bell hooks Lecture, Part 1

Filed Under books, class, events, gender, heteropatriarchy, movies, pop culture, quotes, race

They like to call Coretta Scott King ‘the black Jackie Onassis.’ I don’t need a Jackie Onassis! Give me a Gloria Steinem.
~bell hooks

The parents, the fellow and I went to see theorist and academic bell hooks speak at Reed College earlier this month. Of course, I knew who bell hooks was, but I’d never heard her speak, or even seen her in interview. I was excited because I consider bell hooks to be more than just an academic, but a person I can learn from: a wise person. My only hope was that she would be as radical and accessible as she seemed to be in the writings of hers that I’d read.

First, hooks talked about anger. When she was in her “shrill” 20s, she said, she was often perceived as “too angry” to be listened to. Like many people who have begun to seriously reflect about the injustices they have endured and seen, she was in a lot of pain, and wanted people to know about that pain. But as she got older, she decided to cultivate a more inviting style of communication. This came from interactions she’d had with Buddhist teachers who had experienced “genocidal holocaust,” yet insisted on talking about forgiveness.

Although some of her readers perceived her as going soft, she began to question what she called the “binary thinking” that exists among both progressives and conservatives. Both fall prey to a dualism that says there is always a victim, and an oppressor. By setting themselves up in opposing relations, people fail to be transformed - or to create transformation.

hooks railed against the movie, Crash, which has been nominated for a few Academy Awards. She referred to it as shit, among other things. “A six year old could tell you who the hero of the movie is,” she said, pointing out that the only character in the story to transcend racism and sexism is the racist, sexist white police officer. He is the only person who is redeemed. hooks viewed the relationship between the black television producer and his wife as yet another depiction of a black couple sharing contempt for each other. She asked, why is contempt between a black man and a black woman so normalized in America that when you question it, even black people will say, “but it’s real!” She prefers Spike Lee’s, 4 Little Girls, as a movie that people can watch if they want to see a film that honestly looks at racism, post traumatic stress and mental health. She emphasized that black folks need to look at the effect that anger is having on our health. That anger needs to be recycled into something that counteracts despair and illness.

She told us how she wrote a book about a little black girl and her loving parents, and it was very sweet and nice. But when the publishers showed her the cover they’d designed, it featured the little girl in some kind of chokehold by her mother, and the father nowhere in sight. She asked, “where’s the father?” and was told, “Oh, the target audience for this book doesn’t have fathers.” Eventually, the cover was modified to feature the little girl and both her parents.

She talked about black women staying in their place. Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King are talked about as such regal, elegant women, which they were. But “Rosa Parks was chosen.” Rosa Parks was not the first black, working woman to refuse to give up her seat for a white man, but she was an ideal vision of a black woman: married, neat, “respectable” in all senses of the word. She was not a single mother, illiterate, or any other thing considered ugly. Coretta Scott King is touted as “the black Jackie Onassis,” she said. “Jackie Onassis? …. I don’t need a Jackie Onassis. Give me a Gloria Steinem.” She added, and they say, isn’t it nice … isn’t it wonderful that Coretta never married again? hooks said, “No!” Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great spiritual leader, but this didn’t mean he was the greatest of husband. She found it sad that Scott King never found love again. And the audience burst into a kind of shocked applause when she said, And do you think, that if it had been Coretta who had died, and left Martin Luther King, Jr. a widower in his 30s, that he would not have found someone else? She decided to change the subject, noting that she wasn’t intending to be controversial; she wasn’t trying to pick on Coretta Scott King. She was drawing attention to the forms that black women must adhere to if we are to be considered intelligent and honorable.

hooks mentioned Cindy Sheehan’s arrest for wearing a t-shirt at a Presidential event. What kind of culture of passive acceptance are we living in, when this is allowed to happen, she asked. We are living in a culture of fear of our own government. She used the f-word in reference to the current state of affairs.

And yet, later in the evening, hooks remarked that she was booed at a college event when she mentioned the possibility of Bush and Rice changing their views. “Why is that?” she asked. Why would people boo me for saying that? Again, the dualism and the binary mentality. I believe, she said, “that the doorway of possibility and change is open.” While one cannot make sexist, patriarchal, white supremist, capitalistic people into allies, (”don’t wear yourself where there is no space of openness”), she stressed the importance of always keeping the lines of communication clear - of always being ready to be in relationship with people whose opinions are markedly differently from one’s own.

Coming up in Part 2: pride, raising sons, domination culture, white women

Comments

5 Responses to “bell hooks Lecture, Part 1”

Clyde Grubbs on February 22nd, 2006 6:23 am

Coretta King as a Black Jackie O!!!!

