Fanon: a stranger's words can turn you into an object on the spot

In 'Black Skin, White Masks', Fanon recounts a white child pointing and shouting 'Look, a Negro!' -- and feeling his own body suddenly frozen into a thing seen, not a person seeing. He argued colonial racism works by fixing the colonized inside an image the colonizer invented, closing off the open, improvising self that white people took for granted. An entire history gets written onto your skin before you ever get to speak for yourself.

— Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks — Chapter 5, 'The Lived Experience of the Black Man', 1952
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