Inferior Quotations

bell hooks: The book that I’ve written that mos’ tried to talk to frame my-my concern with popular culture to a more general audience is the collection of essays Outlaw Culture, an’ at an’ in the beginning o’that book what I say is that students from different y’know class backgrounds an’ ethnicities would come to my classes an’ I woul’ want them to read all this metalinguistic theory an’ of difference an’ otherness, an’ they would say Well y’know what’oes this hafta do with our lives. An’ I found continually that if I took a movie an’ said Well did you go see this movie an’ like how di’ how do you think about it an’ I related some thing very concrete in popular culture to the kinda theoretical paradigms that I was trying to share with them through various work, people seemed to grasp it more, an’ not only that it would seem to be much more exciting an’ much more interesting for every body, because popular culture has that power in every-day life.

Forrest Gump: My mama always said life was like a box o’ choc’lates… y’never know what you’re gonna git.

bell hooks: Whether we’re talking about race or-or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is. It’s where the learning is. An’ so I think that partially people like me who started off doing feminist theory or um more traditional literary criticism or-or what have you began to write about popular culture largely because of the impact it was having as the primary pedagogical medium for masses of people globally who wan’ to in some way understand the politics of difference. I mean it’s been really exciting for some one like me both in terms of the personal um desires I have to b- to remain bonded with the working class culture an’ experience that I c-came from as-as well as the sort of the southern black aspect of that, an’ at the same time to be a part of a-a-a diasporic world culture of ideas, and to see how-how-how can there be a kind of interplay between all of those different forces. Popular culture is one of the sites where there can be an interplay.

bell hooks: My own sense is that the-the most enabling resource that I can offer as a critic or an intellectual, professor is the capacity to think critic’ly about our lives. I think thinking critic’ly is at the heart of any body transforming their life an’ I really believe that a person who thinks critic’ly, who, y’know may be extr’ordinarily disadvantaged materially, um, can find ways to transform their lives, um that can be deeply an’ profoun’ly meaningful in the same way that some one who may be incredibly privileged materially an’ in crisis in their life may b- may remain perpetually unable to resolve their life in any meaningful way if they don’t think critic’ly. As some one who’s moved from teaching at very fancy private predomina’tly white schools to teaching at an urban, um predomina’ly non-white campus in Harlem, an’ it an’ the first thing I noticed was that my students were equally brilliant in-in the Harlem setting as they were when I taught at Yale or Oberlin, but there senses of what the meaning of that brilliance was an’ what they could do with it, their sense of agency was profoun’ly different. Um y’know when students came to Yale they came there knowing that they’re the best an’ the brightest an’ they think that they have a certain kind of future ahead for them, an’ they-they in a sense w- are open to embracing that future. It has nothing to do with the level of knowledge, y’know it has more to do with their sense of entitlement about having a future an’ what I see among my really brilliant students up in Harlem, many of whom have very difficul’ lives, they work, they have children, um is that they don’t have that sense of entitlement, they don’t s- have that imagination in to a future of agency an’ as such, I think many professors do not try to give them the gift of critical thinking. In a certain kīn’of patronizing way education just says all these people need is tools for surviv- for survival, basic survival tools like their degree so they can get a job, an’ not in fact, that we enhance their lives in the same way we’ve enhanced our lives by engaging in a certain kīn’of critical process.

bell hooks: It’s scary to me now because particu’ly in issues around y’know erotica an’-an’ sexual violence, people want to deny the direc’ link between representations an’ how we live our lives. I think that it’s possible to embrace the knowledge that there’s a direc’ link between representations an’ choices we make in our lives that does not make that link absolute, that does not say y’know Oh if I look at a movie in which a woman is fucked to death y’know then I will go out an’ think I should let my self be fucked to death by any man who wants to fuck me, I think that that’s-that’s an absurd sense of a direc’ link, but that is not to say that if I watched enough of those images I might not come away thinking that it’s i-that certain forms of unacceptable male violence and coercion in relationship to my female body are acceptable.

It’s frightening to me now when people wan’to behave as though certain images don’t mean any thing. I thought of this when I saw Larry Clark’s Kids, an’ I went back like in circles of progressive white friends an’ I said Ohh god, y’know the racial politics in terms of representation in this film really suck.

Hoodlum: Man you wanna get fucked up mothafucka.

Casper: What what’s up then now what’s up.

Hoodlum: Fuck you mean what’s up.

Casper: Wassup.

Hoodlum: Fuck you mean what’s up.

Casper: Wassup mothafucka.

bell hooks: An’ they really wanted to say it didn’t matter, it didn’t mean any thing. An’ I was like C’ gimme a fuckin’ break I mean like we know why the person who’s brutally bashed to death is a dark-skin black man. It’s not it’s not it-it’s crucial that he’s a dark-skin black man because in fact people’s antipathy to dark-skin black men is actually much greater than their antipathy to black men in some kīn’of general way.

