For bell hooks (1952-2021)

from Autonomies

Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that’s been a place of hope.
bell hooks
bell hooks died this last December 15th, and for all that she contributed to critical theory, and beyond, as a writer, but also for what she engaged with as a witness to and “activist” against patriarchal, racist and capitalist violence, we celebrate her life and what will continue to resonate from it.
If her concerns and her ways of expression seem distant for some anarchists, perhaps the difficulty lies with the anarchists.
For bell hooks …

How Do You Practice Intersectionalism?
An interview with bell hooks by Randy Lowens
This interview originally appeared in Northeastern Anarchist #15 in 2011 – In June of 2009 bell hooks agreed to be interviewed. We met at a local coffee shop and, over bagels and espresso drinks, discussed her books, politics and thoughts on recent events such as the economic downturn. I found her as forthright in person as on the page and with a subtle wit not always apparent (to me) in her writing. For example, after the interview we were approached by a local lawyer who was curious what publication she was being interviewed for. She cut her eyes at me and said, “Tell the man who the interview is for.” Upon learning I was anarchist, the lawyer mouthed familiar clichés about disorganization. hooks, a hint of a grin playing at the corners of her mouth, responded, “Yes, yes, it’s all about license for the individual!”
Randy: We’re interviewing bell hooks, author of Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations and numerous other titles. You’re known to be a prolific author: do you have a personal favorite? Is there any one title that someone unfamiliar with your work should read first?
hooks: My work is so eclectic; it spans such a broad spectrum. I guess if you look at my children’s books, I like Be Boy Buzz the best. If you look at the love books, I like All About Love the best. If you look at the theory books, Where We Stand: Class Matters is one of my favorites. It’s a good thing not to have to choose one. I think part of Western metaphysical dualism is, we’re always being asked to choose one over the other. I’m lucky. I think it’s good that I have a body of work that addresses different things in different ways.
Randy: You don’t capitalize your name? Why is that?
hooks: When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60’s and early 70’s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let’s talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors—bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother—to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who’d gone before us.
Randy: The books of yours I’m most familiar with—the two I cited—are a work of political theory and, the other, a work of cultural criticism. Do you see those as distinctly different? Is there any clear line between the cultural and the political?
hooks: I would say one difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there. For example, the contemporary movie Crash I thought was a very weak statement about race and class. That was already there in the film. What I did in having a conversation about it was illuminate why it was a weak analysis of race and class. “It’s people; we’re all racist.” That’s just another bullshit way of people not wanting to name the power and institutionalized strength of white supremacy. We all may have prejudices, but we’re not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.
Randy: You mentioned your children’s books. I think last time we spoke, you were preparing to publish a book, Happy to be Nappy?
hooks: Happy to be Nappy was my first children’s book. I think when we saw each other I was in the production of Grump Groan Growl which was about anger.
Randy: I read that one to my daughter, by the way.
hooks: Oh yeah?
Randy: Do you have anything to say about the distinction? Are these books in any way political? We have a political audience.
hooks: They absolutely are. Both books were written to counter racism, patriarchy or both. Especially Be Boy Buzz was written to say, “We don’t really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don’t encourage boys to be whole.” I wanted to write a non-patriarchal book that would proclaim the love of boys.
Randy: (Pause) Some of my questions are written kind of wordy. (Laughter)
hooks: You shouldn’t worry about that.
Randy: You’re known, especially within our circles, for popularizing intersectional theory as opposed to reductionisms. Can you say a little bit about how intersectional theory plays out in practice? That is to say, your typical class reductionist at least has a priority; a Black Nationalist has something to prioritize. How do you practice intersectionalism?
hooks: Intersectionality allow us to focus on what is most important at a given point in time. I used to say to people, if you’re in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination—even though you understand it intersectionally—you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that’s what is needed to change the situation. I think that, again, if we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race, gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what gets foregrounded? I think it’s crazy for us to think that people don’t understand what’s being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in time. Like right now, for many Americans, class is being foregrounded like never before because of the economic situation. It doesn’t mean that race doesn’t matter, or gender doesn’t matter, but it means that right now in many people’s lives, in the lives of my own family members, people are losing jobs, insurance. I was teasing my brother that he was penniless, homeless, jobless. Right now in his life, racism isn’t the central highlighting force: it’s the world of work and economics. It doesn’t mean that he isn’t influenced by racism, but when he wakes up in the morning the thing that’s driving his world is really issues of class, economics and power as they articulate themselves. I guess I wish we could talk about: what does it mean to have a politics of intersectionality that also privileges what form of domination is most oppressing us at a given moment in time.
