Hair today, Barack to the Future, a reading response

I love to read bell hooks. People who were alive when Pauline Kael was writing for the New Yorker tell me that folks were drawn to her at the time not because of her taste, necessarily, but because she was so fun to argue with as you read along -- after you’d seen a film. hooks is even better, for her writing is so powerful, so confident, so well-argued that you’re nodding your head along -- totally in agreement with her -- until about an hour or so afterward, it hits you: Hey, wait a second! Then you want to read the chapter again.

It’s difficult for me to address race and culture without being thrown back to Tuesday’s historic election. I was enjoying the “punditry” on CNN, post-acceptance speech, and the commentators made a point I had recognized in my brain and in my bones, but had never articulated in a sentence: Barack Obama’s campaign addressed the United States of 2050 (the one we were promised in elementary school that seemed like a lie once we got to college). In that US, today’s minority is the majority.

After reading chapter two of Black Looks, I began to consider what will become of the hard line hooks has drawn between appropriation and appreciation in the future. Who is allowed to do what in an increasingly multi-racial world? I began to re-engage celebrity and tv journalists' annoying, oft-repeated question over whether Obama was "black" or "black enough."

hooks’s statement, “They claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier …” though it was intended to describe white male sexual desire for dark-skinned females, actually served to bum me out about the news that several top designers are “fighting over” the totally awesome Michelle Obama. I was really excited about that, and now it’s all imperialism. Talk about anhedonia.

Mercer does a lot to recoup the absence of possibility provided by the hooks and Davis texts; she acknowledges that intercultural appropriation is possible from both vantage points, and that the associations of hairstyles with Africa -- which were empowering for Davis and many of her generation -- are exaggerated.