This White Boy Reads Fanon: Virtue-signalling, Fetishization, & How the Claremont Colleges Regurgitate Racial Capitalism Interpersonally

A notorious Pomona College snowbunny was seated in Scripps’s beloved Seal Court. He was reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Nothing makes a white boy who ostentatiously loves his mixed and BIPOC college girls slide from “basic leftist” into fetishist faster than casually reading, or pretending to read, such a text in a place where many (and mostly) women convene. What’s important is that this fear didn’t emerge from thin air: It is a survival tactic where within the social economy of the Claremont Colleges the performance of political consciousness often functions as a form of cultural capital, particularly for affluent white students navigating increasingly racialized and politically status-conscious social environments.

This example is indicative of what the broader culture of a subset of interpersonal relationships at the Claremont Colleges is: political, but more so in the context of a system of exchange rather than one of genuine beliefs. For some affluent white men (and even affluent men of color who reap more benefits than their lower-income counterparts), fluency in the language of anti-racism, decolonization, and social justice functions less as authentic commitment than as a strategy for gaining credibility with women whose racial and cultural identities are treated as both politically meaningful and sexually desirable. Applying liberalism, postmodern and feminist critiques, and Marxist critical theory helps explain why political awareness becomes socially valuable and why elite progressive spaces can blur the line between genuine respect and fetishization.

The Claremont Colleges are a very clear example of the principle of liberalism. Each institution preserves a distinct identity, yet students rely on each other through shared spaces, affinities, and extracurricular activities. The consortium is like a miniature liberal international order, with the students as semi-autonomous actors who participate in a system of mutual dependence while preserving their own institutional sovereignty. Within this system, political fluency acts as currency. Students who can reference Fanon, settler colonialism, or abolition gain easier access to certain friend groups, activist organizations, and romantic/sexual opportunities. 

If liberalism explains the incentives that encourage students to cultivate political fluency, postmodern and feminist approaches can explain why these performances are socially meaningful in the first place. Discourse, identity, and shared understandings of what counts as legitimate and desirable play a major role, too. At the 5Cs, students exist within an environment where anti-racism, decolonization, and intersectionality are not simply sets of beliefs. Within this setting, students learn that certain performances of political consciousness earn more prestige than others. To be dismissed as a “basic leftist” is to be seen as politically superficial. Familiarity with theorists like Fanon, however, conveys a deeper and more refined radicalism. Publicly reading Black Skin, White Masks becomes less significant because of the text itself and more so because of its perceived legibility as evidence of intellectual depth and anti-racist commitment. 

While postmodern and feminist approaches explain how political performances acquire meaning, Marxist and neo-Marxist political economy analysis reveal an underlying contradiction: Even critiques of capitalism can be absorbed and appropriated by the machine. Marxist theory posits that capitalism transforms social relations, identities, and forms of resistance into commodities. This is exactly what happens at affluent and “progressive” institutions like the 5Cs, where knowledge of anticolonial theory, feminism, and so on becomes a valuable form of capital. In this sense, progressive politics risk functioning less as challenges to elite systems and more as refinements to them. Furthermore, women of color are relegated in this system of commodity fetishism to markers of authenticity that can enhance another person’s progressive credentials. The woman herself may be genuinely desired, but that desire is shaped by broader cultural fantasies that frame racial differences as exotic, transgressive, and politically meaningful. Being with a mixed or BIPOC woman can signify that one is worldly and ideologically enlightened, turning intimacy into another area in which social capital is accumulated. 

This is what makes the spectacle of a white student publicly reading something like a lesser-known Fanon so revealing. The performance of anti-racism and the pursuit of racially marked romantic partners can operate according to the same logic, and it is shown very starkly at the Claremont Colleges. The titular Fanonian white boy himself appears drawn to friendships and inserts himself in activist spaces populated by marginalized women largely in hopes of sleeping with them and enhancing his own sense of importance. His attraction is therefore  mediated by fetishistic fascination with racial difference along with the ego gratification he and his peers get from being recognized as being the kind of white guy deemed “aware enough” to be one of the “real ones.”