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,...
Does the arguments that hooks makes hold equally valid for these individuals, as Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans are reduced into the category of 'Asian-Americans' in a way that denies their unique heritage? As blacks have united together and rallied as a group, to be effective in the political environment, putting aside ethnic and national divisions, so have Asian-Americans, but does this reinforce stereotypes and the classifications that whites have created, even while such groups attempt to fight racism?
Ultimately, hooks calls upon more careful study of notions of whiteness from the point-of-view of blacks as a solution, but does this not merely reinforce the black/white divide, a biologically if not culturally false divide, as noted in Omni and Winant? Still, hook's essays remain affirming documents, for despite her critique of institutionalized racism and media representations of race, bell hooks is not a cynic. Rather she calls for the creation of a unifying community, which does not ignore the legacy of racism but creates connections rather than divides souls.
Works Cited hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. NY: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1996.
Omi, Michael Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. NY: Routledge, 2994.
