Representing Whiteness In The Black Imagination Summary

bell hooks in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination, describes whiteness as terror for all those who are not white. Hooks’ approach can be intersectional in that she seems to support the black women like herself, whose sufferings are two or threefold; black, female and sometimes poor. She reiterates that just because imperialism, colonialism and apartheid are either over or illegal, it does not mean that their invisibility has seized to reach out to squeeze the life blood from the necks of the oppressed. Ruth Frankenberg’s essay on the other hand, is mainly about white women, as she describes them as oblivious to the enigma. Frankenberg was a British born author who lived in the United States. Hooks lives with racism and deals with it daily, whereas Frankenberg’s

Hook first describes “whiteness” as purity, but comes with a past that changes how people view the white race. She says “To name that whiteness in black imagination is often represented of terror: one must face the palimpsest of written histories that erase and deny that reinvent the past to make the present vision of racial harmony and pluralism more plausible.”(p.49) White is seen as a clean, safe, and humble color, yet hook sees the history of the color, which dealt with slavery and the behavior of slave masters towards slaves. In the documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance; there is a line said by a Mohawk woman who is in the resistance, “I will never bow down to them they will just step on my hands”. In this line it describes the basis of whiteness to all cultures. She seems to be saying that when we as the ‘others’ bow down to those who are the pure or white, it is never enough; it just brings us closer to the ground where they can take our land and our culture. It is so sad that after years of oppression and resistance we are seen as