Q. 8. Given the market price of a good, how does a consumer decide as to how many units of that good to buy?

Explain.

Theorizing black experience in the United States is a difficult task. Socialized within white supremacist educational systems and by a racist mass media, many black people are convinced that our lives are not complex, and are therefore unworthy of sophisticated critical analysis and reflection. Even those of us righteously committed to black libera- tion struggle, who feel we have decolonized our minds, often find it hard to "speak our experience. The more painful the issues we confront the greater our inarticulateness. James Baldwin understood this. In The Fire Next Time, he reminded readers that "there has been almost no language" to describe the horrors" of black life. Without a way to name our pain, we are also without the words to articulate our pleasure. Indeed, a fundamental task of black critical thinkers has been the struggle to break with the hegemonic modes of seeing, thinking, and being that block our capacity to see ourselves oppositionally, to imagine, describe, and invent ourselves in ways that are liberatory. Without this, how can we challenge and invite non-black allies and friends to dare to look at us differently, to dare to break their colonizing gaze? Speaking about his recent film The Camp at Thiaroye, African filmmaker Ousmane Sembene explains: "You must understand that for people like us, there are no such things as models. We are called upon to constantly create our models. For African people, Africans in the diaspora, it's pretty much the same. Colonialism means that we must always rethink everything." Challenged to rethink, insurgent black intellectuals and/or artists are looking at new ways to write and talks about race and representation, working to transform the image. There is a direct and abiding connection between the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy in this society and the institu- tionalization via mass media of specific images, representations of race, of blackness that support and maintain the oppression, exploitation, and overall domination of all black people. Long before white suprem- acists ever reached the shores of what we now call the United States, they constructed images of blackness and black people to uphold and affirm their notions of racial superiority, their political imperialism, their will to dominate and enslave. From slavery on, white supremacists have recognized that control over images is central to the maintenance of any system of racial domination. In his essay Cultural Identity and Diaspora, " Stuart Hall emphasizes that we can properly understand the not decolonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and is Often it leaves us ravaged by repressed rage, feeling weary, dis 10 and sometimes just plain old brokenhearted. These are the gaps 111 vui psyche that are the spaces where mindless complicity, self-destructive rage, hatred, and paralyzing despair enter. To face these wounds, to heal them, progressive black people and our allies in struggle must be willing to grant the effort to critically intervene and transfom the world of image making authority of place in our political movements of liberation and self-determination (be they anti-imperialist, feminist, gay rights, black liberation, or all of the above and more). If this were the case, we would be ever mindful of the need to make radical intervention. We would consider crucial both the kind of images we produce and the way we critically write and talk about images. And most important, we would rise to the challenge to speak that which has not been spoken. For some time now the critical challenge for black folks has been to expand the discussion of race and representation beyond debates about good and bad imagery. Often what is thought to be good is merely a reaction against representations created by white people that were blatantly stereotypical. Currently, however, we are bombarded by black folks creating and marketing similar stereotypical images. It is not an issue of "us" and "them." The issue is really one of standpoint. From what political perspective do we dream, look, create, and take action? For those of us who dare to desire differently, who seek to look away from the conventional ways of seeing blackness and ourselves, the issue of race and representation is not just a question of critiquing the status quo. It is also about transforming the image, creating alterna- tives, asking ourselves questions about what types of images subvert, pose critical altematives, and transform our worldviews and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad. Making a space for the transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision, is essential to any effort to create a context for transformation. And even then little progress is made if we transform images without shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking. The critical essays gathered in Black Looks: Race and Represen- tation are gestures of defiance. They represent my political struggle to push against the boundaries of the image, to find words that express what I see, especially when I am looking in ways that move against the grain, when I am seeing things that most folks want to believe simply are not there. These essays are about identity. Since decolonization as . Thesis 2: Parallel operation. Both systems oper- ate in parallel. However, there is an asymmetry such that the impulsive system is always en- gaged in processing (by itself or parallel to oper- ations of the reflective system) whereas the re- flective system may be disengaged. This model assumes that information entering the perceptual gates will always be processed in the impul- sive system. However, the impact of that information depends to a great extent on the preactivation of those structures in the impulsive system in which the infor- mation is represented. Depending on its intensity and the attention it receives, a stimulus may also enter the reflective system. In that case, impulsive and reflective processing occurs in parallel, and are assumed to inter- act at various stages of processing. Thesis 3: Capacity. The reflective system re- quires a high amount of cognitive capacity. Therefore, distraction as well as extremely high or low levels of arousal will interfere with its op- eration. In contrast, the impulsive system re- quires little cognitive capacity and may control behavior under suboptimal conditions. As a con- sequence, processes of the reflective system are disturbed more easily than those of the impulsive system. One of the greatest advantages of the impulsive sys- tem is that it is fast, requires no or little cognitive effort, and has a low threshold for processing incoming infor- mation, whereas the opposite holds for reflective oper- ations. The reflective-impulsive model shares this as- sumption with almost every dual-process model, and relevant evidence is reviewed elsewhere (see, e.g., Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Smith & DeCoster, 2000)