Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics)

by Hooks, Bell

  The closing scenes of Malcolm X highlight Lee’s cinematic conflict, his desire to make a black epic drama that would both compete with and yet mirror white Hollywood epics made by white male directors he perceives as great, as well as his longing to preserve and convey the spirit and integrity of Malcolm’s life and work. In the finale, viewers are bombarded, overloaded with images: stirring documentary footage, compelling testimony, and then the use of schoolchildren and Nelson Mandela to show that Malcolm’s legacy is still important and has global impact. Tragically, by the time the film ends, all knowledge of Malcolm X as militant black revolutionary has been utterly erased, consumed by images. Gone is the icon who represents our struggle for black liberation, for militant resistance, and in its place we are presented with a depoliticized image with no substance or power. In Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Richard Dyer describes the way in which Hollywood manipulates the black image with the intent to render it powerless.

  The basic strategy of these discourses might be termed deactivation. Black people’s qualities could be praised to the skies, but they must not be shown to be effective qualities active in the world. Even when portrayed at their most vivid and vibrant, they must not be shown to do anything, except perhaps to be destructive in a random sort of way.

  The Malcolm we see at the end of Spike Lee’s film is tragically alone, with only a few followers, suicidal, maybe even losing his mind. The didacticism of this image suggests only that it is foolhardy and naive to think that there can be meaningful political revolution—that truth and justice will prevail. In no way subversive, Malcolm X reinscribes the black image within a colonizing framework.

  The underlying political conservatism of Lee’s film will be ignored by those seduced by the glitter and glamor, the spectacle, the show. Like many other bad Hollywood movies with powerful subject matter, Malcolm X touches the hearts and minds of folks who bring their own meaning to the film and connect it with their social experience. That is why young black folks can brag about the way the fictional Malcolm courageously confronts white folks even as young white folks leave the theater pleased and relieved that the Malcolm they see and come to know is such a good guy and not the threatening presence they may have heard about. Spike Lee’s focus on Malcolm follows in the wake of a renewed interest in his life and work generated by hip-hop, by progressive contemporary cultural criticism, by political writings, and by various forms of militant activism. These counter-hegemonic voices are a needed opposition to conservative commodifications of Malcolm’s life and work.

  Just as these forms of commodification freeze and exploit the image of Malcolm X while simultaneously undermining the power of his work to radicalize and educate for critical consciousness, they strip him of iconic status. This gives rise to an increase in cultural attacks, especially in the mainsteam mass media that now bombards us with information that seeks to impress on the public consciousness the notion that, ultimately, there is no heroic dimension to Malcolm, his life, or his work. One of the most powerful attacks has been that by white writer Bruce Perry. Even though Malcolm lets any reader know in his autobiography that during his hustling days he committed “unspeakable” acts (the nature of which would be obvious to anyone familiar with the street culture of cons, drugging, and sexual hedonism), Perry assumes that his naming of these acts exposes Malcolm as a fraud. This is the height of white supremacist patriarchal arrogance. No doubt Perry’s work shocks and surprises many folks who need to believe their icons are saints. But no information Perry reveals (much of which was gleaned from interviews with Malcolm’s enemies and detractors) diminishes the power of the political work he did to advance the global liberation of black people and the struggle to end white supremacy.

  Perry’s work has received a boost in media attention since the opening of Spike Lee’s movie and is rapidly acquiring authoritative status. Writing in the Washington Post, Perry claims to be moved by the film even as he seizes the moment of public attention to insist that Lee’s version of Malcolm “is largely a myth” (the assumption being that his version is “truth”). Magazines such as the New Yorker, which rarely focus on black life, have highlighted their anti-Malcolm pieces. The December 1992 issue of Harper’s has a piece by black scholar Gerald Early (“Their Malcolm, My Problem”) which also aims to diminish the power of his life and work. Usually, when black folks are attempting to denounce Malcolm, they gain status in the white press. Unless there is serious critical intervention, Bayard Rustin’s dire prediction that nonprogressive white folks will determine how Malcolm is viewed historically may very well come to pass. Those of us who respect and revere Malcolm as teacher, political mentor, and comrade must promote the development of a counter-hegemonic voice in films, talks, and political writings that will centralize and sustain a focus on his political contribution to black liberation struggle, to the global fight for freedom and justice for all.

