Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (20 page)

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Authors: Bell Hooks

BOOK: Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics)
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bh:
Do you think we can be leaders together, side by side?
IC:
Yeah, definitely.
bh:
I gave a talk at Harvard recently, and a black woman stood up—I was on a panel with some black men—and she said, “I’m black and I’m poor and I want to know why black men don’t like us.” I’m not talking about you, I’m asking you about black men in general. Do you think black men, in general, like black women?
IC:
I think self-hate plays a lot in everything. They make the white woman look so glamorous, and you have to be this, and you have to be skinny, and this color, and I think it takes its toll on the black man. So black man end up over-stepping the guilt and looking for white women, or someone who appears to be white, or close to white. And black men for some reason—I know the reason—they feel that they can show themselves to be a man sexually. So they’ll get the woman pregnant, but won’t be her man. And she’s stuck with a baby, and she’s holding that weight. And nobody wants to stop and take the responsibility. And now she has two or three kids and a man don’t want to get with her, and the cycle just continues and continues and continues.
bh:
How do you think we can change it? I’ve been thinking a lot about this myself: How can I give my insight, my resources, back to black folks so that we can begin to change some of this? So many people said, “bell, why would you want to talk to him?” I feel like part of the magic of us talking is a lot more people have to see you differently. You’re not just saying, “I don’t want to talk to bell hooks, I mean, she’s into this feminist thinking.” And I’m not saying, “I don’t want to talk to Ice Cube, he’s a sexist, he doesn’t like black women.”
IC:
If people really follow Ice Cube and know what Ice Cube about, they have to look at Yo-Yo. You know what I mean? Ice Cube put that thing together as far as her comin’ out. I think the kids need a balance of each dose. Me being a male, a male has a certain ego, you can’t get away. I think that of males all over the world. And that comes out in the music. And I think women need to really show, “Yo, we can do this and we can educate. We can be the same way.” And then what’s gonna happen is everything is gonna melt together and hopefully turn out cool.
bh:
On Predator there’s a number of different female voices. The rough song, of course, for a black woman to listen to is “Don’t Trust It,” which kinda dogs us out and says bitches got a brand new game. Bitches all over with some new improved shit. But you have other moments on the album where women are speaking very differently. There’s the voice-over interview. Do you think that people register those other images of black womanhood? Or do they only focus on the bitches one?
IC:
Well, people always focus on the most controversial thing. Because the evil of America outweighs the good, so people tend to hunger for the bad thing. They want to see the car wrecks. They want to see the sex scandals. They don’t want to see the straight-A student. Since we live in the society that we live in, people are gonna tend to identify with the “Don’t Trust It” record because they identify with the controversies more than they identify with the lady on “I’m Scared,” saying, “Yo, you know, we do this, we do that, we live in Harlem.” But I think it’s startin’ to be more and more socially correct to start identifyin’ with that lady that’s sayin’, you know, this and that.
bh:
What do you think black men and women can do to come closer to one another?
IC:
I think we have to really identify our problems. I think self-love, that’s the key to all our problems.
bh:
Do you feel like your wife is a conscious person like yourself? How do you guys deal with a conflict? What if she thinks your shit is raggedy? How does she tell you? Do you talk?
IC:
Yeah, she sit there and tell me. And, I mean, I take heed to it. But I been doin’ this a lot longer than I’ve known her and on some things I say, “Damn, baby you right.” And on some things I have a strong passion to say it and I’ll say, “Yo, you know, I’ve got to follow my own judgment on this.” We’re one but we’re still individuals and we disagree. But we handle it civilized. And I listen to what my wife has to say because we’re in disagreement, and a woman is really lookin’ for security. And if she think I’m goin’ way out, she’s like, “Wait a minute you might disrupt my security.”
bh:
My black male partner, I know he’s really been struggling in terms of the job market and stuff. And I feel like that’s part of our difficulty as black people, that many of us are insecure. We’ve been emotionally abandoned or wounded or we haven’t been materially taken care of the way we desire. It’s important for us to recognize that each of us needs that.
IC:
Yeah, definitely.
bh:
I know that when you was talkin’ to Greg Tate a while back in his interview “Man-Child at Large,” he was askin’ you about women and you said the whole damn world is hostile to women. But do you think you help intensify the hostility?
IC:
Well, it matters in the way you look at it. Definitely, I mean it’s just like lookin’ at a glass half-full or half-empty. If you look at it in the way that I hope to present it in showing a way of life that’s not acceptable or an action or, you know, having a woman to be the bait so the man can come in and kidnap the guy. That’s unacceptable and we want to point this out and we want to make this look as unattractive as we can.
bh:
Or even like having women seduce men to get them into crack.
IC:
