UNDERSTANDING AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE: WHAT BELL HOOKS TAUGHT ME
When I returned to the United States in 1996 after being away for almost an entire quarter of a century, I had to shift the focus of my attention. Instead of trying to make sense of Asian, and especially Japanese history and culture, I had to catch up on what had been happening in my country of birth and in the Western intellectual milieu. Since intercultural communication as my major field of study and what I was teaching, this meant getting heavily involved with domestic American issues, especially those of race and gender. And I personally wanted to come to terms with American racial matters.
Cornel West’s writings helped me to catch up on American racial politics, and I intensively researched British cultural studies and the work of Stuart Hall. Cultural studies gave me a way to interpret the American racial and cultural situation as I became aware of the role of media representations in the maintenance of racial hierarchy. At the same time, I was alerted to active resistance on the part of subordinate groups to the preferred meanings of dominant media producers. The source of such resistance was critical consciousness which could be nurtured through education and media literacy in particular. This view attracted me, since oppressed groups are not merely seen as victims, incapable of determining their own fate. Although cultural studies recognized the power of media to influence thinking, feeling, and action, it was also keenly aware that all human beings possess agency and are capable of giving their own interpretations to the media messages they encounter.
Encountering the Work of bell hooks
The work of bell hooks demonstrated to me that media representations of African Americans are an important factor in maintaining white supremacy. When I read Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), I was excited that hooks introduced her standpoint by referring to Stuart Hall’s seminal contributions to cultural studies. Hall made the point that colonized peoples are subject to cultural power through the dominant group’s representations that turn them into an object. As a result, they often internalize the beliefs and values of those who oppress them. And so, even when there is no domination through force, the mentally colonized nevertheless conform to the beliefs and values, norms and practices of their oppressors. Such internalized oppression is exactly what hooks saw as prevailing in the United States among many black people. She noted how painful it is for black people to learn that they are not in control of their own images and how they see themselves. As they struggle with building healthy identities in the light of such representations, they often experience intense conflict that leaves them filled with rage, paralyzed by despair, or mindlessly compliant.
Cultural studies had taught me that cultural identity is created within history. It is not something that people discover; rather, they produce their cultural identity through their interpretations of the prevailing stories about the past. This is hooks’s point of departure: critically questioning the old stories about what it means to be black and to be white with a particular emphasis on critiquing the stories presented in the media. In her critical studies of media, she demonstrates the ability of black people to position themselves differently and to leave the past behind by opening up a space for alternative images. Through transgressing the reigning norms, they transform the very ways they think and imagine. Like Hall, she directed my attention to popular culture, the arena of cultural struggle where the elite versions of reality are constructed and challenged. But it wasn’t easy for me to take popular culture seriously. I had to first give up my snobbish preference for high culture and my contempt for the culture of ordinary people. My transition from cultural elitism to a more democratic stance was long and difficult.
The essay “Eating the Other” revealed hooks at her most insightful and, not incidentally, confronted me with the need to look at my own motivations for being interested in African-American culture and writing. She was aware that representations of black Americans were clearly changing. No longer were the pale blue-eyed blonde forms of beauty on center stage. Instead, a desire for the Other was apparent, as darker images began to appear in media and advertising. Some writers claimed that this was the beginning of the end of white supremacy. But hooks wondered whether such optimistic interpretations were warranted. After all, white people had long been fascinated with the “primitive” as a source of pleasure. And sexual experiences with darker women have always been for young white men a rite of passage as they explored the sensual realm and left their innocence behind. But now young white men were saying that their desire for the Other demonstrates that they are not racist. In fact, they expressed adamant opposition to the old racist beliefs that interracial mixing, and especially interracial sex, would endanger the purity of the white race.
