some thoughts after getting through only the first two chapters of bell hook’s book, Black Looks: Race and Representation…mind you, these are only notes, so don’t take them for more than they are:
1. Why does the phrase “accepting diversity” sound so damn similar to “tolerating” the wondrous and shining beauty that is my people? I don’t want to be accepted. I don’t need your acceptance. Fuck you. Either deal with me or don’t, but I don’t have any interest in your feelings about it, nor in commending you for “accepting diversity.” You are the ones who must be forgiven, who must be accepted. You don’t ask the murderer who killed your parents for their acceptance of you and your kin, and you don’t care how they feel about things, all you want is them to keep their mouths shut on the way to the fucking chair. And that’s what each and every one of you are, a gang of fucking murderers, or the beneficiaries of that murderous nature. So you can take your diversity and your multiculturalism and shove it straight up your lily-white ass.
2. The black male is a tortured, broken body. Not a broken soul, mind you, but a body, so gnarled and torn from within and without, that what other expressions can we have other than that of pain or of the infliction of pain?
3. But then, when have death and desire not been directly and forever linked?
4. The eating of the blowfish, the Japanese fugu, poisonous if not served perfectly, is another example of this attempt (outside of white culture) of the attempt to defeat death by eating it. And what is the Other but chaos, the wild? Black culture represents chaos to white culture, in its unstructured (at least, to white systems of structure) ways, its rhythms, its cacophony of sound and sight. Chaos equals death. White attempts to subvert or otherwise envelope itself around that chaotic culture, in order to “understand” it and by understanding control it and protect itself from the death that culture represents, are but another example of what hooks called “Eating the Other.” [more on this later]