Bell Hook's The Others & Lee's Do the Right Thing

Race and the divide between the races is either the subject or the subtext in many films. The theory of the creation of "the Other" as delineated by Bell Hooks applies to these works and helps illuminate how they handle the issue of race. Hooks's analysis will serve as the critical perspective to be applied to a film overtly about racial tensions and how they develop, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

Hooks notes how race is used not merely to discriminate against one group or another but to make that group discriminate against itself:

Though systems of domination, imperialism, colonialism, racism, actively coerce black folks to internalize negative perceptions of blackness, to be self-hating, and many of us succumb, blacks who imitate whites (adopting their values, speech, habits of being, etc.) continue to regard whiteness with suspicion, fear, and even hatred (Hooks 338).

Hooks sees blacks as beset by the contradictory longing to possess the reality of the Other, in this case the other race, even if that reality is one that wounds and negates. As Hooks describes it, racial division produces in a given racial group a sense of otherness, that there are real differences between the realities of themselves and the differing racial group. Similarities between groups, those similarities that all share because they are human first, are discounted in the face of the otherness that becomes the defining factor. The dominant force in society becomes the Other for the dominated

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te in America that is not easily bridged, for there is always a sense of difference that determines the course of relations between the races, the sense of the Other noted by Hooks. This sense of difference affects both groups. It is significant in fact that the whites in the neighborhood are Italian, since the Italians were once subject to massive discrimination and separation in American society. The "third" force in the neighborhood is Korean, and here Lee shows how all racial groups exploit one another in some degree in a society that has become and that remains polarized by race. What is particularly powerful about this film is the fact that the blacks and whites in this neighborhood have coexisted for a long time before this one day brings out all the underlying tensions and resentments that the people may not even have known were there until they explode. The people may have accepted the myth noted by Hooks, the idea that racism has been eliminated, but always the sense of the Other is strong. The blacks in the neighborhood may have a good deal of black pride, but they also would still become the whites in economic terms if they could. They resent anyone from outside the neighborhood who does business better than the

Category: Film - B