Bell Hooks’ “Artistic Integrity : Race and Accountability” deals with racial representation in cinema in a white supremacist aesthetic framework. It begins with the observation of initial inequality between White and Black directors in their subject matters: while White directors seem to be not responsible for their focus on the white world, Black directors constantly need to justify their choices of exclusively black, or whites, subjects.

Like any artists from marginalized groups, Black directors have to find a balance between demonstrations of political and social consciousness and expression of artistry, what Stan Brakhage calls the “aesthetic ecology.” This is particularly difficult, especially for artists who, dealing with a structure of domination, feel pressed to “assume responsibility for producing resisting image.” This appeal is moreover enhanced by the need to fill out the vacuum in the depiction of black subjects.

The threatening phenomenon is the instauration of a racial essentialism which compels artists to obsessionally focus on their environment. As a consequence, there are real difficulties to break with the dominant cinematographic discourse which maintains, even subtly, racist aesthetic and status quo.

In this article, Bell Hooks addresses the tremendous problems faced by directors when trying to escape from a racially defined dominant aesthetics. It provides insight on the difficulties of challenging and reformulating the representation of Black people at the movies. In this sense, it is directly linked to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which uses stereotypes as a mean to reject the racial paradigms of institutionalized cinema. Van Peebles’ film appears as one of the first attempts to challenge the dominant discourse and propose a rich and transformative alternative aesthetic to the self-reinforcing dominant discourse.