In the article, bell hooks takes a historical look at black females as media spectators. Bell hooks is a black feminist who calls attention to the negative aspects of white supremacy and capitalist patriarchy. In addition to spectatorship, this article critiques Hollywood's portrayal of black women and criticizes the lack of more substantial role opportunities. It acknowledges the importance of mass media as a powerful place for critical intervention.

Bell hooks begins her piece with a definition of the "gaze." "When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children would give grownups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as gestures of resistance, challenges to authority." For hooks (and any black person) the gaze was a political entity in life. Not only was the gaze controlled by white authorities but also by black parents. As a child, hooks explained that the attempts made to repress black peoples right to gaze only produces a staggering desire to look, "an oppositional gaze." Michel Foucault states that looking was a sign of rebellion and that th

Many black women did not go to see Hollywood films because they only produced negative images. The others that did visit the theaters could only find enjoyment when they did not critique the movie and chose to ignore the racism and the sexism. In order to enjoy those movies, they identified with the white women, but as one black woman said "it made coming home (from the theater) hard." Many women refused to submit to those images and turned away from movies to save themselves from the pain. Other women, like bell hooks, created their oppositional gaze and "cultivated a way to look past race and gender for aspects of content, form, language." Hooks analyzed foreign, independent, and Hollywood films.

In response to shows created by whites, blacks developed independent black cinema. Black films were also seen with a critical eye; they were critiqued "to see if images were seen as compliant with dominant cinematic practices." Matters of gender were not a part the racial relations in the media. Black men could watch white women without punishment. "In their role as spectators, black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation. This gendered relation to looking made the experience of the black male spectator radically different from that of the black female spectator."

Hooks looked at three films that changed the way blacks and whites looked at Hollywood movies. In the movie Illusions stereotypes are 'problematised,' in which whites are unable to see that race creates what they are viewing. Suddenly, white males get a chance to gaze. In the film, black women gaze at themselves and are in control of the movie. White people did not relate to this movie and were "adrift without a white presence in the film." In the film Passion of Remembrance, black filmmakers show the complexity of black identity. This film challenged the norms of movie making and makes the audience look differently at black women. Hooks states that this film created a new identity. Hook

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1369
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)