Casper: What’s up nowww bitch.

bell hooks: I-I feel that it’s frightening that as mm-mass media uses more certain kinds of representations for specific impact an’ effect, we’re also being told that these images are not really im-that important.

bell hooks: Think about all the Americans who’ve never ever in their lives for one y’know secon’ thought about Scotlan’ an’ Irelan’ who went to see Braveheart who suddenly like put notions of British imperialism an’ the freedom of-of-of Ireland on-on their little social maps because of a Hollywood movie.

Swords: [Dinky clinking with horses neighing an’ hoof sounds an’ maybe yellin’ in close proximity.]

bell hooks: I was truly awed by how much a Hollywood film—

William Wallace: FREEEEEDOMMMMMMM!

bell hooks: —could like totally alter people’s perceptions of national liberation struggles globally in a way that would call attention to those who-who are who are in a sense the underclass in those struggles, an’ that is also the power of white-male privilege. White male stardom, I mean i-it’s important for people to look at who produced an’ directed that film. Because it’s not just that Hollywood can do that, it’s that specific liberal white men who are moneyed within the context of Hollywood can produce what ever images that they wan’to produce.

bell hooks: Eh we look at the recent movie Smoke where the thief is a black kid, now in the original script — it’s based on the story by Paul Auster — in the story there’s no racial identification of-of the character. So when I talked to Wayne Wang who directed the film, I said Why did you choose to make the thief black? An’ he y’know he putters an’ stutters around but he can’t say, he will not say, because the only thing he can say is This will give this movie more zip, to make the thief black, it will make it more compelling to people, it’ll give a kind of good-guy-bad-guy quality to it, and it will just make it all the more stimulating, because he would have to admit that the fact that he simultaneously in making that choice is also reproducing certain kinds of racial stereotypes. No body wants to lay claim to consciously constructing these images that perpetuate white supremacy, racism, et cet’ra.

Joshua Alexander: Gimme ya money mothafucka. You disrespectin’ me?? You dissin’ me mothafucka!? Yuhhh! Wuh-huhh!

bell hooks: An’ the-the ironic thing is that I can sit in class rooms in universities where my students don’t want t’ accept that some one consciously creates that representation.

Darth Vader: Where are those transmissions you intercepted, what! have you done with those plans.

bell hoooks: How come people didn’ think about Darth Vader in the whole sort of sense of who decides what voice will constitute the villainous voice.

Darth Vader: If this is a consular ship where is the ambassador.

bell hooks: I mean what does it mean that media has such control of our imaginations that they don’t want to accept that there are conscious manipulations taking place, an’ that in fact we want to reserve particu’ly for the arena of movie-making a certain sense of magic, a certain sense that reality is being documented an’-an’ again ya know I think that part of the power of cultural criticism and cultural studies has been its sort of political intervention as a force in American society to say There really is a conscious manipulation of representations an’ it’s not about magical thinking, it’s not about like pure imagination, creativity, it’s about people consciously knowing what kinds of images will produce a certain kīn’of impact.

William Wallace: I will love you my whole life. You an’ no otherr.

bell hooks: One of the issues that no one wants to talk about is that finally the most successful s-political movement in the United States of the last twenty years was really feminist movement, and that there is a tremendous backlash to feminism that is being enacted on the stage of mass media, so that films like Leaving Las Vegas really are about ushering in a neww old version of the desirable woman that really is profoundly misogynist-based and sexist. It’s no accident, we know that when women wen’ in to the factories in the Worl’ Wars because men were not here, that when those wars ended, mass media was used to get women out of the factory an’ back in to the home. Well in a sense mass media is being used in that very same way right now, to get women out of feminism an’ back in to some patriarchal mode of thinking, an’ movies to me are the lead propaganda machine in this right now.

Sera: So for five hundred bucks you can do pretty much what ever you want. You can fuck my ass.

Ben Sanderson: Huhuhoh my god!

Sera: You can cum on my face.

Ben Sanderson: HohOh!.

