Black Skin, White Masks (French: Peau noire, masques blancs) is a 1952 book by philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.

The book is written in the style of autoethnography, with Fanon sharing his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche.

Based upon, and derived from, the concepts of the collective unconscious and collective catharsis, the sixth chapter, "The Negro and Psychopathology", presents brief, deep psychoanalyses of colonized black people, and thus proposes the inability of black people to fit into the norms (social, cultural, racial) established by white society (the colonizer).

That the early-life suffering of said psychopathology – black skin associated with villainy – creates a collective nature among the men and women who were reduced to colonized populations.

The colonial culture has left an impression on black Martinican women to believe that "whiteness is virtue and beauty" and that they can in turn "save their race by making themselves whiter."

[4] Together with Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, it received wider attention during cultural upheavals starting in the 1960s, in the United States as well as former colonial countries in the Caribbean and Africa.

The topic is explicitly connected culturally to the societies of the ethnic African and other peoples of color living within the French Colonial Empire (1534–1980).

[5] The psychological and psychiatric insights remain valid, especially as applied by peoples of diverse colonial and imperial histories, such as the Palestinians and Kurds in the Middle East, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the African Americans in the US, and Puerto Ricans, in their contemporary struggles for cultural and political autonomy.

In 2015, leading African studies scholar Lewis R. Gordon published a book titled What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life And Thought.

This movement of freedom and blackness requires knowledge on multiple interdisciplinary studies, such as politics for emancipation, racial inequalities and post-emancipation, all within the context of a post-colonial world.

[11] In the context of race, Fanon postulates that the black person is a phobogenic object, sparking anxiety in the eyes of white subjects.