Racism and sexism: intersecting systems of discrimination

Edward Said & bell hooks

The image of the "Other": Edward Said and bell hooks on the White West's propaganda of political control through cultural dominance and superiority

Towards the end of the twentieth century, sociological criticism centered on issues that depict the seeming dominance of the West against other societies and cultures in the midst of humanity's progress towards increased modernization. During this period, the West was also considered as the 'White West,' a concept that developed from the continued cultural dominance of the West and the supremacy of the white American race. This concept of White West is created by fusing both Edward Said and bell hook's important discussions against Western society. Said's analysis of the Orient culture and society in "Orientalism" showed that Orientalism had been a political propaganda by the West to projects itself as culturally dominant against other cultures in the world. Similarly, hooks, by illustrating "outlaw culture," had shown that white Americans have continued to assert its superiority over the black American race by reinforcing marginalization of the blacks, especially in terms of socio-economic class divisions.

This paper discusses this concept of White West in terms of Said's and hooks' analyses of cultural and class supremacy in "Orientalism" and "Outlaw Culture," respectively. The stance that this paper adopts is two-fold: the first thesis illustrated how Said proved that Orientalism is not a social concept, but rather a political propaganda concocted by the West in order to assert its control over other cultures, while the second thesis showed hooks arguing that white Americans' racial supremacy resulted to the creation of a new, radical class, an "outlaw culture" that asserted itself against and is critical of white Americans' notion of class superiority.

Said's assertion that the Orient was a concept formulated to show West's cultural dominance was explicated earlier in his discourse, where he stated, history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written, so that "our" East, "our" Orient becomes "ours" to possess and direct...There's been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women's rights...You don't need Arabic or Persian or even French to pontificate about how the democracy domino effect is just what the Arab world needs.

This passage is a blatant criticism against the West's attempt to validate its credo and belief of democracy and freedom. As Said had explicated, it is only through the concept of Orientalism that Western culture was able to show its superiority against other cultures, effectively illustrated through the contrast between traditional (associated with Orient societies) and modern (Western) societies.

Indeed, even the works of Karl Marx, according to Said, manifested this Eurocentric view of cultural dominance of the West (or Occident) over the Orient. Despite his criticism of modern capitalist society, Marx's distinction of the traditional Orient as being more culturally "backward" or "rustic" as against the modern yet oppressive nature of capitalist Western society manifested that in all aspects, the West was comparatively better socio-economically than the East. Marx's rustic and traditional depiction of Oriental culture "had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules..." In effect, because of the Orientalism concept, the West had "boxed in" the East as culturally and technologically backward and traditional, while West remained the "high culture" of the world: complex and technologically and socio-economically sophisticated.

Orientalism, then, allowed the West to promote its political propaganda of colonizing Eastern societies. This propaganda of colonizing Eastern societies was legitimized by the West's insistence that the East needed to progress in the same way that it did (West) right after the economic success of the Industrial Revolution. Colonization was the West's method of "rehabilitating" societies it considered as a 'laggard' -- a society that, in the West's view and standards of modernity, had trailed behind other cultures throughout history. Colonization for Said is the "annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of material foundations of Western society in Asia." The acceptance of the concepts of the Orient and Orientalism marked the validation of the intended colonization of the West of the Eastern societies. Colonization passed as a form of rehabilitation and democratization of a society is, interestingly, still practiced today, as was exemplified in the U.S.'s propaganda of declaring war against nations (such as Iraq and Afghanistan) that were allegedly "threats" to national (and international) security.

In a similar vein, hooks presented a critical analysis of the continued racial and economic superiority of white Americans and the increasing marginalization of black Americans. What hooks was trying to elucidate in "Outlaw Culture" was the existence of class divisions in the society based not only on one's socio-economic capacity, but also on race differences. This observation had survived the civil rights movement of the 1960s, surfacing once again in the early 1990s as hooks tried to make sense how the new culture, which she termed "outlaw culture," was created and developed in American society. The development of an "outlaw culture" was not consciously observed in American history because, as hooks argued, "earliest models for black intellectual life were not academics...These writers were readers, thinkers, political activists committed to education for critical consciousness..." By stating this, hooks illustrated outlaw culture as emerging from communities, groups, and individuals and not from established social institutions.