WEEK TWELVE: RACE THEORY, PART 1, BLACK CULTURES

Bell Hooks, in the article “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” mass culture dictates pleasure is found in racial difference. The stereotype of blondes have more fun has been replaced with imagined trysts with “The Other” (pg. 366). There is a contemporary revival of the interest in the “primitive” which black people and those “non-white” fall under. “Fucking is the other” has become the new desire (pg.367). Face and ethnicity is something to “shop” for in potential sexual partners (pg. 368). Primitive revivalists think that non-whites have more experience so they are more sensual, getting a bit of the Other. They don’t see themselves perpetuating racism.  

Michele Wallace takes the topic of racism in “Hell and Back: On the Road with Blac Feminism” and writes in an almost autobiographical approach. Early in the provinces, black women were supposed to be brainwashed to be feminist, to stand their ground, and she finds it so easy to be black feminist now because of how she was raised. She is honest in her short comings of being a feminist and being a black woman and what that meant in her life. Followed her mother into feminism with her help forms (WSABAL) which is now associated with the Guerilla girls. She wore pseudo African apparel to impede sexual propositions because she was black and sexualized.

In her other article, Michele Wallace confronts the ideals of Modernism and Post-Modernism and where black culture has a place in its formation. ”Nigger, black and schwartze” often interchangeably used to mean abject “other” (pg.40).She explains that modernism and Picasso and cubism took heavily from African art. High class art had to borrow from Africans even if they couldn’t admit it. Black criticism was blocked from the discussion of Modernism, because it is defined as exclusively white and blocked primitivism (pg.47).The tribal objects in Modernism weren’t discovered but instead stolen or appropriated. The temptation to subsume primitivism or neo-primitivism in modernist criticism only occurs because white males continue to dominate and control postmodern criticism (pg. 49)

Henry Louis Gates in “The Black Man’s Burden” compares the Harlem Renaissance movement in NY 1920s to a film interpretation made in Britain during the 1980s called Looking for Langston. The film argues that social identities represent the way we participate in an historical narrative (pg.77). New York and London, in this film become interlaced past and present and blues, jass, Motown: a trans temporal dialogue on the nature of identity and desire and history (pg.78). It was gay as it was black but neither exclusively (pg.78). The film is presenting an aesthetic that can embrace ambiguity but is not a naïve celebration either. It compels its audience to rewrite history as it doesn’t with African American modernism.

Derrick Bell in “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory,” brings up a book published called The Bell Curve. He dicusses blacks in comparison to whites in the realm of academia. The Bell Curve states that blacks score 15 points less than whites on the SAT but in truth they actually score higher. Their results are tampered with to keep whites in the leading position. Blacks are often hired at jobs to make the company feel good about itself for having a black person on staff but the situation turns hostile when the black person actually succeeds.

Cornel West’s article, “Nihilism in Black America,” clearly outlines the two camps in society: the liberal structuralist and the conservative behaviorist. Both discuss the plight for Black America but neither really address the threat of nihilism in black culture. The groups argue that nihilism existed before slavery but was kept in check with boundaries they black community erected. Over time they are crumbling and soon there will be a relapse into nihilism. The politics of conversion may control the issue but never cure it.

In Michele Wallace’s last article, “The Culture War within Culture Wars,” she goes to show that by trying to repair the culture, it is usually still being damaged or causing self-harm to itself, such as Black History month. Black artists end up making what some believe to be racist art or demeaning, even those not trying to end up creating something they don’t wish to. 

• HELL AND BACK: WALLACE
• 1997 written 
• autobiographical piece but also enlightening from her experience
• black intelligencia
• honest about her own short comings
• what she does in this piece
• malcolm x being shot down
• vietname
• experience in the bronx, harlem, music
• the anxiety and stress of the mother daughter relationship. She always calls her faith not mom
• wrote for the Voice, left-handed magazine
• DERRICK BELL
• He fights about success
• Black people score at least 15 points less white poeple on SAT because they squew the interpretation of the data based on a book calle The Bell curve. Which this wrong. Blacks usually get higher on ther scores. 
• Lots of Race issues, arguments, riots, spurned on by the unequal success of the black men versus the white men. Though the academic community feels satisfied that they hired a black person to their staff as if it was some great deed. but when he starts to make something of himself, they turn hostile. Treat him not as well because they are jealous and regret hiring him because he is gaining stature rather than them, white men. 
• WEST
• two camps:
• liberal structuralist
• conservative behaviorists
• MICHELE WALLACE, CULTURE WARS ARE CULTURE WARS
• war is happening in white culture