Killing Rage: Ending Racism

hooks writes that after she studied the works of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Paulo Freire, and others, she started to question why American media doesn’t discuss colonialism, since this term is appropriate for enslaved Black people and Black people under apartheid, and it also accurately describes how white supremacy functions. Racial integration resulted in “neo-colonial white supremacy” (109), a term that describes how Eurocentric education taught Black people to feel inferior. It also taught them that in order to gain power, they should obtain the material goods seen in ads, since excessive consumption is what colonizers want the colonized to focus on, rather than militant resistance.

hooks discusses how independent Black media, such as film, thrived when it was separate from white media. After integration, the media sold the idea that racism was a thing of the past. The inclusion of Black actors in roles that they rarely fill in real life, such as judges, is how television sells this idea. As an example of this, hooks examines how a Black woman is blamed for racism in an episode of the TV show, Law and Order. She also looks at movies, such as Lethal Weapon and The Bodyguard, that feature Black and white people working together.