bell hooks: a complex accounting of identity
By shag carpet bomb • Apr 16th, 2009 • Category: Black Feminist Thought, Feminist Fight Club, Identity Politics, Intersectionality, Racialization, Whiteness, Women of Color FeminismAt work, I’ve been doing a lot of rather rote work that requires a ton of QA. It leaves me lots of time to listen to lectures and talks on youtube. I finally found that one video that I’d seen, the one where hooks discusses institutionalized racism and what she thinks of as the need to see racism as structural or institutional. She uses the term “white supremacy” for just that reason.
It’s here, at 6:20: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ-XVTzBMvQ&NR=1
Asked about her use of terms like “white supremacy” hooks says:
“The term white supremacy doesn’t just evoke white people. It evokes a politcal world we can all frame ourselves in relationship to. I think I was able to do that because I grew up under racial apartheid. There was a color caste system. I knew that it wasn’t just what white people do to black people that was wounding and damaging to our lives. I knew that when I went over to my grandmother’s house who looked white and who lived in a white neighborhood and called my sister blackie because she was dark and her hair was nappy. And my sister would sit in a corner and cry and not want to go over there. I knew that there was some system here that is just hurting this little girl that is not directly, not a direct hit from the white person. And white sup was that term that allowed one to acknowledge our collusion with the forces of racism and imperialism. And so for me those words were very much about the constant reminder of an institutional construct. 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.
I don’t know why those terms have been so mocked by people because, in fact, far from simplifying the issue i think they actually, when you merge them together, they really complicate the question of freedom and justice globally. Because it means that we have to look at what black people are doing to each other in Rwanda. We can’t just say racism and what have you. We have to problematize nationalism beyond race. And in all kinds of ways and i think there’s a tremendous reluctance in the u.s. to have a more complex accounting of identity.
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