In hooks’s view, though, the matter was not so simple. For her, the bottom line was that Otherness is being commodified. White people were being sold an experience of pleasure and danger, one that will make up for their own alienation from society and from their own bodies. “The commercial nexus exploits the culture’s desire (expressed by whites and blacks) to inscribe blackness as ‘primitive’ sign, as wildness, and with it the suggestion that black people have secret access to intense pleasure, particularly pleasures of the body.” It offers a possible way out of the Western identity crisis, and that of white youth in particular, as diversity and pluralism bring access to the basic energies that promise life and vitality to those suffering from boredom and loss of purpose.
It seemed like hooks was talking about people like me when she described whites who were embracing distant cultures and new experiences to fill their inner emptiness. Japanese people and culture provided me with a refuge and helped me to experience emotional sensitivity, aesthetic pleasure, and spiritual refinement in ways that I had not known. But my experience with Japanese people can hardly be considered as a taste of the“primitive.” However, I did marry a Japanese woman and Western men sometimes see East Asian women as uniquely sensual and expert in the arts of love. I felt very uneasy when reading hooks’s critique of white people eating and consuming the Other.
Putting my own case aside, I needed to see whether hooks was justified in saying that many white people who enthusiastically embrace black people and black culture are still racist and treat black people as objects. First of all, hooks argued that domination is absent when interaction is based on equality of position and when a white person does not control the situation. In “Refusing to Be a Victim,” hooks proclaimed: “Those white Americans who are eager to live in a society that promotes and rewards racial equality must be willing to surrender outmoded perceptions of black neediness that socialize them to feel comfortable with us only when they are in a superior, caretaking role.”
The standard that hooks proposed for evaluating white communication with blacks is the ability of whites to create intimate bonds with black people through a love of blackness. This means not only giving up the comforts of white supremacy (belief in black inadequacy, inferiority, victim consciousness, etc.) but also refusing to be merely cultural tourists. White people may hang out with black people and go to exotic places inhabited by dark-skinned people, dance to black music, and eat ethnic food, but such activities do not indicate that they have unlearned their racist assumptions. In fact, affluent whites can win admiration for their unique individual selves by engaging in such fascinating pursuits. The advertising industry understands that for such white people difference is a strong selling point. Once again, hooks’s sharp criticisms of white behavior forced me to look at myself and my own motives for liking far-off places, enjoying contact with non-Western people, eagerly listening to world music, and preferring Asian food (Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Thai).
Cultural appropriation is an additional theme to which hooks directed my attention. She helped me become more sensitive to situations in which whites remove distinctively black styles from their original context. Often, in such cases, a cultural icon like the blues is taken by whites and turned into something quite different and its function as cultural resistance forgotten. As a result, on such occasions black history is erased and black culture is sanitized. Such cultural appropriation threatens black people involved in the everyday struggle to fight racism, decolonize their minds, and achieve freedom. For it is vital that they defend their culture of resistance from white attempts to render it merely picturesque or stimulating while robbing it of its oppositional intent. As hooks pointed out, the commodification of blackness often occurs when racial differences are presented as delicious offerings for the jaded white sensibility.
Hooks emphasized that popular culture images that appear to be expressions of racial equality must be critically evaluated and not accepted at face value. Therefore, the greater representation of black people in advertising and media in itself may not constitute progress in racial matters. After spending almost a quarter century outside the US, I wondered what had changed in interracial interaction while I was away. According to hooks, the answer was “not much,” since white supremacy was still alive and well. Thanks to her, I began to examine the process through which images of blackness are produced and consumed. This meant, first of all, analyzing particular cases of cultural production in which popular culture representations of blackness are influential.
Spike Lee’s Malcolm X
I was fascinated by hooks’s analysis in Outlaw Culture (1994) of the movie Malcolm X by Spike Lee in which she deftly uncovered the ways in which seemingly antiracist popular culture offerings may actually reinforce the status quo. And when I thought about it, the commodification of Malcolm X from a living activist to an abstraction, from a militant and radical black nationalist to a pure image provides a great illustration of hooks’s thesis. Yet, Hollywood chose Spike Lee, a black nationalist to direct its version of Malcolm X. This choice appears to contradict hooks’s assertion that American culture robs iconic oppositional figures like Malcolm X of their revolutionary politics in order to domesticate them for popular consumption.
