Clifford L. Staples

Department of Sociology
University of North Dakota
<ud153289@ndsuvm1>

 

hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End, 1990.

 

About two years ago my friend Mike sent me bell hooks’s review of Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” which was published in Zeta Magazine.¹ Mike’s photocopy budget is even worse than mine, so I figured if he went to the trouble of smuggling these pages out to me then he really wanted me to read them. So I did. I had seen the film prior to reading the review, and, just like hooks’s white male colleagues, I too had “loved it” (10). Her critical review challenged me to rethink my initial response to the film, and got me interested in reading more of her work. So I sent a check to South End Press for copies of Ain’t I a Woman (1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), and Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990). Here I will focus on Yearning. This book in particular has encouraged me to join with her in interrogating the racism and sexism of postmodern American culture. Yearning consists of twenty-three short essays, including a dialogue with Cornel West on relationships between black men and black women, and a concluding piece in which she playfully interviews herself. Like her review of “Do The Right Thing,” a number of the remaining essays initially appeared elsewhere: in Zeta Magazine, Inscriptions, Art Forum, Sojourner, Framework, Emerge. Pulling these essays together in one volume has undoubtedly made her cultural criticism available to a much larger audience than the few readers of these publications.

 

The essays cover a lot of territory and are not easily classified. Some chapters (e.g., “Stylish Nihilism,” “Representing Whiteness,” “Counter-Hegemonic Art,” “A Call For Militant Resistance”) might be fairly called film criticism. In several other places (e.g., “Liberation Scenes,” “Postmodern Blackness,” “Culture to Culture,” “Critical Interrogation”) she discusses and evaluates trends in cultural criticism. And then, from another direction (“The Chitlin Circuit,” “Homeplace,” “Sitting at the Feet of the Messenger,” “Aesthetic Inheritances,” “Saving Black Folk Culture”) she remembers and celebrates African-American culture and politics. But one shouldn’t put too much weight on these categories. You are as likely to find autobiographical reflections in the film reviews as in the more properly autobiographical pieces, and references to films, novels, theoretical trends and biographies turn up everywhere. As she writes in the last essay, “There are so many locations in this book, such journeying” (229). Hooks’s excursions erase all boundaries, leave all genres blurred.

 

For hooks, radical cultural criticism is rooted in a commitment to black liberation struggle. She examines representations of black people and black life in literature and popular culture to understand how such representations enhance and undermine the capacity of African-Americans to determine their own fate. She focuses, in particular, on the ways in which such representations work to either enslave or liberate blacks, reinforce or challenge racism in whites, and sustain or subvert white supremacy. She also remains critical of the ways in which both women’s liberation and black liberation continue to be practiced as if black women did not exist.

 

OK. What you’ve mostly gotten so far is the dust-jacket perspective of Anyreader–the sort of “view from nowhere” I was taught to write in graduate school. It’s also the kind of “review” I might have written before reading Yearning–before getting my lesson in racial awareness. Hooks won’t let me forget who I am. So, as it turns out, I’m not Anyreader. I’m a white guy.

 

Many of hooks’s readers are white guys; certainly most of the subscribers to Postmodern Culture are. And have you ever considered the volume of material and cultural capital upon which this discourse rests? To participate in this e-mail discussion one not only has to have a modem, but also a position of some status in or near the state bureaucracy. And you also have to know how to talk the postmodern talk. Hooks knows where postmodern theory comes from and approaches it warily. In “Postmodern Blackness” she writes:

 

My defense of postmodernism and its relevance to black folks sounded good, but I worried that I lacked conviction, largely because I approach the subject cautiously and with suspicion. Disturbed not so much by the "sense" of postmodernism but by the conventional language used when it is written or talked about and by those who speak it, I find myself on the outside of the discourse looking in. As a discursive practice it is dominated primarily by the voices of white male intellectuals and/or academic elites who speak to and about one another with coded familiarity. Reading and studying their writing to understand postmodernism in its multiple manifestations, I appreciate it but feel little inclination to ally myself with the academic hierarchy and exclusivity pervasive in the movement today. (23-24)

 

Certainly, many of the essays in Yearning were written for and about black intellectuals. And you often get the feeling hooks would prefer to write primarily for other blacks, particularly black women. Yet, much of what she has to say seems addressed to whites, or at least it’s written with the knowledge that whites are likely to be looking over her shoulder. For example, “Postmodern Blackness,” one of the essays in the book, was published in the first volume of this journal. And Hooks is also on the editorial board. Thus, she may not want to ally herself with me and my fellow white male travellers, but I know she wants us to hear what she has to say.