Randy: I’m reminded of Murray Bookchin and the analogy of society to ecology. Were you at all influenced by that?
hooks: No.
Randy: Do you have any opinions of the modern day anarchist movement, globally or here in the USA? It’s almost nonexistent here in the South.
hooks: Sadly, anarchy has gotten such a bad name. We don’t really see much evidence of it because people associate it with reckless abandon, which we both know it’s not. I think we have to talk about educating the people for critical consciousness about what anarchy is. I would also say that, in practice, many more Americans are anarchists than would ever use that term.
Randy: It’s clear from your books that you oppose capitalism. Do you think capitalism can be reformed, or must it be overthrown? Do you consider yourself a revolutionary in that sense?
hooks: I see myself, in terms of the question of capitalism, as I would support democratic socialism over a capitalist system, because any approach… or participatory economics, which is another great model that people like Michael Albert are putting out there… any system that encourages us to think about interdependency, and to be able to use the world’s resources in a wiser way, for the good of the whole, would be better for the world than capitalism. Capitalism is fucking up the planet, we know that. But let’s say, imperialism and capitalism together… I mean let’s face it, war in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich—and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people’s lives away from them. We know that so much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group.
Randy: Competitive economics taken to its logical extreme.
hooks: Exactly.
Randy: I was taken to task by a feminist anarchist for taking the liberty of referring to you by your first name. The criticism was: had you been a male I wouldn’t have been so quick to have done that.
hooks: I think this is the kind of trivial personal stuff people focus on that has very little meaning. I don’t think it matters. To me, I think if someone read my work, they’d know I don’t have issues around how I’m identified. Even when people capitalize my name, I don’t freak out, even though that would not be my choice. I’m not attached to it, and in that sense I think we have to choose, what are the issues that really matter? We have to trust that. You have to trust that if you are calling my name in a way that is offensive to me, I’m going to share it with you. But you also have to know what your feelings are behind calling me “bell.” I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in. Or race… ending racism. It’s like, I was talking about Cornell West once, and somebody was saying to me, “Cornell is not a preacher; he’s not ordained”—and another preacher friend of mine said, “I don’t know about the importance of his being ordained. I saw him give a sermon. Lots of people joined the church and that would seem to be what being a preacher is all about.” We have to look at the substance of something rather than the shadow. Is it more important that you, as a white male, read my work and learn from it, or what you call me? I think it’s more important that you read my work, reflect on it, and allow it to transform your life and your thinking in some way. Now I do get a little pissed at people who write me and want me to do things, and spell my name wrong.
Randy: I have read, from someone else, that your work is influenced by postmodernism. Is that true? Do you have an opinion about the end of history, in particular?
hooks: No. If anything I think postmodernism has the least impact on my work. My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives. To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work. But in general, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about postmodernism.
Randy: The final question that I wrote down, I think we’ve already touched on to a certain degree. Some political groups say they are against classism, and that often sounds to me like they’re saying they avoid prejudice on the basis of class, but don’t oppose structural capitalism. I think you’ve already talked about the personal versus the systemic aspects of…
hooks: One of the things my work Where We Stand: Class Matters tried to do was say, “We’re a country that would rather talk about race than class.” I think what’s so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy. When I think about the auto-industry and how it was one of the industries that brought all of these black men from the South to Michigan and other places to make more money than they could ever make in the cotton fields or the agricultural world of the South… what’s happening now is all of that is closing down, and we know that it’s going to reopen in Southern places, focusing on Mexican and other migrant workers to come and work cheaply and get none of the benefits. All of this stuff is amazing in terms of forcing people in this society to think more openly about class and about the intersectionalities.
The whole thing with Joe the Plumber—and then to find out that so much about Joe the Plumber was just fake—was the use of class (of white supremacy and class) to awaken old prejudices, to allow for a denial of the true impact of intersectionalities and class. The white worker who has been displaced at General Motors has more in common with the displaced black worker than those larger white CEO’s, and those Wall Street people who are determining their fate… whose thievery and greed is determining their fate.