bell hooks: I began to use the phrase in my work White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy because I wan’ed t’have some language that would actually um remind us continually of the w- the in- the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality, an’ not to just have one thing be like y’know gender is the important issue, race is the important issue, but for me the use of that-that particular jargonistic phrase was a way a sort of short-cut way of saying All of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives, an’ that if I really wanna understand what’s happening to me right now at this moment in my life, as a black female of a certain age group I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of race, I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of gender, I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking at white how white people see me. Mean one of the one of the-the to me uh an important break-through, um I felt in-in my work and that of others was the call to use the w-term white supremacy, over racism because racism in an’ of its self did not really allow for a discourse of colonization an’ decolonization, the recognition of the internalized racism within um people of color an’ it was always in a sense keeping things at the level at which whiteness an’ white people remained at the center of the discussion. In my class room I might say to some- to students y’know that when we use the term White Supremacy, it doesn’t just evoke white people, it evokes a political world that we can all frame our selves in relationship to. An’ I think that I was able to do that because I grew up again in a ra- in-in t’ in racial apartheid, where there was a color-caste system. So that obviously I knew that through my own experiential reality, y’know that it wasn’ just what white people do to black people that was wounding and damaging to our lives; I knew that when we wen’ over to my grandmother’s house who looked white, who lived in a white neighborhood, an’ she called my sister Blackie because she was dark an’ her hair was nappy, an’ my sister would sit in the corner and cry or not wanna go over there, I knew that there is some system here that is-is hurting this little girl that is not direc’-ly the direct hit from the white person, an’ white supremacy was that-that term that allowed one t-to acknowledge our collusion with the forces of-of racism an’ imperialism, an’ an’ so for me those words were very much about the constant reminder one of institutional constructs, that we’re not talking about personal constructs in the sense of How do you feel about me as a woman or How do you feel about me as a black person, but they really seem to me to evoke a larger apparatus, an’ I don’t know why they those terms have become so uh mocked by people because in fact, far from simplifying the issues I think they actually when you merge ’em together really complicate the questions of freedom an’ justice globally, because it means then that we have to look at what black people are doing to each other in Rwanda, we have to l- an’-an’ we can’t just say racism-what-have-you, we have to problematize nationalism beyond race, in all kinds of ways that I think there’s a tremendous reluctance particu’ly in the United States to have a more complex accounting of identity.

bell hooks: The issue is not freeing our selves from representations, it’s really about being enlightened witnesses when we watch representations, which means that we are able to be critic’ly vigilant about both what is being told to us an’ how we respon’ to what is being tol’, because I think that-that the answer is not the censoring absolutism of um a right-wing political correctness, but in fact of a proactive sense of agency that req-requires of all of us one a greater level of literacy. I think that we can not begin to talk about freedom an’ justice in any culture if we’re not talking about mass-base literacy movements because I think that literacy as we know from the work of Marshall McLuhan an’ many others, that th’ degrees of literacy determine so often how we see what we see, how we interpret it, what it means for our lives, an’ that there’s a way in which radical movements for freedom in the United States devalue the significance of literacy as a radical agenda for politicization, so it seems to me that-that the two major factors of-of intervention have to do with both critical thinking an’ then the capacity to read an’ write, because so much enlightening information only comes through the printed page, so if people are not able to read an’ write, they already don’t have access to those forms of uh enlightenment I mean if we look at some one like Malcolm Ex, he charts his own intellectual development through reading, if you look at my me I-I chart major radical interventions in my life with books that I’ave read, y’know not movies that I’ve seen, uh not television shows, but books that I’ve read. We can not overvalue enough the importance of literacy to um a culture that.. is deeply visual. I mean that rather than seeing literacy and the visual an’ our pleasure in the visual as oppos-sitional to one an other, I think we have to see them as compatible with one an other. I don’t think we’ll we will get much further in terms of decolonizing our minds um so that we can both resist certain kinds of conservatizing representation an’ at the same time create new an’ exciting representations.

IQ: (…without critical thinkin’ an’ the capacity to read an’ write.)

bell hooks: It’s always difficult when-when I want people to see that I-I can be deeply moved by a film, an’ at the same see the kind of dilemmas that are involved in the production of certain kinds of representations an’ Hoop Dreams was an other case where I wanted people to see that this documen’ary reflected as much about the individuals who shot it an’ directed it as it did the lives of the people that they were shooting an’ that they made certain kinds of choices, they made choices about when to show us um that one of the-the boys had a girl friend, uh an’ that she was pregnant it’s like all of a sudden y-you blink you think Wait a minute we didn’even know he had a girl friend, an’ now he’s y’know gonna be a father. What happened? What that moment should’ve made audiences re- remember is that you are not getting some direct account of this individual’s life, or these two individuals’, but that in fac’ you are getting a-a version of their life mediated by the concerns an’ interests of the filmmakers, an’ I think people are hostile to having to again to be asked not to think of this as a true story in the sense of the innocent filmmaker who is just turning the camera on the lives of these young black men an’ we get to see it, but in fact as people who had a very definite message that they wanted to get out of those lives.

I mean what really struck me about Hoop Dreams was that it presented its self initially as a critique of certain aspects of American sports, American idealism, uh American notion of democratic access to success.

