Response to "Postmodern Blackness" by Bell Hooks

I enjoyed reading this essay because it develops a point of view about empathy that we have been struggling to understand in this unit on cultural studies. How am I as a middle class white student suppose to understand and empathize with cultures vastly different from my own? Hooks offers an answer in the form of postmodernism. She states, "The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared circumstance" (Paragraph 8). I found this very interesting and insightful. Sure there is no way we can legitimately place ourselves within the culture, but we can understand through our own human nature the feelings of those in separate cultures through a postmodernist mindset, which allows for all kinds of radical influences to emerge.