 

What she has to say, fundamentally, is that she is a black woman intellectual working in a white male supremacist culture. Her work can be seen as a self-conscious confrontation with, and exploration of, this fact. She constantly positions and repositions herself in relation to this culture and to her specific audience. By pushing positionality to its limits, hooks makes visible the on-going ways in which racism and sexism shapes cultural production–including, reflexively, the writing and reading of her own texts. She forces the white male reader in particular into self-consciousness and self-criticism.

 

Her stance also raises the question of just exactly what a “review” of her work by me might mean. After thinking it over, I have found myself coming to rest in a problematic place somewhere between criticism and self-criticism. So my “review” is also, of necessity, something of a confession.

 

From one paragraph to the next, I never know how I’m going to feel reading hooks. One moment I’ll feel angry and frustrated and the next happy and empowered. Sometimes I’m also afraid; there’s always the chance that she’s going to name one more prejudice I’m carrying around with me. Confronting and sorting out these conflicting feelings about race is hard work. Not having to do this work until now, in my late-thirties, says a lot about what it means to be a white male. Hooks, on the other hand, never felt she had choice. For black people, particularly black women, thinking critically about race has always been a matter of survival.

 

Reading hooks’s critiques of the way black people are portrayed in white culture has forced me to question much of what I knew or thought I knew about African-Americans. It has also made me realize how most of what I know about blacks is manufactured; it does not arise spontaneously out of my day to day experiences with black people.² This is equally true for me living in North Dakota as it is for my parents living in New Jersey. The black people most white Americans know best are on TV.

 

By focusing critical attention on the cultural production of blackness, hooks points to the hyperreality of racial politics in postmodern America. On average, white lives and black lives are probably just as segregated today as ever. Now, however, we watch a lot of images of black people on TV and in other media. The presence of such images creates an illusion of familiarity, a kind of simulated integration. Yet few of these images are produced by black people, or challenge stereotypes of black people, and almost all of them are constructed with profit in mind.

 

It is not simply the case that representations of black people “influence” or “distort” white perceptions. Such a view belongs to a time, no longer with us, when most people recognized and acted as if there were a difference between reality and representations of it. Now, there are few if any white perceptions of black people for mass media to “influence” that are not already the product of mass media.

 

Of course, as a white American sociologist I have been trafficking in these same commodified images of blackness every day for a number of years now. Whether I’m teaching introductory sociology or a senior seminar in “race, class, and gender,” my white students and I talk about “the black family,” “unemployed black men,” or whomever as if we know what we are talking about– as if black people were speaking instead of being spoken about.

 

Participating in these conversations has always left me feeling anxious and troubled, but it has been difficult until recently to figure out why. Now I can see that the problem lay in the one-dimensionality of our conversations. Immersed in a white culture that stretches from horizon to horizon, like the snow outside my window, our conversations created only the illusion that we knew black people’s lives. In this respect white sociology and CNN are indistinguishable; in one way or another, it’s just white people talking about black people. And yet, it’s as if we had convinced ourselves that by starting to talk about black people we had somehow stopped talking like white people.

