Bell Hooks We Wear The Mask Analysis

Morris 1 Bell Hooks is a renowned African-American feminist and author. In her book, Salvation, she tries to expose and critically examine problems for blacks...dealing with the intra-social fibers within their community. Amongst all of her clearly thought out books, four of her most critical thoughts are presented in Salvation. Her thoughts are entwined within four chapters: “The Heart of the Matter”, “We Wear the Mask”, “The Issue of Self-Love”, and “Valuing Ourselves Rightly”. All four of these chapters encompass her message that black love is malnourished in some way, shape or form. Overall, she seems to present good concepts, but she makes very basic mistakes that destroy her path to her conclusion and its validity. In her chapter,
Yet again, however, she misses the other half. The other half here are the many hundreds of thousands of African American’s that need the high emphasis on materialism, being that the materialistic mentality was an essential part of adaptation for survival in capitalist America. Bell Hooks suggests assumingly that all blacks needed to not long for materialism in place of love. Moreover, some African Americans already have a sound foundation in the love that she is preaching. What she misses by looking at the African American situation monolithically is that not all African Americans were deficient in love nor replacing it with materialism. She creates the same mistake that some white people have been doing to black people and that is seeing the black race and their problematic situation as monolithic. Bell Hooks thinks that this moving away from materialism and towards more emotional development will fix all of the problems. However, not all African Americans are in the same situation or the same state of mind. She ignores the fact that African Americans have the ability to create an equilibrium between materialism and emotional foundation built on love. Furthermore, she blatantly overlooks the economic environment. This follows basic Darwinism, when you are in an environment that is different to what an organism is
It is the ability to form a picture in your mind of something that you have not seen or experienced; the ability to think of new things”. With this being said, Bell Hooks again makes a small mistake that disrupts her path to her conclusion. Bell Hooks assumes that the media and imagination are directly interconnected in the sense that black people can't imagine anything other than what the media conveys (what black people see); or that the imagination acts in favor of the media directly. Where she is wrong is that the imagination, by definition, generates images and concepts that one has not seen so since black people habitually see black people as evil and corrupt then they should by definition be able to imagine black people as tranquil, successful, loving, and