Still reading bell hooks
Mar. 29th, 2007 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vcmwIt is taking me a really long time to get through this book (Killing Rage: Ending Racism) because one essay at a time is a brainful. The book isn't long, but it is dense and requires self-reflection. Of course, as I mentioned, I am using it for my own (exploitative? decolonizing?) ends, as I grapple with the weirdo social structure I set up in my novel.
Wait a minute. It's not a weirdo social structure. I'm trying to work out how magic and slavery would have overlapped in late medieval Europe. They were both there as part of the mindset. They're both parts that, when we look back on the period, we tend to elide. So I don't know why trying to imagine them together should make my brain try to push off at the edges, but it does.
Anway, one of the things I find most interesting in Ms. hooks's essays is her use of this phrase "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" which is always used slung together like one long noun.
As far as my story goes, I struggle with how much writing down how things seem to have been, based on history books, is racist or not. I honestly can't think of many fantasy books set in a Europe like setting that grapple with slavery. The literary convention is that slavery is something that happens in an "other" space - our hero journeys to this "other" space, confronts the psychological horror of white involvement in and benefit from slavery, and then journeys back. The historical fact that the slavery was at home too tends to get worked around. And the weird sexualization of black slaves by white owners, the commodification and pseudoscientific study of every aspect of their bodies - all of this seems racist just even to talk about. And then you bring in the magic and remind the reader that magic and science were radically overlapped in the middle ages (Newton the alchemist, anyone? and that was even later). So of course in a medieval fantasy story where magic works, there would be magicians involved in slavery, magicians making spells on or with slaves, etc. And if magic worked, then the slaves would have magic too, and what would that mean to their confrontation with the slave-owners? If you've got the internal ability to burn others with magical fire, what does your slavery look like? What keeps you captive? How do you rebel, and how successful is your rebellion?
Wait a minute. It's not a weirdo social structure. I'm trying to work out how magic and slavery would have overlapped in late medieval Europe. They were both there as part of the mindset. They're both parts that, when we look back on the period, we tend to elide. So I don't know why trying to imagine them together should make my brain try to push off at the edges, but it does.
Anway, one of the things I find most interesting in Ms. hooks's essays is her use of this phrase "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" which is always used slung together like one long noun.
And what I like about this is that, if you think about it, it answers so many of the struggles I have empathizing with a lot of the other activist writings I've read.
Namely, I'm reading an essay in this book where Ms. hooks talks about how important it is to resist our culture's attempts to define black beauty by its approach to and conformity with whiteness. And in previous essays I've read about this problem, I've tended to be only a little bit sympathetic. My thoughts were on the lines of: well, I see that it's very depressing that black people should be rewarded based on "acting white", but on the other hand, women seem to succeed in the workplace only as long as they "act male", and if you're from some weird counterculture like you're, oh, a pagan queer hippie, you better keep those opinions to yourself in the workplace too, unless you want your job search to be defined based on the few jobs which will embrace you as you are. Plus there wouldn't be all those angry blonde jokes if it weren't also true that blondes and Northern European skinned folks were usually better received than brunettes and those with darker, Southern European looking skin (or, umm, nice rounded Jewish noses, like mine own Sephardic inheritance).
And so I wasn't umm, appropriately sympathetic. My thinking was: It's true it's much worse if you're black, but it's bad for anyone who doesn't fit the rather Aryan ideal.
As I'm reading this essay and hitting that phrase again "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" I totally get that Ms. hooks is saying that you can't take apart the racism without taking apart all the rest too. A patriarchal culture is one that devalues women. A capitalist culture is one that devalues a) anybody that doesn't have money, b) all the losers of exploitative economic policies, and c) all the descendants of those people whose exploitation made modern capitalism possible. The fact that the workplace and the public sector exerts coercive pressure on everyone to conform has to be changed. Otherwise it will always be racist. But changing the racism of the public sector permanently involves getting all of us to think in ways that will also challenge patriarchy and the whole white supremacist thing (I'm not entirely sure in this verbal construct if "white" and "supremacist" are too building blocks or one. I feel as if there's this ambiguity because the notion of a constant battle for supremacy enforces all the other negative behaviors/thoughts, so I could make a good argument for two, but I think that one is the dominant implication - like a construct in a poem, I think it's meant to be read "white supremacist"/"white" "supremacist" with the first meaning the primary one?)