 

Thus, like many other whites, I have often found myself adrift in a sea of images–signs of “blackness” that have no signifiers; signs that refer only to other signs. Hooks is on to this when she notes how Spike Lee’s film was made mass-marketable to whites by relying on commodified images of blacks:

 

Practically every character in Do The Right Thing has already been "seen," translated, interpreted, somewhere before, on television, sitcoms, evening news, etc. Even the nationalism expressed in the film or in Lee's interviews has been stripped of its political relevance and given a chi-chi stance as mere cultural preference. (178)

 

Despite the fact that these commodified images of blackness often “work” with white audiences, I think many whites are deeply dissatisfied with the way we are taught to think about black people. There is a nagging feeling that something isn’t right, isn’t even close to being right. This is the ontological anxiety of the postmodern self–a self shaped by watching representations of experience rather than a self shaped by experience. We are so cut off from the lives of black people that we have no vantage point from which to assess the images of black people created by others.

 

Hooks finds cause for optimism in the deep dissatisfaction of the postmodern self. In “Postmodern Blackness” she writes:

 

The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc., that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition. (27)

 

I wish I could share her optimism. Unfortunately, the insecurity that plagues the postmodern self also makes whites a target for clever marketing strategies that prey upon our ignorance and uncertainty. This, I think, is one reason why so many of us watched “Do The Right Thing” uncritically.

 

As hooks points out in her review, “Do The Right Thing” was sold to white America as a “radical” film (77). This was going to be an in-your-face slam-dunk film about black people doing black stuff in black ways made by that “bad” black guy Spike Lee. This hype implied that other representations of black life available to white America were inauthentic, thereby constructing Lee’s film as a “true” insider account. And if Lee thought white America would be “uncomfortable” watching his film then, by God, those of us who fancied ourselves multicultural would show him and everyone else we could hang with this film and this militant black. We’d be so comfortable watching “Do The Right Thing” we’d all probably fall asleep. Of course, by default, those whites who shied away from the film, who didn’t get into its aesthetic, or at least didn’t act like they did, could be defined as racist cretins, or worse: unfashionable. Thus, to understand the white response to Lee’s film it is important to realize how whites read white responses to blackness as signs of hipness.

 

There is more than just a little bit of macho sexism in all of this. As hooks points out, black authenticity is defined in large part by black masculinity. And, in our racist imaginations, black masculinity is all about danger and sexuality. Thus, for white males “loving” Lee’s film is a kind of male-bonding. We may not be able to identify with the “black thing” but we can sure identify with the “male thing.” In this way, white men strive to bond with black men around our supposedly shared interest in sexual exploitation. Our deepest hope is that this connection to black men will deflect their rage away from us and toward someone else–black women, perhaps.

 

Realizing the danger in the lack of critical response to the film, hooks reminds us that in a world suffused with manufactured images of “blackness,” what is black is not necessarily subversive:

 

Overwhelmingly positive reception to "Do The Right Thing" highlights the urgent need for more intense, powerful public discussion about racism, the need for a rejuvenated visionary black liberation struggle. Aesthetically and politically, Spike Lee's film has opened another cultural space for dialogue; but it is a space which is not intrinsically counter-hegemonic. Only through progressive radical political practice will it become a location for cultural resistance. (184)

 

By forcing me to rethink why I liked the film, hooks reminds me how unhappy I am with the way I have learned to think about black people, how my lack of critical response sustains a racist and sexist culture, and how important it is to develop the capacity to make the kind of “critical interventions” she advocates. It is the kind of analysis that is not only rooted in a political commitment to black liberation, and women’s liberation, but is also grounded in an understanding of the nature of postmodern society and the lonely and desperate people who live in it.

 

Thus, while reading hooks I often feel good, even if at first I get angry and defensive. I feel like I am learning new ways to think about black people, as well as new ways to think about myself. This is empowering. With these new ways of thinking I feel like I have the capacity to resist and undermine the sexist and racist life I’m being asked to live. Take, for example, this passage from “Critical Interrogation”:

 

One change in direction that would be real cool would be the production of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness. It would just be so interesting for all those white folks who are giving blacks their take on blackness to let them know what's going on with whiteness. In far too much contemporary writing--though there are some outstanding exceptions--race is always an issue of Otherness that is not white; it is black, brown, yellow, red, purple even. Yet only a persistent, rigorous and informed critique of whiteness could really determine what forces of denial, fear and competition are responsible for creating fundamental gaps between professed political commitment to eradicating racism and the participation in the construction of a discourse on race that perpetuates racial domination. (54)