Himself – Film Director: But you have to realize that no body cares about you. You’re black, you’re a young male, all you’re supposed t’do is deal drugs and mug women. The only reason why you’re here: you can make their team win, an’ their team wins, these schools get a lot o’money.

bell hooks: But in fact as the film developed it reinscribed those values as the important values. An’ in fact the young man who turns his back on those values I-I felt cinematically became the lesser character, the non-heroic character in the film. But we’re not made to feel that it’s heroic when he chooses to focus on his academic studies an’ not to um play basketball, which is where the film begins t’ I think to let down its earlier critique in the interest of having a mass-base appeal. The up-beat ending, the sort of conclusion that suggests in it was still possible for one of these black guys to succeed, to make it, was part of what the thrill for-for many movie-goers, that it wasn’t an indictment of the American dream ultimately, um that in fact it was a film that was saying in spite of it all, in spite of the corruption, you can still hold on to this dream an’ it can give your life meaning.

bell hooks: The O-Jay Simpson case was not compelling to me personally as some thing to watch an’ to observe an’ t’talk about, because I felt the deepest terms in relation to Guy Debord’s work on the notion of spectacle, it was situated as spectacle from the very beginning, an’ it seemed to me that that construction of it as a kind of carnival as a spectacle meant that one could actually not participate in that without in fact colluding with the very forces — um white supremacist capitalist patriarchy — that had led to the violent death of Nicole Simpson in the first place. An’ I felt morally an’ ethically, that as a feminist who has opposed domestic violence who has wanted there to be um a recognition of a meaning of domestic violence as one of the ways in which patriarchy affirms and perpetuates its self. It was impossible to feel that in any way benefitting from this that I was actually not then uh c- colluding in, not only affirming the patriarchal culture of violence that surrounded this case, but also actually working to do the very thing I cr- I critique about patriarchy in my work around domestic violence, which is that we are made t-to think that this is a lesser story, an’ the more interesting story is the story of the life of the perpetrator. It seems to me again an’ again that part of what patriarchy does to reaffirm its self, an’ violence is one of the strategies that it perpetuates an’ reaffirms its self, is making us all identify with men who are violent as potentially our heroes.

Newscaster on TV on TV: Not guilty.

Women watching TV on TV: [Very enthused cheers.]

Newscaster on TV: From a shelter for battered women in Chicago a surprising reaction: cheering his innocence.

bell hooks: So it’s it felt to me that the spectacle was already constructed before any of us were invited to be onlookers, observers, witnesses ec cetera, in such a way that I-I simply did not believe that any of us individuals had the power to intervene on it so that our words an’ our-our writings would not in fact be used to further the spectacle an’ not in fact to further people’s concern with domestic violence, an’ certainly Nicole Simpson was an-an the incredible example of a person who had money an’ who could have altered her life in significant ways that she did not choose to alter her life; perfec’ candidate on a certain level for a more complex understanding of patriarchy an’ domestic violence, an’ women’s allegiance to sexism. One of the sad aspects of Nicole Simpson’s life was her own continual allegiance to sexism an’ patriarchy, even as it was threat’ning her life.

Terri Moore: Wha’does he look like?

Nicole Simpson: He’s O-Jay Simpson I think you know his record, could you just send some body over here.

Terri Moore: Okay what is he doing there?

Nicole Simpson: He just drove up again. Can you s-s-send some body over.

Terri Moore: Okay wait a minute what kinda car is he in?

Nicole Simpson: He’s in a white Bronco but first of all he broke the back door down to get in before—

Terri Moore: Okay wait a minute what’s your name.

Nicole Simpson: Nicole Simpson.

Terri Moore: Ookay is he the sportscaster er.. what ever.

Nicole Simpson: Yeah.

Terri Moore: Okay just stay on the line—

Nicole Simpson: I don’wanna stay on the line he’s gonna beat the shit out of me.

Terri Moore: Wait a minute wait just stay on the line so that we can know what’s going on until the police get there okayy?

OJ Simpson: Y’know! I don’t give a shit any more! That [viper?] she took so much from this mother fucker—

Nicole Simpson: Could you just please O-Jay O-Jay O-Jay O-Jay.

bell hooks: The one time that I did go on television an’ I said that I could be on Good Morning America an’ I could be asked about the O-Jay Simpson case an’ it was stipulated all y’know beforehand that I could be asked one question, I was asked t-to j-just give my response, but they really wanted me to say who was innocent an’ who was guilty. An’ what I said was that the only thing I really knew about the O-Jay Simpson case was that it-it began an’ an’ ended with male violence an’ that no one to my knowledge ever speculated that there were a bunch o’women waitin’ outside that house to hack any body t’death, ya’ow Cut the cameras, that’s not the quote that any body wan’ed to hear, they wan’ed the black woman to be choosing against the white woman or to be protecting the black man, they wanted this whole racialized scenario when the issue is male violence agains’ women, let’s bring on some other kind of issue that makes us not pay real attention to male violence. An’ that’s why race offered the perfec’ sort of screeen to have another drama that every body could be linked to.

Human Person 1: Free O-Jay! Free O-Jay! Free O-Jay! Free O-Jay! Free O-Jay! Free O-Jay!

Human Person 2: Not guilty what not guilty that’s horrible he’s guilty as sin.! That’s a lousy fixed jury.!

