On the very first page of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes: "The black is not a man" (1). What he means by this becomes clearer later in the text. Blackness is associated with several ideas that are usually opposed to the notion of "man" or "human": savagery, cannibalism, the body, the genitals, and animality.

Consider the following passage, which brings these ideas together: "As for the Negroes, they have tremendous sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in their jungles! They copulate at all times and in all places. They are really genital. They have so many children that they cannot even count them. Be careful, or they will flood us with little mulattoes" (121). Here, the black man is pictured as a sort of wild animal in heat. The association with the body is obvious: for most of Western history, animals were thought of as purely physical beings without a mental life.

In contrast, whiteness is associated with culture, intelligence, and intellectual achievement. France, which functions as a sort of metonymy for whiteness, is the nation that produced Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, as well as the Antilles' physicians, department heads, and bureaucrats – in short, all those who represent order and civilization, from the ordinary policeman to the great thinker.