Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (19 page)

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Authors: Bell Hooks

BOOK: Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics)
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bh:
Well, since we’re talkin’ about violence, one of the things is that people love you in Boyz N the Hood. I mean, we all loved you. We identified with you. You were the character to love. But on one hand, you was also rotten. You was sellin’ the crack. How do you think this affects us, then, because everybody loved you more than any other character?
IC:
It shows that Doughboy coulda been either one of them. Doughboy coulda been Tre, Ricky, you know.
bh:
But Tre just came off like a wimp, a crybaby. He was just so weak. He came off weak in the movie.
IC:
No, to me he came off tryin’ to do the right thing. The neighborhood was really frustratin’ him out, because he was tryin’ to do the right thing and everybody else was doin’ the wrong thing. And I think Doughboy woulda been just like him if he had the right guidance, the right father. It’s a thin line between ’em all. Tre was about to be like Doughboy for a minute until he thought about it.
bh:
I feel like if I was a kid lookin’ at that movie, I wouldn’t wanna be him, I’d wanna be you, because your character had the jazz. I mean, your character was cool, your character had feelings. I mean, why couldn’t he have been a strong person?
IC:
I think what John Singleton was tryin’ to do was show three separate people that’s friends, you know. He coulda gave Tre a little more, like you said, a little more jazz, even though I know people that straight up, but they wouldn’t really be hangin’ with us.
bh:
I gave a talk at the Schomberg recently with the black philosopher Cornel West, and one of the things we were sayin’ is that that guy didn’t look glamorous to kids. You don’t want to be him ’cause he didn’t have no humor hardly, he didn’t have much. Part of what I try to do as a teacher, a professor, is to show people just ’cause you’re a professor and you got a Ph.D., you don’t have to be all tired, with no style and with no presence. If I come on like I don’t have no style, then I’m not really being somebody that black kids are gonna wanna say, “Yeah, this is interesting, you know, I could still have my shit together and be this, I could still be down and be this.” Because then kids will look at us and think, she’s cool, she’s down. I want to be like that. I felt like in terms of real love for the character, I think most people felt the love for you, because your character, even though he was wicked, he was presented as having feelings.
IC:
Like I said, he coulda turned out either way. He’s a good kid inside, but circumstances had him the way he was. At the end, it really expressed that I just pretty much wanted to be a regular mo’fucker around here, like everybody else was. I didn’t get the right things at home. I think it’s because he had depth and he looked more like a person than anybody else who was really locked in and then would go up and down. He went from killing somebody to cryin’ on the porch in less than ten minutes. He was like all these kids just stuck up in the penitentiary. They’re the same way—they just took the wrong turn. It’s a fine line between all of ’em, because all of ’em could switch positions anytime. The thing about our neighborhood, you know, now you have the kid that comes from a broken home who turns out to be the best kid. Then you have a kid with a mother and father that’s boom boom, just wild. So we know that it starts young. But we have to start doin’ some things different.
bh:
One of the things that you said that’s really important is the depth. I think that obviously you are a very deep person, a contemplative, complex person in your personal life. How can we create a context where more folks can see that complexity?
IC:
It’s like feedin’ a baby steak. You can’t do that, you know what I mean? I just can’t, at this point in time, I can’t do because I don’t think …
bh:
… people are ready?
IC:
Because I don’t want to flip, like, bam! You know what I’m sayin’? People identify me with the Nation of Islam, which I’m a definite supporter, but I’m not in the Nation. The Muslims have got a bad rap, not because of what they’ve done here in America, but see, the Arab Muslims, the press done given the word “Muslim” a bad rap, so when people hear it, they think, oh, no, no, no, I’m church. So if I flip, they’re gonna say, aw, those Muslims done got his head, boom, boom, boom. I’d turn a lot of people off. I talked to the minister about this, how I really wanna put more messages. He tell me that it’s not wise to really flip the script on people like that. You have to gradually sneak it in. Give ’em what they want but gradually sneak it in, and that’s what I think I’m doin’ now. And pretty soon I get to the point where kids be comin’ to me and sayin’ you need to speak more on this and speak more on that. Right now it’s just an enlightening period because kids that listen to me, what they hear is black this and black that. But through my records they say, damn, that’s true. And then it lights that light that’s up there. So I’m tryin’ to evolve to the point where I can do just straight political records and still get the same love from the people.
bh:
Well, one of the threads that runs through all your albums has been representing black men as both the architects and the representations of evil. Who’s the primary predator now? Are we preying on each other?
IC:
Of course, yeah, that’s the case, but that’s not the focus of my records.
bh:
Well, talk a little bit more about who the predator is and how you see the concept of “predator.”
IC:
Well, I think black people have been the victim of everything. I think we’ve been on the defensive on everything. And a predator is definitely on the offensive, you know. And I think that’s what we need to do, start not sitting back and letting things happen to us, but start creating better things for ourselves. We can do that through a mental revolution which I think needs to take place before anything positive really happens. If we don’t have a mental revolution, if we ever get involved in a physical revolution, we’d get blown out of the water. Because there’d be too many people tryin’ to lead, and too many people goin’ in their own direction. It just won’t be on and it won’t be clickin’. The mental revolution is gonna take time, but it’s happenin’ as we speak.
bh:
Well, what do you think about people like Shelby Steele, and the black voices that are saying our problem is that we focus too much on victimization, that we gotta get off this victim kick?
IC:
I don’t know … You gotta definitely remember the past.
bh:
I think that we can’t get stuck in victimization, but we gotta know who the enemy is, what the enemy has done to us, and we have to name that.
IC:
We can’t sidestep that. And that’s what black people been tryin’ to do. But that ain’t the case. That ain’t the case because the same thing is happenin’, just in different ways. The enemy has got more wicked and more wise, and we haven’t.