 

Reading this passage allowed me to see those class discussions of “social inequality” in a new way. This led me to a deeper understanding of what I was struggling to do and to discover better ways to do it. I began to imagine ways of overcoming the meaninglessness of our discussions of “the black family” by reading commodified images of blackness not as signs of blackness, but as signs of whiteness. We began this discussion by tracing the images of blackness we watch (either in our textbooks or on TV) back to the white men who overwhelmingly control the production of them. Once we did this it was possible to see how our own talk about black people simply built upon these racist stereotypes. Though it is hardly profound, we now respect the distinction between talking about black people and having black people talk to us. This feels like a move in the right direction.

 

There are times, however, when I sometimes feel betrayed by hooks. These are the times when she seems to want to take back what she has given me. As a result I feel set up, and I find myself not wanting to trust her. It also suggests that she feels at least ambivalent about the postmodern possibilities for empathy and solidarity which she otherwise puts forth as liberating.

 

Ever mindful of the extent to which contact with white people has meant suffering for blacks, hooks watches whites very closely. To her, my yearning to escape commodified images of black experience–a yearning given shape and direction by reading her work–often seems predatory. In “Radical Black Subjectivity” she writes:

 

Such appropriation happens again and again. It takes the form of constructing African-American culture as though it exists solely to suggest new aesthetic and political directions white folks might move in. Michele Wallace calls it seeing African-American culture as "the starting point for white self-criticism." (20-21)

 

Reading this makes me angry and frustrated. I think to myself, “She’s never happy. She anticipates every response to her or to African-American culture and defines it and me as incurably white and essentially racist.” My anger eventually subsides, but the frustration remains, and I find myself gradually slipping back into feelings of powerlessness and despair. What else can I do?

 

I don’t think African-American culture exists solely for my benefit, but I see no alternative to my reading it, reading her, as a starting point for self-criticism. Hooks has to give us that at least. Flirting with essentialism, as she seems to do here, leads inevitably to a politics of separatism. If whites are racist by nature then we have nothing whatsoever to discuss. I have no choice but to read her self-critically, and if the results look to her like another kind of theft, then that’s a chance I’ll have to take.

 

It took me awhile to get to this position. In fact, for the reasons discussed above, I almost gave up on this essay. I bet others have also thought about responding to hooks, but abandoned the idea. For example, none of the four reviews I have found of Yearning were written by men. And while I think a lot of other white men ignore hooks because they can, I also think there are a lot of men who might read her work critically, but feel there is no way to respond to her that she has not already foreclosed.

 

The bottom line, however, is that I don’t think hooks is unreasonable. She is just very demanding. Take, for example, the issue of positionality raised earlier. Initially I was feeling proud of myself that I had stepped out from behind the Anyreader persona to proclaim my status as a “white guy.” Then, going back through Yearning a second or third time, I ran into the following passage in “Critical Interrogation”:

 

Many scholars, critics, and writers preface their work by stating that they are white, as though mere acknowledgement of this fact were sufficient, as if it conveyed all we need to know of standpoint, motivation, direction. I think back to my graduate school years when many of the feminist professors fiercely resisted the insistence that it was important to examine race and racism. Now many of these very same women are producing scholarship focused on race and gender. What processes enabled their perspectives to shift? Understanding that process is important for the development of solidarity; it can enhance awareness of the epistemological shifts that enable all of us to move in oppositional directions. Yet, none of these women write articles reflecting on their critical process, showing how their attitudes have changed. (54)

 

As I read this I felt as if she were, once again, trashing a position she had led me to adopt only a few pages ago. I felt this way a number of times reading Yearning. Yet, upon reflection, I could see her point. Acknowledging one’s status is only meaningful as a result of what comes after it. In my case, I came to see this essay as an occasion for self-reflection and analysis. Stating that one is a “white male” won’t, in itself, do that more difficult work. In fact, it might inhibit it to the extent that it serves as a sort of politically correct gesture in the sense hooks means above. This essay may still be such a gesture, but it’s a more meaningful gesture to me than it would have been had hooks not been so insistent.