And y'know, I can get behind that. I can feel as if I am part of this. Because I understand that there's this big ugly wall here, made up of big ugly bricks, and the more of them we can remove, the freer we all will be. The challenge is to remember that the wall keeps getting built back up by the people who think it protects them, so, for example, a white woman shouldn't think that she can just keep knocking away at the patriarchy block and leave the white, supremacist, capitalist blocks and expect to get anywhere.
Namely, I'm reading an essay in this book where Ms. hooks talks about how important it is to resist our culture's attempts to define black beauty by its approach to and conformity with whiteness. And in previous essays I've read about this problem, I've tended to be only a little bit sympathetic. My thoughts were on the lines of: well, I see that it's very depressing that black people should be rewarded based on "acting white", but on the other hand, women seem to succeed in the workplace only as long as they "act male", and if you're from some weird counterculture like you're, oh, a pagan queer hippie, you better keep those opinions to yourself in the workplace too, unless you want your job search to be defined based on the few jobs which will embrace you as you are. Plus there wouldn't be all those angry blonde jokes if it weren't also true that blondes and Northern European skinned folks were usually better received than brunettes and those with darker, Southern European looking skin (or, umm, nice rounded Jewish noses, like mine own Sephardic inheritance).
And so I wasn't umm, appropriately sympathetic. My thinking was: It's true it's much worse if you're black, but it's bad for anyone who doesn't fit the rather Aryan ideal.
As I'm reading this essay and hitting that phrase again "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" I totally get that Ms. hooks is saying that you can't take apart the racism without taking apart all the rest too. A patriarchal culture is one that devalues women. A capitalist culture is one that devalues a) anybody that doesn't have money, b) all the losers of exploitative economic policies, and c) all the descendants of those people whose exploitation made modern capitalism possible. The fact that the workplace and the public sector exerts coercive pressure on everyone to conform has to be changed. Otherwise it will always be racist. But changing the racism of the public sector permanently involves getting all of us to think in ways that will also challenge patriarchy and the whole white supremacist thing (I'm not entirely sure in this verbal construct if "white" and "supremacist" are too building blocks or one. I feel as if there's this ambiguity because the notion of a constant battle for supremacy enforces all the other negative behaviors/thoughts, so I could make a good argument for two, but I think that one is the dominant implication - like a construct in a poem, I think it's meant to be read "white supremacist"/"white" "supremacist" with the first meaning the primary one?)
And y'know, I can get behind that. I can feel as if I am part of this. Because I understand that there's this big ugly wall here, made up of big ugly bricks, and the more of them we can remove, the freer we all will be. The challenge is to remember that the wall keeps getting built back up by the people who think it protects them, so, for example, a white woman shouldn't think that she can just keep knocking away at the patriarchy block and leave the white, supremacist, capitalist blocks and expect to get anywhere.
As far as my story goes, I struggle with how much writing down how things seem to have been, based on history books, is racist or not. I honestly can't think of many fantasy books set in a Europe like setting that grapple with slavery. The literary convention is that slavery is something that happens in an "other" space - our hero journeys to this "other" space, confronts the psychological horror of white involvement in and benefit from slavery, and then journeys back. The historical fact that the slavery was at home too tends to get worked around. And the weird sexualization of black slaves by white owners, the commodification and pseudoscientific study of every aspect of their bodies - all of this seems racist just even to talk about. And then you bring in the magic and remind the reader that magic and science were radically overlapped in the middle ages (Newton the alchemist, anyone? and that was even later). So of course in a medieval fantasy story where magic works, there would be magicians involved in slavery, magicians making spells on or with slaves, etc. And if magic worked, then the slaves would have magic too, and what would that mean to their confrontation with the slave-owners? If you've got the internal ability to burn others with magical fire, what does your slavery look like? What keeps you captive? How do you rebel, and how successful is your rebellion?
