General education is basically an attempt to democratize what had been an elite mold. It’s a combination of Humboldt, with the whole idea of Bildung, and a little bit of Oxbridge, I think. There used to be the idea of an educated gentleman, who was able to confront a whole range of problems, from sewage in Calcutta to tribal warfare in Iraq on the basis of having thoroughly studied the classics. Now, we don’t do that kind of canonical education, and Sosc Core is of course much more critical than that. But the attempt to promote critical awareness flies in the face of vocational education. So it’s a critical attempt. I think it could be a profoundly democratic attempt.

One of the reasons why Black Skins, White Masks is very uncomfortable for a lot of students is that it’s in part a psychoanalytic approach to the experience of being Other. In postcolonial thought, by contrast, the Other is a reified category. It’s reverse Orientalism, where you’re not allowed to do a critical analysis of a Muslim society. With what’s going on now, people are totally helpless conceptually.

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One of the reasons I think Fanon is so challenging, for many students, is because he argues that the system of racism creates certain kinds of selves that are not free from it, that it does not sit like a carapace on the black self, which is just waiting to burst the carapace and emerge. In some respects, aspects of The Wretched of the Earth are for me a theoretical regression and indissolubly linked with a valorization of violence as liberating. There is a kind of fairy tale that racist structures remain external to people, and that all you have to do is change the structure and everything will poof! Then there’s just you and me. There’s no damage done. It’s a form of positivism. And I think Black Skin, White Masks makes students uncomfortable because that isn’t what he does there.