Yeah, or whatever is the thing that’s the unacceptable action. How do you deal with that? Do you say, “Well, because we can’t say nothin’ bad about each other don’t even speak on that topic?” Or do you attack the thing, hold it and say, “Look, here’s what’s goin’ on. Watch yourself women, be cool.” And I tell men the same thing on records. But see, people focus on the women thing.
bh:
You seem to think that it’s really important for the family for both men and women to be there.
IC:
Yeah. You know, my father never left home. He’s still at home. And I think that’s the reason that I’m the way I am. Because, you know, a woman can raise a boy to be respectable. But, a woman can’t raise a boy to be a man. You need a man there. Like, if I had a daughter and no wife, it’s just two different people. We don’t have the same problems.
bh:
The only thing I don’t agree with is that mostly I feel like every child needs to be loved. Sometimes you got a man and woman together, but you don’t have any love. I don’t think that child is gonna be any better off than the child who’s just with one parent, but is being loved.
IC:
Yeah, but I’m sayin’, like there’s some things a boy wants that’s with his father.
bh:
Or with a man. I don’t think it has to be his father.
IC:
Yeah, with any man that he looks up to or he thinks is givin’ him the right information or the right advice. Some things my friends wouldn’t even tell their mother. Some things I wouldn’t tell my mother, but I sit down and talk to my father and the problem gets handled. I think when that doesn’t exist, the kid tends to turn to friends and that’s just like the blind leading the blind. And their friends become— especially older people in the neighborhoods, you know like older dudes that gangbang or whatever—the people they look up to. It’s like being led by the wrong people. And all this stuff that’s happenin’ to the community is happenin’ because of that.
bh:
I really want to respect the black women single parents who have raised their kids through the hardships of poverty in this country and aloneness, and although I believe that every child needs men and women in their life, we can’t focus too much on saying we need “the” father because a lot of kids are never gonna have contact with “the” father. I have a sister who’s on welfare who doesn’t have a husband, but her child has a really deep and loving relationship with my dad. I feel like, in lots of ways she has a more positive idea of black men than she would have if my sister just grabbed any ol’ nigger to marry just to have a daddy. Because a daddy that’s not loving, that’s not gonna help you.
IC:
Nah, not at all. You’re definitely right on that tip because, like I said, I want to see my stepson with a better understanding of the world goin’ into school than I had. I didn’t know what the powers that be was and I didn’t know what time it was on this and what time it was on that. And to give him that understanding at six years old on “Here’s the situation, here’s what’s goin’ on, here’s what you’re gonna be up against.” When the teacher tells him that George Washington was the founding father of our country, he can raise his hand and say, “Wait a minute,” and really drop the real deal. And to be able to do that, I think that we’re startin’ to reverse the process that’s been goin’ on since we’ve been here and I think this is the generation to do it.
bh:
That was really an important point to make. I really appreciate you talkin’ about yourself some, ’cause I think also that we need to know that we can love children that come into our life. They don’t have to be our children, like your blood child. I think there’s been a lot of negativity around people feelin’ like if it’s not your child, like men sometime feel like, “If it’s not my child, you know, if it didn’t come from my seed, then I don’t want to have a relationship to it.” And I think that kind of thinkin’ is out.
IC:
That’s way off line.
bh:
Tell me somethin’ about what you hope for your children, and for yourself, in the years to come.
IC:
Well, you know, I hope that I grow as a person and as an artist. I hope for my children to know who they are and know what they up against and just be responsible people. Whether they turn out to do whatever they want to do in life, that doesn’t matter as long as they responsible and as long as they know that they’re black first. That’s how everybody in this country think besides us. You know, you pick a police officer, if he’s Japanese, he’s a Japanese police officer. And he’s gonna deal with his people a certain way. And black people need to do the same thing. If you’re a black police officer, you’re black first.
bh:
Do you feel that black men dominate black women?
IC:
Only if they let ’em. ’Cause I don’t dominate my woman. Because she ain’t gonna go for that, and I don’t try to inflict that because that ain’t what I want. If I wanted to give orders, I would get me a German shepherd or somethin’. I think that black women gotta stand strong. Black women, if they lookin’ for a man, it’s not any ol’ man but a man that’s conscious and a man that knows what time it is and a man that can feed their kids with somethin’ other than go get me a beer.
bh:
One of the things that I hear you saying is that you and your partner talk to one another. Because a lot of times when I talk to black groups, many of us talk about growing up in homes where we didn’t really see our parents talking to one another, having a conversation with one another; they talked at one another. But talkin’ about something and talkin’ about something deep, I think that has a real impact on kids. It says this is what you can do.
IC:
The TV cuts off all conversation—except some comment on what’s on TV—instead of commentin’ on what’s goin’ on in your life, or what happened to you today. Instead you, like, “Damn, did you hear what happened to such and such?” “Yeah, so and so got caught up in some scandal, or some affair.”
bh:
Communication has to be the “dope” thing in black liberation struggle—like you and me talking culture this way down home and revolutionary-like.

