While reading bell hook's "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance" I couldn't help but notice the connection between her experience and Dick Hebdige's Strategies that deal with The Other from "(ii) Subculture: The Unnatural Break". Hebdige describes two of these 'strategies', the first being to trivialize, domesticate, or naturalize The Other-- reducing it to sameness, and the other being to transform it into exotica. Hebdige describes the transformation to exotica as a separation from meaning, the making of a "pure object, a spectacle, a clown" (cited from Bathes, p. 133). But, I would argue that, as hooks suggests, in Western consumer culture exoticism has been made into more than a meaningless object, but a fetishized sexual fantasy. I can't even count the number of times I've heard (or seen online) an individual talking about how they desire an "exotic" partner. I'm not sure if this would be the same across all search engines, but when I looked up "exotic women" the entire first page of results was extremely sexualized. I was absolutely disgusted (but unfortunately not all that surprised) when I read bell's experience as a professor at Yale overhearing white male students talking about "their plans to fuck as many girls from racial/ethnic groups as they could 'catch' before graduating" (p. 309). And the cherry on top was that the people who say these vile things often view themselves not as racists, but as open-minded. Forget this just being a disgusting way to think about women, their logic is so flawed. Wanting to have sex with women of different ethnicities (at least in my opinion) furthers the idea that there are biological differences among people of different races which we know is both not true, and a common white supremacist ideal that was used to justify slavery (it was believed that black people were more biologically suited to be slaves...).
In terms of trivialization or the reduction to sameness, Langston Hughes' comments on appropriation on page 313 come to mind:
"You've taken my blues and gone- You sing 'em on Broadway- And you sing 'em at the Hollywood Bowl- And you mixed 'em up with symphonies- And you fixed 'em- So they don't sound like me. Yet, you done taken my blues and gone".
Black artistry is colonized and commodified by white mainstream culture, this 'naturalization' and domestication of Black art by white individuals maintains white supremacy and serves as a constant threat to black liberation.
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