Black Looks Review

Whitney Curtis
September 29, 2008
Pop Culture
Tim Posada

Black Looks Review

Bell Hooks writes, “The essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert,” and this is exactly what her book did for me. After reading the first chapters of the book, I felt attacked. I was hurt and certain that I held no part in this white supremacist, racist society. However, slowly I began to realize that this book was not a direct attack on me, but rather a sharing of the real experiences, tragedies, and points-of-view of people that have been marginalized in society—specifically those of black people. I am not a racist and do not consider myself better than anyone, but I am uneducated in the racist ways of this society. This book helped me see that I am naïve in the ways that black people are portrayed in society, and that I have been caught in the “sameness” trap that states that we need to not focus on the differences between races because we are all really the same—we are all human. What I never realized before is: this statement negates the positive differences between races, the differences that create cultures and individuals.

Bell Hooks does an excellent job at teaching the reader and helping us see, whether we are black, white or any other color, the changes that need to occur in society. She opens our eyes to the ongoing undermining and terrorizing of the black community.

What I found very interesting in Hooks writing was the way she addressed the portrayal of women as over sexualized or “mammies.” She states that black women are trapped in a role of “sexuality and desirability” put on them by a white society that suppressed its own sexuality and needed to project it onto the “Other.” This sexuality is seen throughout the media, including Madonna music videos and various films.

I recently saw a romance/drama, and was able to immediately recognize that the character of the black best friend was depicted as the sexually awakened and eager-to-experiment woman, who gives the white main character relationship advice. However, this character is also portrayed as a mammy. Her home is an old-fashioned, southern type beach home. The kitchen has an old refrigerator and a stove and oven from the 1940s. She decorated the house in effort to remember her great grandmother--who was once a slave. And this character has taken care of her white best friend's two children on many occasions.

Another plight discussed by Hooks, that black people and people of other, non-white origin face, is the prospect of being used by whites as “new dishes to enhance the white palate” and will eventually “be eaten, consumed and forgotten.” Madonna is a key person in the “commodifying” of other cultures, especially black culture. She uses black culture as part of her chic beauty and popularity. In her desire to surpass racist culture and show the world that she embraces other cultures she actually portrays blacks in her music videos as slave-like, sexual barbarians.

When reading this book I constantly felt helpless and hopeless against the disappointment I felt in my culture and society for not having come further in this fight against racism, power and domination. But my hope came toward the end of the book when Hooks writes, “…[repositioning] allows for the recognition that progressive white people who are anti-racist might be able to understand the way in which their cultural practice reinscribes white supremacy without promoting paralyzing guilt or denial.”