13
SPENDING CULTURE

Marketing the black underclass

At the end of Class, Paul Fussell’s playful book on the serious issue of social status, there is a discussion of a category outside the conventional structures entitled “The X Way Out.” Folks who exist in category X, he reports, “earn X-personhood by a strenuous effort of discovery in which curiosity and originality are indispensable.” They want to escape class. Describing the kind of people who are Xs, Fussell comments:

The old-fashioned term Bohemians gives some idea; so does the term the talented. Some Xs are intellectual, but a lot are not: they are actors, musicians, artists, sport stars, “celebrities,” well-to-do former hippies, confirmed residers abroad, and the more gifted journalists … They tend to be self-employed, doing what social scientists call autonomous work … X people are independent-minded, free of anxious regard
for popular shibboleths, loose in carriage and demeanor. They adore the work they do … Being an X person is like having much of the freedom and some of the power of a top-out-of-sight or upper class person, but without the money. X category is a sort of unmonied aristocracy.

Even though I grew up in a Southern black working-class household, I longed to be among this X group. Radicalized by black liberation struggle and feminist movement, my effort to make that longing compatible with revolution began in college. It was there that I was subjected to the indoctrination that would prepare me to be an acceptable member of the middle class. Then, as now, I was fundamentally anti-bourgeois. To me this does not mean that I do not like beautiful things or desire material well-being. It means that I do not sit around longing to be rich, and that I believe hedonistic materialism to be a central aspect of an imperialist colonialism that perpetuates and maintains white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Since this is the ideological framework that breeds domination and a culture of repression, a repudiation of the ethic of materialism is central to any transformation of our society. While I do not believe that any of us really exists in a category outside class, in that free space of X I do believe that those of us who repudiate domination must be willing to divest of class elitism. And it would be useful if progressive folks who oppose domination in all its forms, but who manage to accumulate material plenty or wealth, would share their understanding of ways this status informs their commitment to radical social change and their political allegiances, publicly naming the means by which they hold that class privilege in ways that do not exploit or impinge on the freedom and welfare of others.

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