Human Person 3: Free O-Jay right now!

bell hooks: The masterful nature conservative aspect of this spectacle was it so successfully got people to move back in to very one-dimensional positions of iden’ity politics, of racial or sexual essentialism because there was no frame within the spectacle its self to allow for a complex accounting of what was taking place. It’s only in the aftermath now that we can enter the wreck of this spectacle and say Here’s how can we can account for it more um deeply here is how we can have a complex reading.

bell hooks: Madonna always laid claim to being a female artist who was breaking new ground an’ in her own testimony laid claim to an engagement with feminist politics. A lot o’times people act as though feminists bring an unwarranted critique to Madonna but I think Madonna receives so much attention from feminists precisely because she positioned her self as a woman within the music industry who was going to break new ground an’ who was going to challenge the sexism of that industry. An’ as we know for early on in her career she actually did live out that particular praxis an’ that’s I think why many of us continue to have affection for her as a cultural icon even as we feel incredibly disturbed by the fact that stardom, which by it’s very nature has to be reproduced again an’ again, meant that at ce- a certain point as an aging woman Madonna had to have a new gimmick to renew interest in her, an’ it’s not surprising that a-a major part of her reinvention of her self becomes a reattachment to sexism. When Madonna appeared in I-I think it’s Vanity Fair that she appears in in all the little girl sort of sexual sadomasochistic kind of pictures an every thing, it’s suddenly a complete repudiation of the kind of images of a powerful woman that she theoretic’ly talked about wan’ing to put forth, an’ it’s a reinvestment in patriarchy, but let’s face it there’s always gonna be more money to be had an’ more stardom to be had in patriarchy, an’ for a while Madonna worked the feminist revolutionary tip as far as she could push it, an’ then she needed a new.. new driving force. To me Madonna symbolizes so much the question of greed. I think exac’ly like many rap musicians I don’t believe th’ in her quote real life Madonna is committed to any of the sexist images that she’s quite willing to reproduce for a profit, but in fact um she’s willing to turn that particular trick in order to make more an’ more money even though we all know this is a incredibly wealthy human being who-who theoretic’ly should not have to debase and degrade her principles um to earn money, but the reproduction of stardom says I mus’ earn more an’ more and more money, an’ it’s interesting that she not only does she come back to patriarchy but she also comes back to white supremacy. I was soo amazed by the incredible racist comments she makes in Spin magazine in a recent interview about black culture an’ black men when she go-goes on to tell us that black men are the most sexist men on the planet. I said it’s kind of like Madonna out of Africa, y’know it’s like Report from the front: I went in to the jungle, I ffucked all those black men, an’ I used black culture in my videos but I’m here to testify that they really are primitive, that they really are the most sexist people on the planet; I useda kinda like black people but I’m not sure I do any more. An’ I was really fascinated by that, ’cause I thought to my self Thi-this person is actually using this interview to reposition her self as a voice for the right, because let’s face it there’s more money to be b-made on the right than there ever will be to be made on the left. But what was most sad was not her as an individual repositioning her self, but people not responding to the kinds of anti-black.. statements that she made with outrage an’ disgus’. Here’s a woman whose white husband was beatin’ h’ up, and yet she doesn’ tell us that any of these black men have engaged in domestic violence with her, and yet black men come to stand for the most sexist people on the planet. An’ that was very very very distressing an’ distressing that.. as a contributing editor to Spin, as a black woman, I really couldn’t get any body involved with Spin magazine to be at all interested in and concerned about a critique of this particular issue or the statements because it was a big money-making issue. I mean I just recently did a seminar at Sony Music where I sat on a panel with black male executives who said, an’ a female executive who said Race is not the issue, the only c-color that matters in this society is the color green, y’know the color of dollars. This is an other American myth that people want to really believe right now that only dollars matter. Because not only does it allow the collusion of people of color with the perpetuation of white supremacy, or y’know women with the perpetuation of patriarchy, it also creates a culture where there is no moral or ethical valuation that you can bring to bear upon any thing, ’cause the assumption is that we all share the common morality of the dollar which is Get as much as you can as quickly as you can by any means necessary.

bell hooks: If I had talked about Spike Lee filmmaking before he made Girl Six, I would really be assessing him very differently from my assessment of him after he’s made G-Girl Six because I find Girl Six to be a movie that not only challenges Hollywood I feel that it’s a critical read on Hollywood I mean that moment in the opening o’the film when you have Quentin Tarantino saying that he’s going to make the best black film.

Director #1 – NY: Okay this the thing this movie is gonna be big. Bigger than big. Huge. Greatest roman’ic African-American film eva made, directed by me of course.

Prince: —out door out door she wore a raaspberry beret.. the kind ya find in a second-hand store, raaa—

bell hooks: I mean that was such a deconstructed moment where Spike Lee was saying this is what blackness has come to mean in Hollywood. It-it doesn’t it doesn’t have any thing to do with what color y-the person is, it’s a certain image of blackness that Hollywood finally believes can be negotiated by any cultural maker.

