Eating the Other

In the AI Story

hooks developed this framework during the late 1980s and early 1990s as consumer culture increasingly marketed 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism' as lifestyle choices. She observed white consumers purchasing Kente cloth, adopting Black hairstyles, and consuming hip-hop culture while the material conditions of Black communities continued to deteriorate. The consumption created the appearance of racial progress—look how celebrated Black culture has become!—while the celebration functioned as a mechanism for avoiding structural change. The consumer could feel cosmopolitan, enlightened, and anti-racist through acts of consumption that left every structure of domination intact. hooks connected this to a longer history of primitivism in Western culture, the recurring pattern by which the dominant culture has sought renewal through contact with the supposedly more 'authentic,' more 'natural,' more 'sensual' cultures it simultaneously dominates.

The critique extended to feminist and progressive movements that claimed to center marginalized voices while structurally reproducing their marginalization. hooks documented how white feminist organizations would invite Black women to speak at conferences, would cite Black feminist theory in their scholarship, would celebrate diversity in their mission statements, all while maintaining leadership structures, funding priorities, and definitional power that remained concentrated in white hands. The Black woman's perspective was consumed—included in the synthesis, acknowledged in the literature—but the Black woman herself was not granted power over how her perspective would be used, which parts would be emphasized, which would be quietly discarded as inconvenient to the consumer's project.

The 2026 Grammarly incident—the company's unauthorized deployment of an AI feature using hooks's name and identity—demonstrated 'eating the other' at algorithmic scale. hooks's intellectual labor, her critique of the very commodity culture that produced the feature, was consumed and repackaged as a subscription service. The particularity of her thinking—rooted in her experience as a Black woman, grounded in her commitment to liberation—was stripped away. What remained was a product called 'bell hooks feedback' that carried no trace of what made hooks's thinking distinctive: her insistence on difficulty, her refusal of comfort, her demand that the reader be transformed rather than merely informed. The incident was not an aberration but the structural logic of AI training and deployment made visible.

Contemporary research on AI and colonialism has extended hooks's framework directly to large language models. Scholars have documented what they call a colonial gaze embedded in image-captioning algorithms—patterns of essentialism, cultural erasure, dehumanization, and infantilization absorbed from training data that itself carries the residue of colonial ways of seeing. Nyah Mattison's 2024 application of hooks to generative AI argued that 'hooks' argument that Blackness has been neutralized for the conspicuous consumption of a White audience remains all too apt in our technological age where inequity is not just an unintended consequence of these tools, but a cornerstone in their foundation.' The consumption is not a feature to be debugged. It is the architecture.

Origin

The essay emerged from hooks's observation that the 1980s–1990s turn toward 'celebrating diversity' in American culture coincided with material attacks on Black communities—rising incarceration, collapsing public services, intensifying economic inequality. She recognized a pattern: whenever structural resistance to racism becomes too threatening, the culture offers a substitute satisfaction. The substitute in this case was the commodification of Blackness as a consumable aesthetic, available to white consumers without requiring any change in the structures that produce racial inequality. hooks traced the pattern across popular culture, documenting how Black bodies, Black music, and Black suffering were all converted into products that white audiences could purchase and consume without confronting their complicity in the structures that produced what they were consuming.

Key Ideas

Commodified Otherness. The marginalized culture's knowledge, aesthetics, and 'authenticity' are extracted, packaged, and sold to the dominant culture as products that provide novelty, transgression, and the appearance of cosmopolitanism without requiring structural change.

Consumption displaces encounter. When the Other is eaten rather than engaged, the dominant culture avoids the difficult work of genuine relationship—the listening, the discomfort, the transformation that real encounter with difference demands.

Desire as mechanism. The consumption is driven not by neutral market forces but by the dominant culture's desire for the transgressive thrill of Otherness, a desire that seeks pleasure without consequence and authenticity without cost.

Structural reproduction through inclusion. The invitation to participate in commodity culture—to be featured, celebrated, included—functions as a mechanism for neutralizing resistance; the marginalized artist or thinker gains visibility while the structures that produce marginalization remain intact and invisible.

AI training as ultimate consumption. Large language models consume the textual and cultural output of marginalized communities without consent, compensation, or power-sharing, producing synthetic outputs that carry the flavor of diverse perspectives while erasing the standpoint from which those perspectives emerged.