Another provocative element of hooks' text is the way that she renders whiteness problematic and alien, while the dominant culture has always done this with blackness. The quest to know what is not 'us' and to know the 'other' she implies, is endemic to all societies (hooks 32). Yet the academy has shown scant interest in how blacks perceive whiteness, only how whites perceive blackness. This renders white people and whiteness invisible as an ideological construct and renders black people invisible as human beings.

Instead, black people are merely reduced to serving bodies, as hardly human, as something for whites to use as reflections to see what they are 'not,' rather than as legitimate subjects with a perspective of their own. This recalls how the first native people were classified, almost as animal subjects, in the first encounters of Europeans with the New World, and discovered as objects or primitive...
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