Interview with bell hooks about Night-Vision “The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as dramatic, as disorienting a change as was the original European colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart and reconstructing the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have.”
- - from the preface of Night-Vision
Once in a while, a book is published that creates a stir below the surface of mainstream discourse. Night-Vision: illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, by Butch Lee and Red Rover, was published more than two years ago by Vagabond Press. Night-Vision discusses the radical politics born in the '60s when colonialism was dying (the old reality) and suggests that we must develop new theories to cope with the new neo-colonial world in which we now live (the new reality). It has received some remarkable reviews from underground, anarchist and revolutionary newspapers but has been ignored by mainstream feminism. bell hooks read Night-Vision last year and was impressed with much it had to say. She felt that it was an important book which needed to reach a wider audience and agreed to talk with Sally Owen, Book Review Editor of On the Issues, about Night-Vision; neo-colonialism; and class, race, and gender in America today.
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OTI: What is it about Night-Vision that impresses you?
bell hooks: Night-Vision was so compelling to me because it has a spirit of militancy which reformist feminism tries to kill because militant feminism is seen as a threat to the liberal bourgeois feminism that just wants to be equal with men. It has that raw, unmediated truth-telling which I think we are going to need in order to deal with the fascism that’s upon us. Anyone who reads this book understands that, globally, women and children are the new proletariat and that white women in the so-called developed countries support the enslavement of lower-class and poor women around the world. That’s an indictment that is hard to hear. But if we really want to talk about the liberation of women, then we’ve got to talk about the investment that bourgeois women of all races have in the social structure.
OTI: It’s interesting that you begin by talking about militancy because I believe the authors feel that it is the militancy in Night-Vision that might most concern you.
I was drawn to the fire in Night-Vision which I hope is also present in my own work. What I am most criticized about is the use of the phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. It’s seen as too strident, too exaggerated, too militant. But what that criticism says is that we’re not even allowed to name the enemy. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says we have to call things by their real name, and if we’re not allowed to do that, how can we have a revolution? How do we move forward? I’m not particularly attached to those terms but they seem to me to much more accurately state what we’re up against than a term like “sexism.” And I prefer the term “white supremacy” to “racism.” Part of what is magical to me about Night-Vision is that it situates the discourse within a discussion of colonialism and neo-colonialism, because as much as people resist “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” as an identifier of anything we’re about as a nation, they also don’t want to talk about imperialism and colonialism in relation ship to this nation. And you know, Night-Vision is a real call for white women to be disloyal to patriarchy! It is willing to call white women out on their white supremacy which is often represented as simply a victim response to patriarchy. Night-Vision says that white women have a stake in white supremacy – that it is the hottest, the fastest ticket for white women to get inside the patriarchy and play the game. We can’t act like “daddy made me do it” anymore. It’s all about what white women have to gain. Look how many feminist thinkers have simply abandoned any discussion of fucking male power because it makes men uncomfortable and because we don’t want to act as though men actually do wield power in ways that are detrimental. All the radical, subversive, subjugated knowledge that this book brings to light needs to be heard although I know there are many people who may be really afraid of what it is saying because of what it means for our lives to have to hear it.
OTI: So, when you call people resisting the term “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” you’re talking about middle class people, white people?
bell hooks: Oh, absolutely. When you speak to the disenfranchised and the dispossessed – the people who Night-Vision invokes – they don’t have any trouble hearing you say “white supremacy.” They may tell you that they don’t know what you mean when you say “patriarchy,” but when you put it all together and show how these things are so deeply interdependent, they don’t have any trouble getting it at all. Night-Vision brings together class, race and gender in a way that academic feminist theory gives lip service to but doesn’t manage to convey. To see class, race and gender as not separate is to explode to understanding, but Americans do now want to deal with class and alack Americans no more than anybody else. The fact that we all, as black people, suffer racism is not a levelling factor. We can’t talk about black liberation if we can’t confront gender and sexism. But people continue to say that race, not gender, is the issue and they don’t see how deeply the crisis in Black life in America, so graphically symbolized by O.J. Simpson, is a crisis of race and gender and that we are not going to solve the crisis of race without solving issues around gender.
OTI: I know there are things about this book you don’t like. Would you discuss that?
bell hooks: One of the things about Night-Vision that bugs me is the complete absence of black women’s voices within the text itself. Maybe the authors are white women who have come to these insights by themselves, but I don’t think that any of us do that, and I don’t think it’s useful for us to cut ourselves off from the works of black women. Night-Vision presents itself as the counter-hegemonic vision that has not been stated rather than as a more militant statement of a counter-hegemonic vision that is already in the works of black women and women of colour. By not making that connection, Night-Vision risks another space where black women and white women compete for who has the transformative vision. Night-Vision does, however, make the point that rebellious women have always been central to any kind of major transformation of culture. I was very moved when it talked about Rosa Parks. I always knew that Rosa Parks was chosen by bourgeois, heterosexist black men to be the representative of radicalism. And that obscured the poor working-class black females who had always been part of this movement, who had put their lives on the line and who resisted on those buses. To know things that we don’t consistently document is problematic and there is so much pressure to bury the history of rebellious, revolutionary, and visionary women.
OTI: Night-Vision has received a tremendous reception from young black men in jail. They get it, and they can make the connection. But many women seem reluctant to read this book.
bell hooks: the bulk of letters I get around the militant aspect of my writing are also from young black men, in prison and out. What’s wrong with this picture? Why are black men able to enter this work and be changed in their thinking when so many black women are so guarded about it? Part of it is just the politics of heterosexism. And the tragedy is that women don’t think they have shit to learn from women, although we fall over ourselves to learn from some man whether we’re lesbian, straight, bisexual, or sex radical. Politics in America is seen as hardball terrain, a male thing, especially if we talk about the politics of race. White women have managed to acquire a voice in certain spheres of conservative politics, around health, around economics, but when the media is running around to get its spokesperson on race, that spokesperson will always be male because its seen as a discourse between men. So what is interesting here is that white supremacy has not managed to destroy in young black men heir feeling of having a right to politics. Part of that is that they have images like Malcolm X, a visible, radical, political tradition that can be drawn on, but young black women don’t feel that politics have much to do with them.
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