It was my first year in my PhD program at the University of Minnesota. I was taking a course focused on culture and teaching that was central to my major. I did not completely understand the way that the course was designed; it seemed like a hodgepodge of material coming together to create this greater whole. But I loved the readings.
One of those readings was bell hooks’s Black Looks: Race and Representation. Fortunately, I was already familiar with hooks’s work. I first came across her writing when I was in seminary in 2008. I swallowed up her book Feminism is for Everybody,as her unpacking of the way that children are abused in our community resonated with me. Years later, I read Salvation: Black People and Love which focused on the hows and whys of Black love and how we could love each other to wholeness. I also read her essay “Understanding Patriarchy,” first in 2015, alongside Andrea Smith’s “Heteropatriarchy and Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” and I felt as if hooks’s unpacking of heteropatriarchy went further than Smith’s analysis. I picked up that essay again in 2016 after the mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, FL. I needed hooks’s words to make sense of what we as a nation were experiencing in the aftermath of the toxic masculinity that hunted and ultimately executed people who were queer.
Given what hooks had already meant to me, I was excited to read Black Looks: Race and Representation for my graduate class, but I found myself exposed and embarrassed about how she spoke so candidly about the representation of Black people in pop culture. The way she tore into John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood made me cringe. The way she critiqued the symbols of Black nationalism as a means to guard against white supremacy made me angry. The way she interrogated Audre Lorde’s essay“Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger” made me feel defenseless. In hooks’s interrogation of the essay, she pushes back on Lorde’s use of the collective ‘we’ to describe the experiences of Black women in relationship with each other. She states:
The experience her essay suggests black women share is one of passively receiving and absorbing messages of self-hate, then directing rage and hostility most intensely at one another. While I wholeheartedly agree with Lorde that many black women feel and act as she describes, I am interested in the reality of those black women, however few, who even if they have been the targets of black female rage do not direct hostility or rage toward other black women. (hooks 1992, 43).
I wasn’t able to process this level of critique about the forms of resilience we gravitated to by someone who said they loved us. To make matters worse, I had to process my own shame in a room full of people who did not look like me and, thus, did not carry the Black experience hooks was describing in the same way that I did. At the end of the day, I was left emotionally exhausted examining myself in a place that made me feel immensely vulnerable and quite frankly unsafe while clothed in what I felt were righteous symbols of resistance that hooks had already said were questionable if not altogether meaningless.
Over the years, however, I have had more time to sit with this particular text. I am not saying that I have gotten to the point where I agree with all of hooks’s critiques, but I understand at a greater level the assignment that was placed in front of her. Still, it is hard to open ourselves up to the critique that hooks offers in Black Looks when Black people have been so ardently oppressed, pushed and pulled on every side, constantly forced on the run to fight for our literal breath every single day because of the white supremacist heteropatriarchal hellhole that we find ourselves in. Instead of balm, it feels as if she is applying salt to wounds that have never had a chance to heal because of the continual disregard of Black lives from police brutality and massive unemployment to housing displacement and mass incarceration.
Yet, what hooks offers is a look into who we are, teaching us that even in our most extreme pain we are not above critique and examination. She compels us to examine ourselves not so we can assimilate into whiteness, but so we have more tools to resist and ultimately dismantle it. In her own words she affirms this by stating that “the issue of race and representation is not just a question of critiquing the status quo. It is also about transforming the image, creating alternatives, asking ourselves questions about what types of images subvert, pose critical alternatives, and transform our worldviews and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad” (hooks 1992, 4).
Loving Blackness, as I have come to understand it, means being able to challenge the things about us that are less than perfect. It is practicing Black joy. It is resistance against oppression. It is dancing outside of the lines and pushing back against respectability politics. It is also a fierce examination into the things that we say are liberatory to find out if they really are. In this way, Black Looks is not a departure from any other work that hooks has ever written but an extension of her undying love for our people. Her words feel like discipline, but they are the tools that we need to get better. I do not believe that hooks’s work invites us to believe as she believed—I mean let Boyz n the Hood live for the love of all that is holy in the world—but she did invite us to interrogate the things that are sacred to see if they hold. This is the work that we must carry forward as we continue to reflect on her memory and the legacy she left all of us. hooks, bell.
1992. Black Looks: Race andRepresentation. Boston: South End Press.