bh:
The way that white people continue their power is, in part through their control of our images and our representation.
IC:
Oh, Yeah. I think Dr. Frances Cress-Welsing’s philosophy on racism, I think that’s the whole root of the problem, about the genetic annihilation, and that we all become one big melting pot. In some years in the future, white people won’t even exist. So to make sure that they do exist, they got to put walls around themselves, and they really have to block everybody out. To block everybody out they feel they should murder ’em. I think we need to recognize that they’re attackin’ us, and we’re tryin’ to sidestep. But now we’re on the offensive, we know how to go around this, this bullshit. But if you in denial of the problem, you’re never gonna solve it.
bh:
I write a lot about white supremacy, and then people say to me, she doesn’t like white people. And I keep tryin’ to get people to see it’s a difference between attacking the institutionalized structures of white supremacy and individual white people.
IC:
Yeah, I mean, I don’t dislike white people. I just understand ’em. And since I understand ’em, I should read what they tryin’ to do. I mean, this is what they have to do to survive, to exist as a white race, ’cause if not, genetically they can be just taken off the planet.
bh:
I have more problems than you do with Cress-Welsing, ’cause I feel like that sidesteps the issue of power. I feel like even if white people knew they were going to be on the planet forever, they wouldn’t want to give up the power and control of the planet. Because it’s not just about whiteness, it’s about the world’s resources, oil …
IC:
It’s definitely about that, but I think all that goes hand in hand. I think since they got the power, of course now they wouldn’t give it up. But when they went to countries and raped the women and come back and the babies are the color of the women they raped, you know, they like, wait a minute, and then came up with a plan. So consciously that’s what he holds onto when you’re talking about racism. And I think by him using his methods to exist, he gained power and said wait a minute—I like this, too. I ain’t gonna let go of this no matter what. So I think it all goes hand in hand.
bh:
Do you think the average dude out there is thinkin’ the way you think about racism and white supremacy?
IC:
No. Because I think the average dudes haven’t been exposed to as many people. The average dude really ain’t been nowhere outside their neighborhood. So they ain’t really that concerned. They worried about how to get food on the table. They don’t care who’s the president and who’s mayor. They still gotta get money. And that becomes their drive—money. And nothin’ else.
bh:
There’s so much emphasis on black men and violence. What about black male pain and grief? What do you do with your pain and your grief?
IC:
Well, I really just try to suck it up. I don’t let it become routine because pain and grief never supposed to be routine to nobody. Killin’ has become a way of life. Very little talkin’, a lot of shootin’. And, I mean, that really has a big effect on us, you know. Television, you look at the violence before television and the violence after television. Now they can show an actual murder on TV, you know what I’m sayin’? A couple of days ago, an actual murder.
bh:
I know, it was too much.
IC:
And it’s like, it wasn’t even shocking. It’s a thin line between reality and the fake movie stuff. But the reality, it didn’t look as gory as the movie shit does. I think subconsciously some people say, damn, that was real, and they shocked and they don’t like that. But I think violence has become a way of life, and I think black people have always carried guns to protect ourselves from white men. And I think white men themselves can’t integrate, but they’re really gonna pump this self-hate so that the guns will never be pointed up, but will always point inward toward each other. And that’s what we’re stuck in. We got to put somebody to blame for this, because somebody is. You screw somebody out of their culture and their know-how and make them dependent on you, then you got to point that out. You got to show them that this black face that you’re about to shoot is not the enemy. On my records I refuse to say I shot a nigger for this, I shot a nigger for that. On my past records when I didn’t have no knowledge … I wouldn’t say some of the things now that I would in ’89, ’87, ’88, because, I mean, I’ve grown as a person. I need to grow as an artist, so I would never say, yo, I’m lookin’ for a nigger to shoot. I’d rather say, I got my gun pointed at the cracker, because the black man and the black woman is not my enemy. Although we do things within our community that need to be checked.
bh:
Do you think white supremacy oppresses black women?
IC:
Hell, yeah. I think white supremacy sometimes uses the black woman to get to the black man. You know, we’ll hire her, but we won’t hire you.
bh:
But don’t you think it also uses black men? Like to me, Clarence Thomas is a case of the black man being used.
IC:
Oh, yeah, it uses everybody. It takes a person like Clarence Thomas and it feels like a lot of black people would be proud, and it puts him on TV and rips him apart. A lot of people—I’m not one of them—but a lot of people look, oh yeah, we got a black man, we got Thurgood Marshall, and now we got Clarence Thomas, that’s cool.
bh:
There’s a big difference between Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, and they don’t see that.
IC:
No, it’s a black face, it’s a pacifier. It’s kind of like, every inner city has a Martin Luther King Boulevard, you know what I’m sayin’? It’s to pacify us. Y’all say we’re racist? Y’all got Martin Luther King Boulevard. Y’all got the Cosby Show. And if you look at talk shows, white people say y’all got this. They throw out a pacifier. “What about Colin Powell?” They always use the pacifier as a scapegoat to show that they’ve been fair and lovin’ and understandin’, they bend over backwards for black people.
bh:
One of the main things a lot of people said to me is “Why you want to talk to Ice Cube? ’cause he don’t even like black women.” I wanted you to talk some about whether you believe black men and women must work together to challenge dominations.
IC:
Yeah, on the business level, I think a black woman is the best thing to have, because black women are focused. My manager, a black woman, when it comes to business, she is sharp. [He laughs.]
bh:
So you think we need to have a vision of partnership?
IC:
Yeah, I think black women have always been the backbone of the community, and it’s up to the black man to support the backbone, to show strength. I think black women have been the glue. Black women is trying to hold it together and it’s up to the black man to lock it in. In some cases we jump at the occasion, and in some cases we fail. But I think the black women have been the most consistent.

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