Director #1 – NY: We’re lookin’ for the th-the range of Angela Bassett, we’re lookin’ for the total game y’know what I’m sayin’.

Girl 6: Yeahhh.

Director #1 – NY: Okayy.

Prince: —that’s when I saw ’er oooh I saw ’er she walked in through the—

bell hooks: Black people aren’t needed to produce black cinematic culture because white people can produce that culture, an’ there’s a lot of critiques of Hollywood an’ a certain value system in Girl Six ’at Spike Lee him self has played along with in order t-to get to the position where he can use Hollywood as a vehicle to make certain critiques, an’ I don’t wanna say in order to get there to suggest some kind of continuum where y’know the person says I’m a radical but I’ll pretend I’m a conservative y’know for ten years, but at the end of it all when I’ve made my wealth I will make the radical cultural production. I think that it’s.. precisely the opposite, that no matter how successful Spike Lee has been in Hollywood, he is still put down by mass media, he still does not have the level of opportunity that would be available to him had he been seen as a bright young white up-an’-coming filmmaker, so that I think that his bitterness towards that system is actually concrete an’ real, an’ not a function of a kind of radicalization that pretended to be conservative an’ became more radical, but the kind of radicalization that comes from a person who wholeheartedly embraces the rules o’the game, an’ find that no matter how well they follow those rules they still are not a real contestant in the game an’ they still can not win. A major magazine like Time or Newsweek just recently carried a story on Spike Lee as a failure. I mean it just was amazing how could you talk about Spike Lee as a failure an’ it was it was some thing like y’know Malcom Ex was made for thirty-seven million but it only made forty-some million, an’ I thought Well how was that failure, you not only paid for your movie, but you had some excess profit though not a great deal not-not what Hollywood would want, but that can become talked about in mass media as a failure, even though Woody Allen who has made many films that do not make a lot of money does not then get talked about as a failed filmmaker. An’ so then it is in the interest of a certain structure of-of white supremacy an’-an’ patriarchy to put Spike Lee down at this point in his career uh-an’ to make it seem some how that he could not deliver the goods because part of that is about sanctioning white people to become the new makers of so-called black film. As in for example a film like Waiting To Exhale which is sold an’ marketed in ways that suggest This is a black film, I mean people kept telling me This is a film about black women, this is gonna be for black people. In fact this was a typical Hollywood shitty uninteresting film with a script written by white people, all marketed as being a film by an’ about blackness, successfully. Nothing Spike Lee has done can match the financial returns of this piece of shiit. This is how blackness can be done successfully an’ the problem lies not with the terms of-of what makes blackness successful in Hollywood or on the screen, but with Spike Lee as an individual. I mean an’ that I think i-is tragic because so many black people are buying in to that mode of thinking, that Spike Lee some how represents a failure, when in fact Spike Lee will continue to be the most successful black filmmaker in the United States, an’ he’s not by any means a failure. There’s a way in which as Hollywood d-decides to occupy the territory of blackness— as white Hollywood decides to occupy the territory of blackness it becomes very useful to say We let black people have that territory, an’ they just didn’know what t’do with it; they made these strange films like Girl Six that didn’even have a plot; I mean Crooklyn didn’even have a plot. Which of course is completely bogus because of cour- the plot of Crooklyn was very obvious an’ very simple it was about a family where the mother is dying in the family. But I can’t tell you how many white reviewers wrote that it didn’t have a plot. When what they should’ve said is that it didn’ have a plot that interested us, that white America is not interested in black mothers that are dying. So I think that this is going to have deep ramifications for the future of representing blackness in Hollywood, because it really is almos’ a public announcement of the white take-over of that particular territory: the issue of representing blackness in Hollywood.

bell hooks: Kids fascinated me as a film precisely because when you hea-heard about it seemed like the perfec’ embodiment of the kind of postmodern um notions of-of journeying an’-an’ dislocation an’ fragmentation an’ yet when you go to see it, it has s-simply such a conservative take on gender, on race, on the politics of Aitch-I-Vee. All the people I know who’re doing concrete work around teenagers an’ Aitch-I-Vee were so saddened to go to a film that reproduced th-th-the notion that some how Aitch-I-Vee is this thing that kno- that these teenagers know nothing about an’ that there’re these innocent girls having sex with the worldly boys, an’ it reproduced all of these stereotypes that-that wer-weren’t in-in any way transgressive or critical in any way as to intervene on the status quo, an’ that was really sad, an’ what was sadder is that it was again the kind of issue that divided progressive critics an’ thinkers because so many people who only saw Kids through the lens of transgressive sexuality thought that they needed to support it at a time when so much art sfunding, so much effort towards censorship is directed at shutting down images that are perceived to be vulgar or obscene, erotic images that are perceived to be threat’ning to family values, ec cetera, so a lot of people felt that they had to throw their support behind Kids one hundred percent, an’ that was very ’sturbing- disturbing to me because it was so deeply an’ profoun’ly right-wing in its relationship to the politics of race an’ gender, particu’ly I think in terms of how the voyeuristic pornographic gaze of the middle-age white male filmmaker really utilizes the bodies of the female children an’ the small male children of color, where those bodies become ob-ob-objectified in very traditional, pornographic, racist, an’ sexist ways.