For hooks, Lee’s movie is a prime example of the commodification of blackness. She emphasizes that Lee is a film industry insider. He may have told the film’s white producers that only a black person should direct the story of Malcolm X, but the main reason he was chosen was money. As a director with appeal among whites as well as blacks, he would bring in a larger audience than any white director. Since Lee himself wanted the movie to be a great box office success as well as satisfy the producers, he had to make it in line with the typical Hollywood epic dramas and the standard fictional biographies. So there is nothing that distinguishes his approach from that of white directors. Since the audience would be predominantly white, he made a film that whites could enjoy and not feel threatened by. In line with this requirement, the first half of the film contains a lot of spectacle mixed in with tragic events whose sadness the spectacle tends to diminish.
Lee also made some revealing decisions such as largely omitting the members of Malcolm’s family and the surrounding community from the film, despite their importance in Malcolm’s life. In so doing, he treated Malcolm as a solitary individual, self-made in the tradition of individualistic Hollywood heroes. Not only that, Lee removed Malcolm’s radical politics and militant rage in favor of a focus on the struggles against white racism and police brutality. Here, hooks makes the point that Malcolm’s critique of imperialism and capitalism is excised in order to highlight his confrontations with racist white men. In her view, Malcolm’s radical politics have disappeared, replaced by the underdog male hero confronting the evil male forces arrayed against him, similar to a Hollywood western.
She adds that near the end of the film when Malcolm is alone and isolated and then murdered, the viewer is left with the impression that black attempts at revolutionary change are foolhardy and bound to fail. There is no political message that remains in the viewer’s mind. Even at the very end, when Lee offers a profusion of images that celebrate Malcolm’s legacy, he does not suggest that Malcolm’s radical political stance could bring about social change. Therefore, most white viewers can feel relieved that Malcolm was actually a sympathetic character and no enemy of the established order. At the same time, many black viewers can take comfort in the scenes where Malcolm confronts white racism and shows his courage. Instead of a unified political message, Lee’s film allows both blacks and whites to take away something that pleases them.
When I saw the film Malcolm X in the mid-1990s, I liked it. In my view, it wasn’t primarily a political film; it was about understanding and appreciating Malcolm the person. I wasn’t left with feelings of despair about the possibilities for political change because the film did not focus on politics. What I felt was great sadness about what happened to Malcolm, coupled with much admiration for the determination and integrity with which he carried out his mission. So I agreed with hooks that Lee’s film did not threaten the predominantly white audience by asking it to do soul searching and to recognize racial injustice. Instead, Lee provided a largely psychological portrait of a universal hero that all people could look up to and respect. Although Lee thought that he was making an important contribution to black liberation, his film did no such thing. And for the reasons that hooks gave, Lee could have only made a political film if he was willing to risk failure. Such a film would have been less successful, made less money, and offended many white people.
So I had to thank hooks for giving me clarity about why Lee made the film that he did. What hooks helped me to see was that Lee could not focus on Malcolm’s compassion for black people and their suffering and on Malcolm’s political quest to relieve such suffering. The only film he could make was one that pictured Malcolm as an individualistic hero who met a tragic end. Does this mean that Lee not only denies black suffering but also sentimentalizes Malcolm, as hooks charges? I thought that Lee gives us a valid angle on Malcolm, even though his film doesn’t contribute to black liberation. I wondered whether it would have been better if he hadn’t made the film. Did he merely further the already advanced process of turning Malcolm into a commodity?
