Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 514

 

I came to bell hooks late. I was already in my 20s, already a parent, and firmly fed up with the ways that white middle class feminism Othered me. But I didn’t have the right words to express how I felt yet, and so for me reading bell hooks was less revelation and more confirmation. It was maddening to come to feminism as a young Black single mother and find people like me described as a problem to solve with no recognition of our humanity. So, the first time I read Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism I felt seen, more than that I felt validated. It was the feminism that hadn’t included me or women like me that was the problem, not my inability to connect with the words of white feminists. Even though they wrote books that were hailed at the time as necessary and relevant reads, hooks made it clear that they were not above critique. As she said in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, “we knew that there could be no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy.”

In this way bell hooks taught us another unforgettable lesson, that those who do some of the hardest work to make change possible will have missteps. The mythos that arises after an icon passes away hinges on their complexities being forgotten in favor of a handful of favorite and easy to absorb quotes. In the way of all icons, when that happens there is a danger of context being forgotten as well. But bell was more than her best quotes, more than her awards and successes, and the best way to honor her work is to think critically about what she said in her time as well as understanding that her experiences may not always be relevant. To remember the full, complicated person she was and learn from her is to wrestle with her growth, her flaws and understand that no feminism, no feminist could ever be perfect. As hooks herself said, “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

bh: At the conference, I confessed that I have really violent impulses that sometimes listening to some panels I had wanted to come out and shoot people. The audience laughed, but I wasn’t being funny, and I wasn’t saying it to be cute or exhibitionist. I was acknowledging that the violent impulses don’t just exist out there in Black youth or in the underclass, but that they reside in people like myself as well—people who have our PhDs and our good jobs. But that doesn’t mean that my life is not tormented by rageful or irrational, violent impulses. It does mean that instead of shooting people, I go home and write a critique. My irrational impulse to want to kill people who bore me or whose ideas are not very complex, clearly has to do with an exaggerated response to situations where I feel powerless. I think Black people, across class, have many moments in our lives when we feel utterly powerless to change the direction of situations. And we don’t deal with this collectively, because we’re so in denial about it. 

LC: You’ve talked about how figures like Tupac Shakur and Ice Cube disrupt essential notions of Black masculinity. Your understanding of gangsta rap is very different from the dominant feminist line. 

bh: People presume that because I’m a feminist thinker they know I’m gonna trash rap, especially gangsta rap. I can challenge the sexism and misogyny of it, but I can embrace the rage that is implicit in it and the sense of powerlessness that undergirds it.

LJ: In Feminism Is for Everybody, you write, “If women and men want to know love we have to yearn for feminism.” Can you talk about this connection between love and feminism? 

bh: I keep telling people that I’m going to be the high priestess of love for the next few years, and so many people keep saying, “Oh, well, bell hooks is turning soft ‘cause she’s focusing on love.” And I think, Oh, no, not the love I’m talking about—because I’m really talking about a love that’s grounded in a vision of mutuality and communion and sharing; to me that is so deeply related to feminism because I feel like as long as we have gender inequality and inequity and sexism and patriarchy, we can’t have mutuality. What we have is a constant paradigm of domination, a constant sense that in the world there’s always a top and bottom in our relationships, there’s always a subordinated person and a person who is dominant. 

One thing that I have felt strongly over the years is that while I have seen relationships between heterosexual men and women change a lot, what I often see is that if the man assumes a more nurturing, more emotional and giving position, the woman is often cold and aloof and ungiving. We certainly see this in a lot of movies—even in a movie like High Fidelity, which I really enjoyed, we still see that you have a certain kind of warmth posited with the man and a coldness in the energy of the so-called New Woman, the young, professional career woman. It seems to me that this is still within the same old paradigm of every relationship [having] a submissive party and a dominant party. It’s just that people are more comfortable now with men taking on the submissive roles, but that’s not what feminist visions of true love are about, because those visions are about mutuality. They’re about a world where we can both be self-actualized in a relationship, whether it’s two men together or two women together or two transgendered people or whatever our arrangements. Mutuality is at the heart of this vision of a more politicized understanding of love as a force that transforms domination.

LJ: To me there’s something about that model of looking at things that very much naturalizes gender roles—it says that this is the way men are and this is the way women are. 

bh: When I go out into the high schools or just into an everyday world talking about feminism, the people from 6 to 25, that’s exactly what they bring up. That’s exactly their wall of resistance. I don’t even have difficulty with us saying that there’s some kind of hardcore biological determinism, because what we really know is that everything can be changed through socialization. So even if you want to say we start off in some kind of binary that is oppositional, it can be altered at birth. So let’s talk about why people have such resistance to altering that—[people] who believe in some kind of fixed biological destiny—since we’re quite willing to alter all other kinds of destinies. Sometimes when I think of the incredible revolution people have made with technology, moving from being fearful of technology to people of all classes in our nation believing everybody should know how to use a computer…we know that people can make incredible leaps away from anything that we call natural or biologically determined. And I find it interesting that whenever we’re talking about gender equality, people want to fix biology in some kind of absolute unchanging space rather than say, Nothing has been altered more in the scientific revolutions of modernity than this thing we might call biology.

SH: Do you think it’s true that writers carry around a great sadness? And do we have that sadness because we’re writers, or are we writers because we have that sadness? 

bh: It’s so interesting that you ask that, Silas, ’cause my morning meditation has to do with grief because I often feel such a tremendous sense of grief about what’s happening in our world, what’s happening to people around me, the disconnects, and my dysfunctional family and others. But I don’t know that I think it’s so much writers but people who are choosing to be aware. It’s hard to wake up, in the Buddhist sense. I mean, to open your eyes and see what’s happening in our world without feeling that grief. And the point that Thich Nhat Hanh always says—the Vietnamese Buddhist monk—is I gotta take that grief and use it as compost, you know, for my garden. That’s the challenge for me. I feel like that grief has been with me since I was a child facing the brutal racism of Kentucky, the extreme patriarchal sexism of my parents and our religion, and, you know, just trying to find that place of through the pain and the sadness to a place where one can say as Jackie Wilson in his song, “Your Love Has Lifted Me Higher.” That’s the thing, when I go out to my land and I look out at the hills and I think about that scripture that says, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” So there again we have that evocation of nature and the environment, and that which helps us, restores us, which gives us a way to keep a hold on life. For me, it’s keeping that grief balanced, but I don’t know an aware person who doesn’t have that grief.