bell hooks

"All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness."

This statement caused a lot of controversy on Tuesday and I feel the need to come to hooks' defense. One of the essays we read in my Feminist Theory class, Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition by Mari. J. Mastuda, has something to say on the use of language.

Mastuda says

There is a politics of anger: who is allowed to get angry, whose anger goes unseen, and who seems angry when they are not.
Once, when I intended to compliment an African-American woman on a powerful speech she had made, I said: 'I admire your ability to express anger.' She looked at me coolly and replied 'I was not angry. If I were angry I would not be speaking here.' Another African American friend of mine jumped into the conversation. 'I'm disappointed in you,' she said 'This is what always happens to us when a Black woman speaks her mind. Someone calls us angry.'
I remember this exchange because it was an uncomfortable one for me, and because it was a moment of learning. Talking across differences, my colleague told me that if she were hatefully angry, beyond hope of coalition, she would not talk...
...On the simple, communicative level, failure to express the pain created by this legacy obscures the depth of one's feelings and discounts the subordination experienced by one's community. More significantly, the use of polite, rational tones when one is feeling violation is a betrayal of the self.

I think this excerpt is incredibly relevant for the discussion we were having on hooks. She uses the word terrorize because that's how she feels. That's how many (all?) black people feel in relation to whites/whiteness. Of course I don't think that hooks was referring simply to physical dangers, but to institutional racism/discrimination as well. It goes back to what I said in class today: look at who is in power, specifically in politics and corporations
. The corporations are mainly run by rich (hetero, cis, protestant) white men. Guess who has the politicians by the *ahem*? The corporations. So of course the politicians (who are also the same demographic as those in the highest corporate echelons) are going to make policies based on their own personal interests. These policies then serve to keep blacks and other minorities in lower socioeconomic positions, furthering their inability to gain access to better education, day cares, health insurance, health care, jobs, transportation, etc. So yeah, I would definitely say hooks and other minorities have every right to feel terrorized, even if that word tends to make you a bit uncomfortable.

One last word from Mastuda:

Discomfort brings with it an opportunity for learning...the comfort we feel when we avoid hard conversations is a dangerous comfort, one that seduces us into ignorance about the experience of others and about the full meaning of our own lives.

Victoria Rader Post 14