 

The kind of self-disclosure hooks is pushing for here is, of course, risky business. Power and status are at the heart of it. Western Academics and intellectuals are reluctant to open up about our own intellectual development because doing so reveals that we have not always been as smart as we’d like others to think; crediting those who have influenced us exposes the social nature of intellectual achievement– evidence that runs counter to our sacred individualism; and admitting that we have been affected by another is also to grant that someone a certain kind of power over us. This latter point is something particularly difficult for men to do; we are supposed to be the movers and shakers, we are not supposed to be moved and shaken–at least not in other than a rigidly defined heterosexual way. Homophobia, sexism, and racism all play apart in determining who it is we are willing to admit to having moved us, depending upon who it is we need to ignore at the time.

 

On this issue I think hooks herself could be more forthcoming. On the one hand she does write about herself a lot (in Yearning and elsewhere), yet I don’t get a very clear sense of self-transformation from these writings. I understand that she has always been a black woman, but has she always been a militant, feminist, socialist black woman? Very little that she writes would lead one to believe otherwise. Thus, while I was interested and impressed by her description of the way that her family critiqued white representations of black people on TV in the 1950s (3), I was also left with the impression that she has always been as militant as she is now, and that she (among other black women) has always been in the place that everyone else is just now discovering. Maybe these things are true. Even so, by her own admission, even if she is way out ahead of me then it’s important that I understand how she got there. I would like to read more autobiography from hooks that shows the intellectual turning points in her life.

 

There is another problem. It’s about that business of whites reading other whites’ responses to blackness as signs of hip status. A reader of this essay wondered whether white readers of hooks, such as myself, might fall into the trap of approaching her work uncritically for the same reasons that we watched “Do The Right Thing” uncritically–out of an effort to signify that we were hip to her militant stance. The result being a kind of racist spectacle in which black intellectuals duke it out while whites sit on the sidelines, bet on the outcome, and root for the most radical team around. I mean, if hooks thinks Spike Lee’s work is conservative, then she must really be “bad.” This isn’t hooks’s problem, though she may be implicated in it. As much as she might try at times, she can’t control how she is going to be read and the meaning her work might come to have. The problem is the river of white racism that flows deep and strong through our culture and our lives. At times it’s hard for me to imagine what it might be like to be white and not be racist.

 

Many of my friends, those on the left in particular, are trashing postmodern theories and theories of postmodernity. They are concerned, and in some cases rightly so, about the political and personal nihilism that seems to surround some postmodernist thinkers. Hooks is critical of the elitist origins of postmodern thinking, but she would rather use it than trash it. Hooks takes from postmodern thinking what newfangled ideas look useful, and at the same time boldly affirms a commitment to such unfashionable notions as “black liberation,” “women’s liberation” and “revolution.” Yes, even revolution. Hooks is committed to that old-fashioned idea that we should be leaving this world a better place than we found it and reads postmodernism with this goal in mind. I read her with the same commitment. No one should fear succumbing to nihilism from reading Yearning.

 

And despite the obvious problems involved, I want white men and women to read hooks. We won’t find our way through these problems if we don’t confront them, and reading hooks is a good place to start. I found that she pushed me to go beyond my tired and self-serving responses to racial issues. I’m pretty sure reading her work will do the same for others. I’d also like to see a lot more sustained commentary on her work by both blacks and whites. What little that exists is superficial. Wrestling with the issues that hooks raises for white readers will propel us toward ways of responding to black authors that are not racist; ways of responding that move between criticism and self-criticism in an effort to expose, not bury, the problematic nature of reading and writing in black and white.

 

Notes

 

1. My thanks to Julie Christianson, Jim English, Janet Rex, and Mike Schwalbe for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this essay.

 

2. I particularly like this way of describing postmodern culture. I am paraphrasing Dorothy Smith, in The Everyday World As Problematic: Toward a Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern UP), 19.