"if anyone around here should be scared, it's us"

In chapter 11, "Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination" of "Race and Representation," bell hooks explains that black people perceive white people in a particular way, sometimes based on stereotypes- pointing out that white people often don't understand that they aren't judged by black people. For hooks in particular, she associated white people with thoughts of terrorizing and threatening individuals. She described a reoccuring experience during her childhood of walking from her black neighborhood into a white neighborhood to reach her grandmother's black neighborhood. Walking through the white neighborhood was always a terrifying experience for hooks. She felt that every white person was looking at her with hate and she felt like she did not belong. bell hooks explained that even now, she experiences these same feelings towards whites in experiences such as when she is interrogated in an airport where her dark skin makes her appear "suspicious" to the white security guards. "I learned as a child that to be 'safe,' it was important to recognize the power of whiteness, even to fear it, and to avoid encounter," hooks said (175). hooks also explained that white guests and speakers at a conference where she spoke could not understand why a black woman would be intimidated by the white people in the room.
bell hooks' accounts showed me a perspective that I have rarely seen. It reminded me of the part at the beginning of the movie "Crash" when two black men notice a white couple walking down the sidewalk. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MprFd8p9X94 Starting at 7:35 of the video clip, Sanda Bullock's character nervously holds tighter to her husband's arm as they pass the two men. One of the black men points out that, in fact, they should be the one's who feel threatened, because they are two black men surrounded by all white people. "If anyone around here should be scared, it's us," he says. Now that I have had a chance to think about it and to see some different perspectives, it must be more common than I realized for whites to find blacks threatening, and for blacks to find whites threatening. It's difficult for either to understand the other's perspective. In hooks' story of the conference she attended, she met a couple including a black woman and a white man. This man gained a new perspective from living with this woman, and hooks said that he could understand "how racism works."