  Spike Lee’s filmic fictive biography makes no attempt to depict Malcolm’s concern for the collective well-being of black people, a concern that transcended his personal circumstance, his personal history. Yet the film shows no connection between his personal rage at racism and his compassionate devotion to alleviating the sufferings of all black people. Significantly, Spike Lee’s Malcolm X does not compel audiences to experience empathetically the pain, sorrow, and suffering of black life in white supremacist, patriarchal culture. Nothing in the film conveys an anguish and grief so intense as to overwhelm emotionally. And nothing that would help folks understand the necessity of that rage and resistance. Nothing that would let them see why, after working all day, Malcolm would walk the streets for hours, thinking “about what terrible things have been done to our people here in the United States.” While the footage of the brutal beating of Rodney King shown at the beginning of the film is a graphic reminder of “the terrible things,” the pathos that this image evokes is quickly displaced by the neominstrel show that entertains and titillates.

  As sentimental, romanticized drama, Malcolm X seduces by encouraging us to forget the brutal reality that created black rage and militancy. The film does not compel viewers to confront, challenge, and change. It embraces and rewards passive response—inaction. It encourages us to weep, but not to fight. In his powerful essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin reminds readers that

  sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

  As Wallace warns, there is no place in Hollywood movies for the “seriousness of black liberation.” Spike Lee’s film is no exception. To take liberation seriously we must take seriously the reality of black suffering. Ultimately, it is this reality the film denies.

  15

  SEEING AND MAKING CULTURE

  Representing the poor

  Cultural critics rarely talk about the poor. Most of us use words such as “underclass” or “economically disenfranchised” when we speak about being poor. Poverty has not become one of the new hot topics of radical discourse. When contemporary Left intellectuals talk about capitalism, few if any attempts are made to relate that discourse to the reality of being poor in America. In his collection of essays Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times, black philosopher Cornel West includes a piece entitled “The Black Underclass and Black Philosophers” wherein he suggests that black intellectuals within the “professional-managerial class in U.S. advanced capitalist society” must “engage in a kind of critical self-inventory, a historical situating and positioning of ourselves as persons who reflect on the situation of those more disadvantaged than us even though we may have relatives and friends in the black underclass.” West does not speak of poverty or being poor in his essay. And I can remember once in conversation with him referring to my having come from a “poor” background; he c
orrected me and stated that my family was “working class.” I told him that technically we were working class, because my father worked as a janitor at the post office, however the fact that there were seven children in our family meant that we often faced economic hardship in ways that made us children at least think of ourselves as poor. Indeed, in the segregated world of our small Kentucky town, we were all raised to think in terms of the haves and the have-nots, rather than in terms of class. We acknowledged the existence of four groups: the poor, who were destitute; the working folks, who were poor because they made just enough to make ends meet; those who worked and had extra money; and the rich. Even though our family was among the working folks, the economic struggle to make ends meet for such a large family always gave us a sense that there was not enough money to take care of the basics. In our house, water was a luxury and using too much could be a cause for punishment. We never talked about being poor. As children we knew we were not supposed to see ourselves as poor but we felt poor.

  I began to see myself as poor when I went away to college. I never had any money. When I told my parents that I had scholarships and loans to attend Stanford University, they wanted to know how I would pay for getting there, for buying books, for emergencies. We were not poor, but there was no money for what was perceived to be an individualistic indulgent desire; there were cheaper colleges closer to family. When I went to college and could not afford to come home during breaks, I frequently spent my holidays with the black women who cleaned in the dormitories. Their world was my world. They, more than other folks at Stanford, knew where I was coming from. They supported and affirmed my efforts to be educated, to move past and beyond the world they lived in, the world I was coming from.

  To this day, even though I am a well-paid member of what West calls the academic “professional-managerial class,” in everyday life, outside the classroom, I rarely think of myself in relation to class. I mainly think about the world in terms of who has money to spend and who does not. Like many technically middle-class folks who are connected in economic responsibility to kinship structures where they provide varying material support for others, the issue is always one of money. Many middle-class black folks have no money because they regularly distribute their earnings among a larger kinship group where folks are poor and destitute, where elder parents and relatives who once were working class have retired and fallen into poverty.

  Poverty was no disgrace in our household. We were socialized early on, by grandparents and parents, to assume that nobody’s value could be measured by material standards. Value was connected to integrity, to being honest and hardworking. One could be hardworking and still be poor. My mother’s mother Baba, who did not read or write, taught us—against the wishes of our parents—that it was better to be poor than to compromise one’s dignity, that it was better to be poor than to allow another person to assert power over you in ways that were dehumanizing or cruel.

