Pre-class Hooks

Hooks talks about "the other." He discusses how "the other" is often depicted by race, ethnicity, or skin-color. The part of this reading that most stood out at me was the part which talked about Heart Condition. Heart Condition was a movie about a white, racist male who got a heart transplant from a black man. "This film offers a version of racial pluralism that challenges racism by suggesting that the white male's life will be richer, more pleasurable, if he accepts diversity"(374). I personally thought that this film seemed like a good lesson. I thought it seemed to discriminate against racism, but "not surprisingly, most black folks talked about this film as 'racist'"(374). This immediately reminded me of my CMC 200 class because we read an article on Black Women on Television. Many people who are of a minority race are often classified as "the other" and they are aware of it. We read about different TV shows in which black women were offended as to what their stereotypes were portrayed as. For many white people, including myself, we do not realize when things could be considered racist. For example, Heart Condition does not sound racist to me, but it clearly came off that way to a number of black folks. I feel terrible that minorities are classified as "the other" and I feel bad that I often do not notice when people are being classified as "the other," but the ideology of "the other" will never go away. People classified as "the other" can try to escape the ideology of it, but as we have learned before, there is no way of escaping ideology. "The other" is here to stay.