Mass Media and Maintaining White Supremacy
I asked myself about the implications of hooks’s brilliant critique of Lee’s Malcolm X. It definitely made her claim that white supremacist ideology in the media was colonizing black people’s minds more plausible. But I needed to delve more deeply into the issue to see if she had proved her case. In her view, the mass media are the vehicle through which white supremacy comes into black people’s lives. In particular, it is through television that black people passively consume the values and beliefs of white people. The same thing happens through movies and through the educational system. Now that information no longer comes to black people through separate channels controlled by black people themselves, the dominant white values and those of most black people have come closer together. But, in her view, the experiences portrayed on television and in the movies are interpreted according to white, not black standards, and what is taught in the educational system is from a white perspective.
According to hooks, a frequent message of the mass media is that racism no longer exists in the United States. As white folks who have little actual contact with black folks see images of blacks on their TV screen, they imagine that they live in a country where blacks and whites are not kept separate and where they live in harmony with each other. The reality of largely segregated residential areas and schools is replaced by the mediated image of a society in which racial amity and concord prevails.
Standards of beauty have been a highly contested area that has also been heavily influenced by the mass media. In tracing the development of American notions of beauty since the 1960s, hooks credits the Black Power movement with overturning the color-caste hierarchies that had long dominated American life, among blacks as well as whites. Black Power advocates promoted self-love as a key part of their radical political agenda, and in their efforts to overcome internalized racism within the black community, they critiqued and militantly confronted black bias against those with darker skin and the “wrong” kind of hair. In so doing, they were successful in replacing white aesthetic standards with their own. Women began to have natural hairstyles, and it was no longer fashionable to look for a partner with lighter complexion or to make disparaging remarks about people with darker skin.
In hooks’s account, such gains did not endure due to the opening up of social mobility for the black middle class. In “Black Beauty and Black Power,” she states that “it did not take long for interracial interaction in the areas of education and jobs to reinstitutionalize, in less overt ways, a system wherein individual black folks who were most like white folks in the way they looked, talked, dressed, etc., would find it easier to be socially mobile.” She adds that many black activists did not foresee how assimilation would offer benefits that would turn black people away from black consciousness and from opposition to white supremacy.
A further casualty was the loss of the communal ethic that enabled black people to survive during the era of blatant racism. Communalism was replaced by liberal individualism which emphasized people’s rights to satisfy their own desires regardless of the effects on the larger group. So black people could view their hairstyle as a matter of individual choice rather than as a political decision. “Unfortunately, black acceptance of assimilation meant that a politics of representation affirming white beauty standards was being reestablished as the norm.”
For hooks then, white supremacy was maintained by pressures for assimilation to white standards and through the influence of media. Black adoption of white standards of value and beauty demonstrated that greater racial integration produced class differences that divided middle-class blacks from lower-class blacks. And this meant that, as hooks often emphasized, there is no single black identity or culture, since black people are divided along class and gender lines. The lesson for me was that when I talk about “black” people, I need to specify which black people I am referring to: men or women, middle-class or lower-class people. And even this level of generalization is not that accurate.
After reading hooks, I could see that the media role in the production and reproduction of white supremacy was highly complex. First of all, hooks was not taking a fatalistic position in the face of the power of mass communications. Her tireless campaign to educate black critical consciousness and uncover the ideological underpinnings of media representations attested to her activism and idealism. Nor was she claiming that media audiences are necessarily passive. As cultural studies had taught me, audiences are active and can interpret media messages in accordance with their own cultural values. After all, hooks recognized that during the ascendance of black power and nationalist ideologies, African Americans had resisted the dominant meanings of mass media in favor of a cultural standpoint based on radical self-love. Yet, toward the end of the twentieth century, hooks saw the colonization of the minds of black people occurring once again, partially due to media influence.
Some important questions came to mind. When black audiences were watching media offerings produced, directed, and written by whites, how were they actually responding to and making use of such media? To what extent were black writers, directors, and producers having an impact on the production side of media? How different were these shows from those controlled by white people and how different were the actual tastes and preferences of black and white audiences?
