bell

I only met bell hooks once at a large feminist gathering—but as it happens when a powerful woman is in the room, her presence registered. At that time the feminist movement was being attacked by the mainstream for being exclusively white and middle class; the same voices tried to limit the impact of books written by white women, and even Gloria Steinem, lecturing all over the country, needed a co-lecturer who was black, often Florence Howe, to—among many other things—fend off these accusations.

I doubt that bell ever bothered to notice these attempts to disable the movement, although with the sharp edge of her wit, she excoriated the way white feminists had ignored and marginalized black and working class women. In our anxiety to protect the power of our movement, we had been unconscious of our class and race-driven limitations; bell made it possible for black women to begin to call themselves feminists.

The power of any social movement is limited by its exclusions, and it butters no parsnips to explain that, willy-nilly, women at the top of the food chain may be listened to when those excluded are not—and that the benefits are for all.

Bell thought later in her life that some of these problems had been solved while never ignoring the fact that racism, founded and supported by the patriarchy, always functions. One of her thirty books, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004) showed how this macho worldview resulted inevitably from centuries of oppression, reminding me of the disturbing issues about black masculinity raised, perhaps inadvertently, by Ken Burns’ documentary on Muhammad Ali. If blood sports like professional boxing are indeed “real cool” and a proof of masculinity, we are close to viewing all forms of violence in the same light.

Bell’s insights illuminate her diverse works; she did not limit herself to any category, writing novels, essays, criticism, poetry and children’s books, the last perhaps the most influential. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), she argued that the end product of education in the U.S. is the creation of compliant workers in the machines of capitalism; the current widespread disgust with the kinds of labor most people were enslaved by before the pandemic may lead to big changes, even in our crippled system of education.

Born, like me, in Kentucky, although in the small town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, rather than larger and more cosmopolitan Louisville, hooks experienced the racially segregated public schools of her area, writing about navigating the issues involved in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996). When Kentucky public education was integrated after Brown Vs. Board of Education—provoking riots in Louisville—she began to experience the complex hierarchies of the newly integrated systems. Escaping to Stanford University and graduating in 1974 with a degree in English, she had already begun writing as an undergraduate Ain’t I A Woman, the title taken from a speech by the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth. She went on to earn a master’s degree and then a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, writing her dissertation on Toni Morrison.

After teaching at Yale, Oberlin and the City College of New York, she found a home at Berea College in Eastern Kentucky—a fine combination of her activism and the socially-forward mission of this college to offer a free college education to the children of Appalachia. The college established the bell hooks center to advance her teaching and scholarship.

Finally calling herself a “Buddhist Christian,” hooks said in a New York Times Interview in 2015, “I believe wholeheartedly that the only way out of domination is love.”

As a final note, I’m quoting from a poem by Louise Bogan, “Evening Star”, that symbolizes bell and her presence in this world:

Light from the planet Venus, soon to set,
Be with us.

Light, pure and round, without heat or shadow,
Held in the cirrus sky, at evening,
Accompany what we do.

Be with us
Know our partial strength.
Serve us in your own way.
Brief planet, shining without burning.

In Women, Writing Kentucky feminism