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    bell hooks Lecture, Part 2

    Filed Under books, class, events, gender, heteropatriarchy, people, race 

    Throughout her lecture, bell hooks repeatedly referred to our society as a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (though perhaps not in that order). Whenever she would use this phrase – as easily and matter of factly as one might say, “in North America” – there were twitters of laughter in the audience. I recall squirming in my seat, glancing at my companions, and giggling nervously. At one point, hooks called attention to the snickers in the crowd; she pointed out that while the words seemed rough or dramatic, they were true. And we need to ask ourselves why we are uncomfortable with calling things by their true names? Instead, we find a way to make fun of them, or deem them “too harsh.” She invited the audience to call things as they really are so that we could begin to see them as they really are. I will have to be mindful of my own verbal blindness.

    When a lesbian mother asked bell hooks for advice on raising boys not to be molded by the patriarchal culture, hooks’ response was, “I am [an advocate] of homeschooling for boys.” This came as a pleasant surprise to me, having been home/unschooled myself from the age of 12. hooks also suggested the active, involved presence of males in the lives of the mother’s sons – men who modeled ways in which to be in healthy relationship with others.

    Another woman at the microphone asked for advice on how white women could be allies to black women, or women of color. “White women I love have done the work of educating themselves,” hooks said. She explained that she has some very close white friends. One of her friends is so adept that she can spot racism in a shared experience sooner than bell does. The friend can do this because she sees things through the same lens. Her friends, she said, share some of her interests and values, but also – and this is important - she isn’t seen as “other” by the white friends she holds dear. They are white women who have done “their work of unlearning racism, and then are able to have a subject-to-subject encounter.”

    A young man reminded hooks that she’d bemoaned the lack of black think tanks in the US, but she herself was working at a small, mostly-white school. He questioned why she was not instead a professor at an historically black college (HBC). hooks replied that she had offered herself to HBCs, but had been rejected. “Colleges and universities are by nature conservative institutions,” she said. They are concerned with training young people on how to be good workers and obedient citizens. This was no less true of HBCs, and she was just considered too radical.

    hooks spoke quite a bit about domination. One attendee questioned hooks on the possibility of ever doing away with the current dominant culture. Wouldn’t it just be replaced with another dominant culture? hooks’ reply was that it was really sad that “most people in the US probably believe that domination is normal and inevitable.” They say things like, “it’s natural! and we can’t break with nature.” Even leaving apart the dubiousness of that statement, if we were so concerned about what nature dictated, we would naturally shit all over ourselves – yet we’ve found ways around that. She talked about partnership models. There was also some conversation about The Chalice and the Blade, Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power, and the correlation between agriculture and the rise of domination.

    Midway through her lecture, hooks talked about knowledge of one’s rights and responsibilities. She lamented that black children weren’t being taught the things she was taught as a child: to love the principles of this country and to see them as valuable and attainable. Even though rights and dignities were withheld from her and other peoples, she’d been brought up with the sense that they were hers to fight for, and to have. She remembered taking part in assemblies in which the children wrote essays on Freedom and other ideals. If you don’t know what it means to have Freedom - if you’ve never even thought about it - how can you want to preserve it? She warned against cynicism - especially among young people.

    -End of summary.

    Edit: Thanks to Wendy for correcting me on the “white supremacist etc.” phrase.

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    One Response to “bell hooks Lecture, Part 2”

    1. spotted elephant on February 26th, 2006 3:29 pm

      Thanks very much for posting these summaries. I enjoyed them (wish I could have been at the lecture).

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