What is telling about that analogy is that Jackie O did remarry. What is frightening about that analogy is that Jack the cold warrior who wrote Profiles in Courage but found himself lacking much courage when faced with with segregationist resistance can be linked in the white mind with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Is it all about image? What about substance? content of character?
Anonymous on February 22nd, 2006 11:50 am

I read a really good column on Counterpunch not long after Parks died– Contrasting the way that our so-called leaders were practically trampling each other in an effort to heap accolades on her;Even as they treated Sheehan like she had the plague. The author made the point that the Establishment in this country really likes its firebrands best when they are dead. Before that, it’s just too hard to control them.

Harsh, perhaps, but I thought the same thing when I read about Hilary Clinton snubbing Harry Belafonte not long after he told off Dubbya. Of course, Belafonte had gone on record as feeling betrayed by Mr. Hilary when he was still President. Tsk. Can’t have that. –alsis39.5

P.S.– Sofia, I’ll be sending you an email in a bit, about some local stuff that might interest you.
LaReinaCobre on February 22nd, 2006 3:04 pm

Yes, it’s the image. bell hooks talked about how rosa parks was “chosen” by the black, male leadership to serve as representation - she was the desired “face” of anti-segregation, because she conveyed an imagine of respectability.

It very much reminds me of abolitionist times when, in order to sell apathetic whites on the evils of slavery, abolitionists and former slaves alike appealed to the apathetic whites with the argument of “we’re decent, well spoken Christians; what a shame to enslave us/them.”

Linda Bolton discusses something similar to thisin her book, Facing the Other: Ethical Disruption and the American Mind describing it as a kind of “theater” in which pioneers of color choose to play roles in order to be heard. Not exactly the same as what hooks was talking about with Parks and Scott King, but along the same lines.
Qusan on February 26th, 2006 12:57 am

Coretta King as a Black Jackie O!!!!

What is telling about that analogy is that Jackie O did remarry. What is frightening about that analogy is that Jack the cold warrior who wrote Profiles in Courage but found himself lacking much courage when faced with with segregationist resistance can be linked in the white mind with Martin Luther King, Jr.

The reason Jackie O. remarried (and moved her children far, far away) was because she wanted to seperate herself from the Kennedy image and constant trama. Coretta, on the other hand, felt obligated to continue her husband’s legacy.

I heard Alice Walker on Pacifica Radio recently and she spoke of an encounter she had with Rosa Parks and realized that her hair, when un-pinned, cascaded all the way down her back. She claimed that her husband liked her long hair and that after he died, she kept it in a bun in public as a reminder of what they shared …
Jeff Wilson on March 8th, 2006 1:55 pm

I think a lot of hooks’ changing tone has to do with her Buddhist practice, as well as the natural maturation that happens as we grow older. I read her stuff when I was in college and liked it back then. Later, she and I were both participants in a small-group Buddhist seminar, talking about race and other divisive (or at least potentially divisive) elements within American Buddhism. If you think she’s impressive in print and even more so as a lecturer, wait until you interact with her on a more personal level. Very impressive lady.

One thing I took away from our seminar was that she began to modulate some of her tone because of her Buddhist insight into non-duality, and that she discovered that this actually made her a better communicator. So the evolution seems to have been a) changing religious views lead to altered way of perceiving things, b) new outlook leads to change in how she communicates with others, c) new communication skills turn out to be more effective. It wasn’t like a conscious strategy or anything to change how she communicated, though as she found that she was doing better she then did begin to pay attention to what worked and analyze how and why, and she learned from interacting with other Buddhists (especially Tibetans).

Now she has a more open communication style, that seeks to keep as many parties as possible in dialogue for as long as possible, rather than choosing a side and making the triumph of that particular view the central aim of her conversations. And this seems to bring about more overall transformation than her more overtly confrontational earlier approach. It’s not like she’s really changed her ideas on race, gender, and power so much, but rather she’s a little more stealthy and a little more skillful and it seems to go a long way toward actually meeting her goals in the first place.

All of this comes straight out of Buddhism. I don’t think she talks about this so explicitly in her books, but in our seminar it was really clear. Specifically, she’s really internalized the Buddhist ideas of 1) non-dualism, 2) skillful tactics in communications, and 3) mutual transformation. These are all related to Mahayana Buddhism specifically.

I thought she made a really good Buddhist role model, especially for a layperson. I don’t always agree with her but I do just about always admire her. I hope I can achieve her ability some day. I know a lot of it has to do with being willing to remain open in dialogue, with having your own views but holding them loosely so you can still hear other viewpoints and maybe learn from them and change your own. I see so little of this on either the Right or the Left.