Harold: S’ I’ma be up against ya ass I’ma be like this.

Girls: [Squealy laughter.]

IQ: I can’t figure out who they are.

bell hooks: I was so fascinated by how every one would tell me they loove this film. An’ I’d say Well can you tell me the name of the-the lead woman character in the film an’ her side-kick. They never can say the names of the female characters, but they remember the names of the two white male stars, quote, again, an’ so in a sense when we watch Kids we are actually being asked again an’ again by the camera by the visual politics of this film to identify with those heterosexual misogynistic boys, the two white males who stand at the center of the film largely because they are the people who speak, who have a voice.

Stanly: Yo excuse me miss can I borrow your hole.

[Some People]: Hahaaa hahaaa ahhhhhh.

Stanly: Only take a little bit an’ I’ll give it right back.

Casper: Nah y’know what I noticed though bitches love to suck dick yo.

[Some Body]: True.

[Some Body Else]: Worrd.

Casper: It’s like some secret pastime hobby for them or some shit.

Stanly: Some tricks..

bell hooks: The girls speak only in that sort of preten’ documentary moment which was just a slick moment to make us think that there’s gender equity in a film that goes on to never let them speak again,—

Fidget: Please just take it.

Jennie: No I’on’—

Fidget: You look sad j’com’ere j-just take it, just swallow it I promise, ’ey swallow it swallow it.

bell hooks: —who allows one of them to be raped I mean that moment of the rape in that movie was such I mean was the kind of moment that at an other historical moment men an’ women would’ve been outside theaters carrying signs saying y’know Be prepared for this violent rape in the film, but that can become a kind of sexy coolness now wi- what with the sort of y’know domestication of Ess-Em an’-an’ um sexualized violence, patriarchal sexualized violence, because we can have this woman young woman being violently raped, with other people all around so I mean the message of that is If you y’know go to the bad party, nice girl, you can be raped, violently abused, with people all around you and they’re not gonna care about your well-being. While the little white boy’s raping her he’s saying all these tender sweet things.

Casper: It’s me Casper don’t worry.

bell hooks: An’ since we know that she’s knocked out, she’s not really awake, you don’t hear her voice at all so you hear no protesting voice. If you close your eyes an’ listen to what’s taking place, you would have no idea that a violent rape is taking place.

Casper: It’s me Casper don’t worry.

bell hooks: Because it’s all couched in seductive language. These to me were so much of the conservative strategies underlying the transgressive s-surface of the film. An’ it’s just a s- an other sad moment where people are seduced by transgression in an’ of its self, as though transgression makes you radical, an’ not what you are transgression transgressing in the service of.

bell hooks: Rap music is so dīverse in its themes its style its content, but um when it becomes a vehicle to be talked about in main-stream news the rap that gets in national news is always the rap music that perpetuates misogyny, that is most obscene in-in its luh-lyrics, and then this comes to stand for what rap is, uh really it’s the perfect paradigm of colonialism, that is to say we think of rap music as a little third-world country that young white consumers are able to go to an’ take out of it what ever they want. We would have to acknowledge that what young white consumers, primarily male, often times suburban, most got energized by in rap music was misogyny, obscenity, pugilistic eroticism, an’ therefore that form of rap began to make the largest sums of money.

Eazy-E: —fanatic I smoke any fools tryna cause some static, number four hit the floor, a crazy-ass ***** that remains hardcore, fifth one my killin’s just begun, I pulled out my gun now they’re keepin’ me on the run.

IQ: Sounds like “hit the floor” an’ not “here’s what’s in store” in the film.

bell hooks: The young men who-who create a lot of rap music are not naïve, an’ they know that if they can make a million dollars talking about y’know how they want to fuck a woman an’ that will make tons of money..

Brother Marquis: —answer, I really wanna be with you, I get hard after seein’ you, how hard, hard like a rock, when you make that coochie pop.

bell hooks: The kind of capi’list forces an’ market forces that’re driving young male and female artists who produce rap would suggest to me that they’re gonna go for the gusto, they’re gonna go for those millions.

Luther Campbell: Pop that coochie pop pop that coochie baby pop pop pop the coochie pop pop that coochie baby.