  I went to college believing there was no connection between poverty and personal integrity. Entering a world of class privilege which compelled me to think critically about my economic background, I was shocked by representations of the poor learned in classrooms, as well as by the comments of professors and peers that painted an entirely different picture. They almost always portrayed the poor as shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest, and unworthy. Students in the dormitory were quick to assume that anything missing had been taken by the black and Filipina women who worked there. Although I went through many periods of shame about my economic background, even before I educated myself for critical consciousness about class by reading and studying Marx, Gramsci, Memmi, and the like, I contested stereotypical negative representations of poverty. I was especially disturbed by the assumption that the poor were without values. Indeed one crucial value that I had learned from Baba, my grandmother, and other family members was not to believe that “schooling made you smart.” One could have degrees and still not be intelligent or honest. I had been taught in a culture of poverty to be intelligent, honest, to work hard, and always to be a person of my word. I had been taught to stand up for what I believed was right, to be brave and courageous. These lessons were the foundation that made it possible for me to succeed, to become the writer I always wanted to be, and to make a living in my job as an academic. They were taught to me by the poor, the disenfranchised, the underclass.

  Those lessons were reinforced by liberatory religious traditions that affirmed identification with the poor. Taught to believe that poverty could be the breeding ground of moral integrity, of a recognition of the significance of communion, of sharing resources with others in the black church, I was prepared to embrace the teachings of liberatory theology, which emphasized solidarity with the poor. That solidarity was meant to be expressed not simply through charity, the sharing of privilege, but in the assertion of one’s power to change the world so that the poor would have their needs met, would have access to resources, would have justice and beauty in their lives.

  Contemporary popular culture in the United States rarely represents the poor in ways that display integrity and dignity. Instead, the poor are portrayed through negative stereotypes. When they are lazy and dishonest, they are consumed with longing to be rich, a longing so intense that it renders them dysfunctional. Willing to commit all manner of dehumanizing and brutal acts in the name of material gain, the poor are portrayed as seeing themselves as always and only worthless. Worth is gained only by means of material success.

  Television shows and films bring the message home that no one can truly feel good about themselves if they are poor. In television sitcoms the working poor are shown to have a healthy measure of self-contempt; they dish it out to one another with a wit and humor that we can all enjoy, irrespective of our class. Yet it is clear that humor masks the longing to change their lot, the desire to “move on up” expressed in the theme song of the sitcom The Jeffersons. Films which portray the rags-to-riches tale continue to have major box-office appeal. Most contemporary films portraying black folks—Harlem Nights, Boomerang, Menace II Society, to name only a few—have as their primary theme the lust of the poor for material plenty and their willingness to do anything to satisfy that lust. Pretty Woman is a perfect example of a film that made huge sums of money portraying the poor in this light. Consumed and enjoyed by audiences of all races and classes, it highlights the drama of the benevolent, ruling-class person (in this case a white man, played by Richard Gere) willingly sharing his resources with a poor white prostitute (played by Julia Roberts). Indeed, many films and television shows portray the ruling class as generous, eager to share, as unattached to their wealth in their interactions with folks who are not materially privileged. These images contrast with the opportunistic avaricious longings of the poor.

  Socialized by film and television to identify with the attitudes and values of privileged classes in this society, many people who are poor, or a few paychecks away from poverty, internalize fear and contempt for those who are poor. When materially deprived teenagers kill for tennis shoes or jackets they are not doing so just because they like these items so much. They also hope to escape the stigma of their class by appearing to have the trappings of more privileged classes. Poverty, in their minds and in our society as a whole, is seen as synonymous with depravity, lack, and worthlessness. No one wants to be identified as poor. Teaching literature by African American women writers at a major urban state university to predominantly black students from poor and working-class families, I was bombarded by their questioning as to why the poor black women who were abused in families in the novels we read did not “just leave.” It was amazing to me that these students, many of whom were from materially disadvantaged backgrounds, had no realistic sense about the economics of housing or jobs in this society. When I asked that we identify our class backgrounds, only one student—a young single parent—was willing to identify herself as poor. We talked later about the reality that although she was not the only poor person in the class, no one e
lse wanted to identify with being poor for fear this stigma would mark them, shame them in ways that would go beyond our class. Fear of shame-based humiliation is a primary factor leading no one to want to identify themselves as poor. I talked with young black women receiving state aid, who have not worked in years, about the issue of representation. They all agree that they do not want to be identified as poor. In their apartments they have the material possessions that indicate success (a VCR, a color television), even if it means that they do without necessities and plunge into debt to buy these items. Their self-esteem is linked to not being seen as poor.

  If to be poor in this society is everywhere represented in the language we use to talk about the poor, in the mass media, as synonymous with being nothing, then it is understandable that the poor learn to be nihilistic. Society is telling them that poverty and nihilism are one and the same. If they cannot escape poverty, then they have no choice but to drown in the image of a life that is valueless. When intellectuals, journalists, or politicians speak about nihilism and the despair of the underclass, they do not link those states to representations of poverty in the mass media. And rarely do they suggest by their rhetoric that one can lead a meaningful, contented, and fulfilled life if one is poor. No one talks about our individual and collective accountability to the poor, a responsibility that begins with the politics of representation.