Bell Hooks the Scholar Bell

¶ … Bell Hooks

The scholar bell hooks Killing Rage: Ending Racism begins with the shocking defense of a severely psychologically disturbed black man who unleashed a killing spree on the New York subway. While by no means defending murder, hooks engages in a kind of tacit endorsement of the man's motivation, or his sophisticated understanding that both blacks and whites can perpetuate institutionalized racism, by supporting institutions that foster racist attitudes. America is a nation founded upon a racial divide between blacks and whites, founded upon the economic, political, and social legacy of slavery. The notion of institutionalized, rather than personalized racism demarcated by hooks stresses that although the effects of institutionalized racism may disproportionately affect blacks, both black and white 'bodies' can and do enforce the prejudices and stereotypes.

A bell hook's own ideology, thus although it is 'about' race is not a 'racist' ideology, in that she agrees with the fact that racism can be perpetuated by individuals of all colors of skin. This is not to equate anti-white attitudes with anti-black attitudes, because of the historical and intellectual legacy that makes violence against blacks far easier and socially damaging, merely that she acknowledges that racism is an ideology tied to a society, it is not something that people simply 'feel' and can be healed on an individual level.

This affirms what Michael Omi and Howard Winant speak of in their book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. They call the process of constructing racial ideology a historical and ideological process, with no real basis in biological fact. If race seems self-evident, it is because it has become such a part of our cultural worldview, that we take it for granted and do not see it clearly. Even the Founding Fathers like Jefferson used scientific racism to justify class division and oppression (Omni & Winant 63).

While reporting on the subway incident, hooks argues, the greater violence that had been perpetuated upon black bodies through institutionalized racism was erased in the media coverage. Instead, the man's action was racialized with what Toni Morrison calls 'race talk,' a reductionist tendency to see all black actions as motivated by race alone, not by class, gender, nationality or even personal angst (hooks 23). In striking contrast, a Klansman's deathbed revelation about how he drowned a black man, one of countless such incidents that occurred up until the 1960s, went unreported (hooks 22). The juxtaposition is striking.

Additionally, the fact that the man on the subway was not an African-American, but a Jamaican-American from a well-to-do family is also ignored. This reinforces what Winant and Omni speak of in their text when they note who it is the United States' unique history with black Americans that has effectively created blackness. Before the institution of slavery, there were no blacks rather there were merely individuals from different areas in Africa. But to explain and morally justify the existence of slavery, America created a color divide (Omni & Winant 66).

Thus slavery's legacy is still evident in the erasure of black national differences, even if the African may identify with his or her own nation or tribe as an immigrant. Class is ignored; rather everything is reduced to racial differences. Black rage is mocked and trivialized (hooks 25). Yet hooks notes that many successful blacks, upon hearing of the incident, while they did not justify the man's actions, said they could identify with the concept of black rage (hooks 27). Unfortunately, although these thoughts might flit through the minds of many successful blacks, out of fear of seeming to angry, and threatening their foothold in American society they instead prefer to remain silent, like the "black banker" harassed by the police wearing "casual clothes" on his day off while walking around his neighborhood (Omni & Winant 58).

Another provocative element of hooks' text is the way that she renders whiteness problematic and alien, while the dominant culture has always done this with blackness. The quest to know what is not 'us' and to know the 'other' she implies, is endemic to all societies (hooks 32). Yet the academy has shown scant interest in how blacks perceive whiteness, only how whites perceive blackness. This renders white people and whiteness invisible as an ideological construct and renders black people invisible as human beings.

Instead, black people are merely reduced to serving bodies, as hardly human, as something for whites to use as reflections to see what they are 'not,' rather than as legitimate subjects with a perspective of their own. This recalls how the first native people were classified, almost as animal subjects, in the first encounters of Europeans with the New World, and discovered as objects or primitive representations of what European culture had 'evolved' into (Omni & Winant 61).

With some humor, hooks records some of the stereotypes that blacks have spoken of in regards to whites, as noted by Lorraine Hansberry in her work to be Young, Gifted, and Black -- for example, in a rather understandable comment by black women who have cleaned the homes of white women to be economically viable, the women note that whites are "dirty," as well as passionless and cold. Hooks records these stereotypes not to endorse them, but merely to note that as the individuals on opposite sides of the artificially constructed color line gaze at one another, in printed material other than a few black authors like Hansberry, only the white gaze is studied, analyzed, and privileged (hooks 31).

A hooks' criticism seems apt in the sense that 'whiteness' as a construct, much like 'heterosexuality' and 'maleness' has only recently been problematized within contemporary academic discourse. But hooks' use of the term as the opposite of blackness, in reference to individuals is itself problematic. What about racial categories of white people who only 'recently' became white, such as people of Irish, Italian, or Mediterranean extraction? Or Jewish people and members of other minorities that have not been able, historically, to fully participate in American culture because they are not seen as 'white.' Do they all see blackness in the same fashion because they are locked in the same ideological system, or do they exist within their own subculture as well as participate in the dominant discourse of black/white racialization?