Fresh Kid Ice: Freaky girls with plen’y of class, rollin’ to the music an’ shakin’ real—

bell hooks: I mean one of the things that’s amazing to me is that there has been this demand some how that rap um musicians be more moral an’ more ethical than any body else in American culture as they approach the business of creating a produc’ an’ making money. An’ for me this is not to condone the sexism an’ misogyny of rap but it is to say that th- to this has to be seen in the larger framework of cultural production within capitalism in our society an’ that far from being um diff’rent from y’know multinational corporations an’-an’ their processēs of-of gaining greater an’ greater wealth one might argue that y’know rap musicians, especially the success of a certain kind of misogynistic, anti-feminist, anti-woman rap, is totally in line with, if you find a produc’ that-that gives you the maximum profit an’ reward, then push that product whether you actually believe what you’re saying or not. It seems to me that we must first acknowledge that they’re making strategic choices an’ we must then critique both those choices an’ their impact. The damage y’know in the long run to black life of when pugilistic eroticism, when-when rape an’ assault become the defining aspects of erotic exchange between black females an’ males in youth culture, y’know that-that fallout, that genocidal fallout is so much greater for the culture than the individual who becomes wealthy as a result of that, an’ the individuals s-surrounding that individual who perpetuate their wealth, the larger corporations who produce that music an’ give it to the world. And that’s uh precisely why it’s become very meaningless to talk about Is there an authentic, y’know, is rap authentic. Because once you become part of the machinery of an a c- of an advanced technological capitalism system-system of production that is y’know all out for the most profits, questions of authenticity become to me totally stupid an’ meaningless. Because it’s no, it’s already not any thing um that you can speak of any more as indigenous, it doesn’ have a marginal location any more. So you can’t talk about it as authentic to that marginal location because it’s simply not there. It is authentic then to what it is.

bell hooks: Well I think that rap videoos, like all major videos right now, have reinscribed the female body in very tradition’ly sexis’ pornographic, within the framework of the traditional sexist pornographic imaginary. To the extent that rap music or any kind of black music uses more black female bodies, the black female body comes in to greater representation solely along the sexual terms that we have historically been represented within mass media: the hot pussy, the prostitute, the slut, the vulgar girl, the girl who is willing to do what the nice girls won’t do, ec cetera. All of these images an’ representations that have been a function of r-racist and sexist stereotypes get reproduced in rap videos, but the most noticeable a..spect of the objectification of black female bodies in rap videos, for black women an’ men is the color-caste system gets reintroduced an’ affirmed. Ih-it’s quite rare to see darker-skin black females among the groups of women that are-are seen as s-sexually viable an’ desirable in most music videos whether rap or otherwise because in fact it is the light-sk-skin, preferably long-haired, preferably straightened-haired female who becomes once again reinscribed as the desirable object, this again is one of the tragic dimensions right now of race in America because more than ever before color-caste systems are being overtly affirmed… as though, y’know, we didn’t change this we didn’ fight against it so now all we can do is embrace it an’ live out the consequences of it.

bell hooks: I believe that American culture is obsessed with transgression. An’ to the degree that blackness remains a primary sign of transgression.. one could talk about American culture an’ mainstream culture as being obsessed with blackness, but it is blackness primarily in a commodified form that can then be possessed, owned, controlled, and shaped by the-the-the consumer an’ not with an engagement in black culture that might require be- one to be a participant, an’ therefore to be in some way transformed by what you are consuming as opposed to being merely a buyer. An’ I an’-an’ anecdotally that to me is the difference between a young white male from the suburb who’s consuming y’know black music in the form of rap an’ y’know who’s wearing the same kind of clothes as other y’know the hip-hop musicians but then in fact when he encounters a black young black male on the streets feels the same um racialized fear an’ demonizes that person as any white person who’s had no contac’ with that music, so that there’s no correlation often between the consumption of the commodity that is blackness an’ the culture from which that commodity comes, or that provides uh the-the-the resource base an’ that’s no different again from us thinking of Third-World countries. There’s a way in which white culture is perceived as too Wonder Bread right now, not edgy enough, not dangerous enough. Let’s get some of those endangered species people y’know to be exotic for us an’ it-it’s really simply, I think, a more y’know up-scale version of primitivism, resurging. When blackness is the-the-the sign of transgression that is most desired it allows whiteness to remain static, to remain conservative, an’ its conservative thrust to go unnoticed. So as we’re having a mounting fascism in the United States that is perpetuated increasingly by liberal, young, moneyed, liberal, white people, if they’re wearing black clothes or listening to black music, they can be perceived as transgressive, as radical, when in fact, uh once again, th- we see a separation between material aspirations and cultural an’ social interests. So that at any point in time they can drop their int’rest in blackness an’ do what ever they need to do to reinforce their-their class int’rests, the int’rests of white supremacy, the int’rests of capitalism an’ imperialism, an’ I think that this is this is fright’ning because it’s so deep and profound. It really suggests um the way in which fantasy will I think more an’ more mediate fascism as it a- has always done in the past. Pretend that you’re going some where that you’re not really going and you can stay in place um an’ be ready to serve the state when the state calls you ’cause you really haven’t left home. An’ I think that’s a lot of a lot of what’s happening.