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RACISMGrowing up hooks attended segregated elementary schools. No one ever informed her that she was living in a white-supremacist nation, which was obvious to her as she took the long bus ride to her all-black school. She remembers getting up in the earliest hours of the morning so that she could make the long bus ride she always noticed as they passed the white school those student appeared well rested because they lived in the area where their school was located, no bussing, they just got up in the morning and went. The bus riding process seems minor but it was one major example of the racist dehumanization young black children like bell hooks were forced to endure. It is experiences like these that cause her to point out that the “world is more a home for white folks than it is for anyone else…” (Bone Black 31). She argues white supremacist values continue to develop in society even today. hooks explains that the mass media plays an enormous role in the construction of images that construct America’s social reality. Mass media is generally seen as a mechanism for entertainment but with the frequency that it is viewed in American society there is a tendency for individuals to accept those things consistently seen on television as normal. Because of this values conveyed by television play themselves out in everyday life. The prominent group controlling American mass media are white males, representations of their value structures and a devaluing of non-white people further marginalizes those groups. Frequently the media represents black people in subordinate roles to whites and fails to represent their reality or daily concerns, hooks argues that this acts as a barrier to self actualization by creating a false consciousness. (Killing Rage) There are five major angles from which hooks chooses to analyze white supremacist tendencies in society: American nationalism, legitimating standard English, racism within feminism, social movements and educational biases. hooks articulates the impact of white supremacist media influence as socialization and colonization of the mind. This process, she argues, also occurs in the classroom where students are presented with white heritage and values but not called upon to consider the history of any other cultures and when those cultures are presented they are generally shown as they are perceived by the white historians. hooks discusses pictures in her all-black school that portrayed black people as primitive savages in loin cloths, not very different from anything the students could relate to. Her argument is that we live in a patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalist culture that uses racist, sexist, and classist educational policies. There are a few terms that are frequently used in criticisms of the structure hooks describes. Racism privileges one group of people over another based on racial classification, in a white supremacist society white individuals have the highest concentration of power thus white people are seen as superior to any other racial group. Patriarchy is the privileging of males over females. Classism creates an elite group, in a capitalist society it is those with the most money, and it privileges that group over disenfranchised peoples. FEMINISM"Feminist politics is losing momentum because feminist movement has lost clear definitions. We have those definitions. Let's reclaim them. Let's share them. Let's start over. Let's have T-shirts and bumper stickers and postcards and hip hop music, television and radio commercials, ads everywhere and billboards, and all manner of printed material that tells the world about feminism. We can share the simple yet powerful message that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression. Let's start there. Let the movement begin again."(Feminism is for Everybody 6) Often people will refer to the feminist movement as a collective whole and while they do tend to come together on many issues each major feminist thinker in American society has their own take on the definition and qualities of feminism. Occasionally an author, or their critics, may even create a new type of feminism for the ideas presented in their work. When talking about a particular feminist position it is important to clarify what the author's point of view is on the subject so that everyone is functioning in the same conceptual framework. bell hooks sees feminism as, "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression,"(Feminism is for Everybody 1). She believes that this is a good definition of the feminism because it does not imply that men are an enemy of the movement. Sexism, she argues, is the heart of the matter. Issues of who perpetuates sexism or whom it is directed toward are irrelevant. It is broad and able to include institutionalized sexism. In her book, Feminism is for Everybody, hooks argues against the impression that feminism is only, and always, about women becoming equal to men and she indicts the notion that feminism is anti-male. She argues that feminists are made, not born, and that individuals who choose to advocate feminist ideals do so as a result of a conscious choice that comes from consciousness raising. bell hooks is in the business of consciousness raising, not only on feminist issues but a variety of social concerns. hooks’ version of feminism is one that goes beyond traditional notions of a feminist movement that only deals with women’s issues to include race. At the core of her feminist theory is the assumption that racism and sexism are intimately intertwined forms of oppression. These structures are mutually reinforcing and dependent. The goal of her writing is consciousness raising in order to overturn the “white supremacist patriarchal system.” She argues that most women became involved in women’s rights movements as a result of their efforts to create change in a cultural setting. In Feminism is for Everybody she points out: Early on most feminist activists (a majority of whom were white) had their consciousness raised about the nature of male domination when they were working in anti-classist and anti-racist settings with men who were telling the world about the importance of freedom while subordinating the women in their ranks. Whether it was white women working on behalf of socialism, black women working on behalf of civil rights and black liberation, or native American Indian women working for indigenous rights. It was clear that men wanted to lead and they wanted women to follow. Participating in these radical freedom struggles awakened the spirit of rebellion and resistance in progressive females and led them towards contemporary women’s liberation. This is the reason many early feminists lashed out at men, they perceived them as the problem and the reason for the perpetuation of a sexist structure that allowed them to be dominant. However, men are not the sole reason there is sexism in society and feminists had to eventually learn to fight the oppressive structures through sisterhood. As women identified structures that were hindering their self-actualization they looked to their own lives and realized that nearly all structures in American society were part of hooks’ “white supremacist patriarchal system.” This lead women to begin working on things that most affected them. Work on personal issues have caused feminists to group together based on their lifestyle. hooks identifies this as the most destructive force in current feminist ideology. The women’s movement has fractured into multiple movements based on the area certain women are most concerned with. While it is important that feminism address all of the structures that support oppression they have decreased some of their power by dividing on particular issues. hooks’ argument is that these groups need to come to this realization and reunite to regain power for social change. She points out that when feminist politics can be divided and connected only to equality with elite white males it prevents society from recognizing the need for revolutionary change and allows small gestures toward equality to pacify people. She argues that in order to rectify the problem we must, “acknowledge the ways politics of difference have created exploitative and oppressive power relations between women that must be contested and changed”(Skin Deep 272). Because of this a more beneficial definition of the feminist movement is the one used above by hooks that provides cohesion, not division in the movement. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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