Read Online Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) by Bell Hooks - Free Book Online Page B

are light-skinned and have straight hair, while ignoring other black people. It all shows how deeply that myth has inserted itself in all our imaginations. Falling Down captures not only the horror of that but also the role that the mass media has played in that. In the one scene where the white man is trying to use that major weapon and the little black boy shows him how to, the man says to this little boy, “Well, how do you know how to use it?” The boy says, “I’ve seen it in movies.”
    Menace II Society, which I thought was really just a reactionary film on so many levels, offers itself to us as “black culture,” yet what the film actually interrogates within its own narrative is that these black boys have learned how to do this shit not from black culture but from watching white gangster movies. The film points out that the whole myth of the gangster—as it is being played out in rap and in movies—is not some Afrocentric or black-defined myth, it’s the public myth that’s in all our imaginations from movies and television. There was the scene in Menace II Society, where we see them watching those white gangster movies and wanting to be like that, and that is the tragedy of white supremacy and colonization. It’s delivered to us in the whole package of the film, as being about blackness, as being a statement about black young people and where they are, but it is, in truth, a statement about how white supremacy has shaped and perverted the imagination of young black people. What the film says is that these people have difficulty imagining any way out of their lives and the film doesn’t really subvert that. It says to you: When you finally decide to imagine a way out, that’s when you get blown away. The deeper message of the film is: Don’t imagine a way out, because the person who’s still standing at the end of the film has been the most brutal. But in Falling Down the white man is not still standing. He hasn’t conquered the turf. There’s this whole sense of, “Yeah, you now see what everyone else has been seeing, which is that the planet has been fucked up and you’re going to be a victim of it too,” as opposed to the way in which Menace II Society suggests—mythically almost—that the genocide we are being entertained by is not going to be complete, that there are going to be the unique and special individuals who will survive the genocide but they’re not the individuals who were dreaming of a way out. That’s why these films are anti-utopian. They’re antirevolution because they shut down the imagination, and it’s very, very frightening. In the same way, I was disturbed lately by the film, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. Subtextually, its a fucking antiabortion film. This woman who is portrayed as so powerful and thoughtful yet she can’t make a decision about what to do with her body. I teach young women at a city college: these women would not be so confused when it came to their bodies, but that’s how people imagine lower-class black women. I teach single mothers who have had the will and the power to go forward with their lives while this society says to them, “How dare you think you can go forward with your life and fulfill your dreams?’
MFA:
Camille Billops’s film Finding Christa addresses that. Talk about revolutionary. A woman—Billops herself—does something for the sake of her art very few of us would ever think of doing: give her young daughter up for adoption. And then, twenty years later, far from denying anything, instead celebrates it all over again through the making of the film. Finding Christa is a very troubling and interesting film.
bh
I think it was disturbing on a number of levels. It’s interesting that we can read about men who have turned their back on parenting to cultivate their creativity and their projects and no one ever thinks it’s horrific, but a lot of us, including myself, were troubled by what we saw in Camille Billops’s film. This