Bell Hooks on Representing the Poor in American Culture

Introduction

One of the harsh realities of life in modern America is the legacy left by slavery — a legacy that pervades every aspect of society. Through popular media and institutionalized practices that celebrate rather than challenge images rooted in slavery (think Uncle Ben's rice and Aunt Jemima's pancakes), longstanding stereotypes continue to influence perceptions of Black Americans. According to Gloria Jean Watkins, better known as bell hooks, these pervasive stereotypes affect the manner in which many white Americans think about African Americans, but they also influence how Black Americans and the poor think about themselves, to varying degrees. In a Euro-centric environment where white people are presumed to be inherently superior to the peoples they encountered on the path to world domination, hooks and others argue that overcoming these longstanding stereotypes about the poor represents a challenging but worthwhile enterprise. This paper analyzes hooks' essay "Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor," identifying her rhetorical appeals in support of this enterprise, followed by a summary of key findings in the conclusion.

Growing Up Poor: hooks' Personal Frame of Reference

In her essay "Seeing and Making Culture," bell hooks gives voice to an enormous group of people she claims remain voiceless in modern American society: the poor. When she was growing up, hooks states that everyone she knew fell into one of four general categories — destitute, working poor, middle class, or affluent. The working poor were barely able to make ends meet, and although no one in her family actually talked about it, all of the children simply knew the family was poor. As hooks states, "We never talked about being poor. As children, we knew we were not supposed to see ourselves as poor but we felt poor" (p. 234).

Being poor, however, was not regarded by hooks' family and friends as being lazy or worthless; it simply meant having less money than others. According to hooks, "Poverty was no disgrace in our household. We were socialized early on, by grandparents and parents, to assume that nobody's value could be measured by material standards. . . . One could be hardworking and still be poor" (p. 234). Moreover, education did not necessarily equate to intelligence: "One could have degrees and still not be intelligent or honest" (p. 235).

Academia, Media, and the Stereotyping of the Poor

It was not until hooks removed herself from this enlightened environment and entered the halls of academia that she encountered a very different picture of poverty. Rather than understanding poverty as the product of deeply entrenched social stratification, hooks was taught in college that poverty was the fault of the poor themselves. In an impassioned response to these experiences, she writes, "I was shocked by representations of the poor learned in classrooms, as well as by the comments of professors and peers that painted an entirely different picture. They almost always portrayed the poor as shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest, and unworthy" (p. 235).

Clearly, hooks is painting American higher education with a broad brush, but it is reasonable to suggest that many people do in fact conceptualize the poor in this fashion, due in large part to the insidious and influential media messages that bombard audiences on a daily basis (Diawara, 2007). These repeated messages, hooks argues, cause poor people to formulate hypocritical and self-destructive views about themselves.

Conclusion

In her essay "Seeing and Making Culture," bell hooks presents a series of arguments in support of her assertion that American society continues to be shaped by longstanding stereotypes about the poor in general and African American poor people in particular. One of the more striking issues to emerge from hooks' argument is the fact that, even though popular media reinforces these stereotypes and presents an America of opportunity accessible only to the few, these same media productions accurately reflect how many poor people have come to measure success in purely material terms. In the final analysis, poor people face enough hardship without being depicted in consistently negative terms. Part of the solution to overcoming poverty in the United States is to change the manner in which the poor are represented in popular media and American culture broadly.

References

Belvey-Jennings, R. (1996, March 31). Book reviews. Transformations, 6(1), 131.

Diawara, M. (2007, Fall). Self representation in African cinema. Journal of Contemporary African Art, 21, 74–76.

hooks, b. (1994). Seeing and making culture: Representing the poor. In Outlaw culture: Resisting representations. New York: Routledge.

Loewen, J. W. (2007). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: Touchstone.