Daisy, hooks

The article “Eating the Other,” by bell hooks brought together many ideas we have talked about throughout CMC, like otherness, sameness, commodification, and culture. Putting these words together, you are able to get a very surface summary of hooks; to combat sameness within our culture, “otherness” has been commodified as something obtainable and through this culture is lost. Using Jameson’s idea, our culture has replaced the depth of “others” with surface. As hooks goes on to say, individuals within our culture want to experience individuals of other cultures, particularly African Americans, because of the element, “otherness.” He gave an example of white males “shopping” for women of color and feeling “the need to be intimate with dark Others” (369). Within our society being different is popular, hooks said “difference can seduce precisely because the mainstream imposition of sameness if a provocation that terrorizes” (367). Throughout the article, hooks gave examples of media where the “other” is portrayed as exciting. Consuming the other allows white men to feel more “experienced” and powerful. However, as another culture is portrayed in the media, it loses aspects of it history, and is portrayed closer to a white culture. For example, hooks described how Pepsi capitalized on the fact that African Americans buy more Pepsi, by putting African Americans in the commercials. Viewing African Americans in Pepsi commercials portrays blacks as average Americans who enjoy soda. Adorno’s ideas demonstrated how our culture is infecting everything with sameness, and the main culprit of this is the media. Advertising has allowed companies to portray individuals other different culture backgrounds as the same. Bourdieu would say that the media is responsible for making everything ordinary. Portraying individuals, as being created equal is good, however in doing this, aspects of history are forgotten and individuals are portrayed closer and closer to “whiteness.” It is extremely hard to understand a culture today by the way the media portrays it as consumable to a white culture, which leads the important aspects of the culture to be missed and overlooked.