Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) by Hooks Bell
Author:Hooks, Bell [Hooks, Bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781136767906
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-09-10T00:00:00+00:00
13
SPENDING CULTURE
Marketing the black underclass
At the end of Class, Paul Fussell’s playful book on the serious issue of social status, there is a discussion of a category outside the conventional structures entitled “The X Way Out.” Folks who exist in category X, he reports, “earn X-personhood by a strenuous effort of discovery in which curiosity and originality are indispensable.” They want to escape class. Describing the kind of people who are Xs, Fussell comments:
The old-fashioned term Bohemians gives some idea; so does the term the talented. Some Xs are intellectual, but a lot are not: they are actors, musicians, artists, sport stars, “celebrities,” well-to-do former hippies, confirmed residers abroad, and the more gifted journalists … They tend to be self-employed, doing what social scientists call autonomous work … X people are independent-minded, free of anxious regard for popular shibboleths, loose in carriage and demeanor. They adore the work they do … Being an X person is like having much of the freedom and some of the power of a top-out-of-sight or upper class person, but without the money. X category is a sort of unmonied aristocracy.
Even though I grew up in a Southern black working-class household, I longed to be among this X group. Radicalized by black liberation struggle and feminist movement, my effort to make that longing compatible with revolution began in college. It was there that I was subjected to the indoctrination that would prepare me to be an acceptable member of the middle class. Then, as now, I was fundamentally anti-bourgeois. To me this does not mean that I do not like beautiful things or desire material well-being. It means that I do not sit around longing to be rich, and that I believe hedonistic materialism to be a central aspect of an imperialist colonialism that perpetuates and maintains white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Since this is the ideological framework that breeds domination and a culture of repression, a repudiation of the ethic of materialism is central to any transformation of our society. While I do not believe that any of us really exists in a category outside class, in that free space of X I do believe that those of us who repudiate domination must be willing to divest of class elitism. And it would be useful if progressive folks who oppose domination in all its forms, but who manage to accumulate material plenty or wealth, would share their understanding of ways this status informs their commitment to radical social change and their political allegiances, publicly naming the means by which they hold that class privilege in ways that do not exploit or impinge on the freedom and welfare of others.
Lately, when I find myself among groups of black academics or intellectuals where I raise the issue of class, suggesting that we need to spend more time talking about class differences among black people, I find a refusal to deal with this issue. Most are unwilling to acknowledge that class positionality shapes our perspectives and standpoints. This
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