aime Cesaire's anti-colonialis