Justin, hooks

In "Eating the Other," hooks says that, "Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger. Hooks' discussion on the relationships between white and black people is interesting, because now I think it is very arguable that black people will sometimes react to this otherness with cooperation; they will act in a way that white people expect them to act when they are around white people as a means of distinguishing themselves. I got to know one of my best friends, who is black, when we were in middle school. At that point, he had many white friends and I had many black friends. Since then, for whatever reason, I don't have near as many black friends and he doesn't have near as many white friends. He talks a different way to his black friends and family than he talks to me, which is understandable. I'm sure I talk to my friends differently than I talk to him without necessarily noticing it. But the most interesting thing that I notice when he hangs out with my friends and me is that he will switch to his "black side" when it seems to be what people don't know him might expect. Often times he is intoxicated when he does it, which to me shows a truthfulness to what he's doing: it seems that he feels like he benefits from being the Other. The Other has become so commodified that he can switch it on as if trying to show his authenticity. I'm not talking here about someone that is acting fake, or foolishly. He's sharp and absolutely objective about the nature of race, and completely aware of it. It's just very interesting that what was a black characteristic of Otherness in white people's eyes can be acknowledged and utilized for the same type of reasons.