It’s interesting to look at all the aspects where everyday Americans, many of whom are not college educated, are thinking deeply now about our economic structure. See the way credit cards have exploited the working class and the working poor? I think it’s going to be an interesting next ten years for the United States. For people like me, what is important and vital is to keep that education for critical consciousness around intersectionalities, so that people are able to not focus on one thing and blame one group, but be able to look holistically at the way intersectionality informs all of us: whiteness, gender, sexual preferences, etc. Only then can we have a realistic handle on the political and cultural world we live within.
Randy: That’s all of my questions. Do you have anything to say to our audience, off the cuff?
hooks: Dare to look at the intersectionalities. Dare to be holistic. Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that’s been a place of hope.
From the Anarchist Library

Feminist Class Struggle
bell hooks
Class difference and the way in which it divides women was an issue women in the feminist movement talked about long before race. In the mostly white circles of a newly formed women’s liberation movement the most glaring separation between women was that of class. White working-class women recognized that class hierarchies were present in the movement. Conflict arose between the reformist vision of women’s liberation which basically demanded equal rights for women within the existing class structure, and more radical and/or revolutionary models, which called for a fundamental change in the existing structure so that models of mutuality and equality could replace the old paradigms. However, as the feminist movement progressed and privileged groups of well-educated white women began to achieve equal access to class power with their male counterparts, feminist class struggle was born.
From the onset of the movement women from privileged classes were able to make their concerns “the” issue that should be focused on in part because they were the group of women who received public attention. They attracted mass media. The issues that were most relevant to working women were never highlighted by mainstream mass media. Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique identified “the problem that has no name” as the dissatisfaction females felt about being confined and subordinated in the home as housewives. While this issue was presented as a crisis for women, it really was only a crisis for a small group of well-educated white women. While they were complaining about the dangers of confinement in the home a huge majority of women in the nation were in the workforce. And many of these working women, who put in long hours for low wages while still doing all the work in the domestic household would have seen the right to stay home as “freedom”.
It was not gender discrimination or sexist oppression that kept privileged women of all races from working outside the home, it was the fact that the jobs that would have been available to them would have been the same low-paying unskilled labor open to all working women. Elite groups of highly educated females stayed at home rather than do the type of work large numbers of lower-middle class and working class women were doing. Occasionally, a few of these women defied convention and worked outside the home performing tasks way below their educational skills and facing resistance from husbands and family. It was this resistance that turned the issue of their working outside the home into an issue of gender discrimination and made opposing patriarchy and seeking equal rights with men of their class the political platform that chose feminism rather than class struggle.
From the onset, reformist white women with class priviledge were well aware that the power and freedom they wanted was the freedom they perceived men of their class enjoying. Their resistance to patriarchal male domination in the domestic household provided them with a connection they could use to unite across class with other women who were weary of male domination. But only privileged women had the luxury to imagine working outside the home would actually provide them with an income which would enable them to be economically self-sufficient. Working class women already knew that the wages they received would not liberate them.
Reformist efforts on the part of privileged groups of women to change the workforce so that women workers would be paid more and face less gender-based discrimination and harrassment on the job had positive impact on the lives of all women. And these gains are important. Yet the fact that privileged women gained in class power while masses of women still do not receive wage equity with men is an indication of the way in which class interests superceded feminist efforts to change the workforce so that women would receive equal pay for equal work.
Lesbian feminist thinkers were among the first activists to raise the issue of class in the feminst movement, expressing their viewpoints in an accessible language. They were a group of women who had not imagined they could depend on husbands to support them. And they were often much more aware than their straight counterparts of the difficulties all women would face in the workforce. In the early 1970s, anthologies like Class and Feminism, edited by Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Myron, published work written by women from diverse backgrounds who were confronting the issue in feminist circles. Each essay emphasized the fact that class was not simply a question of money. In The Last Straw, Rita Mae Brown (who was not a famous writer at the time) clearly stated:
“Class is much more than Marx’s definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.”
These women who entered feminist groups, made up of diverse classes, were among the first to see that the vision of a politically based sisterhood where all females would unite together to fight patriarchy could not emerge until the issue of class was confronted.
Placing class on feminist agendas opened up the space where the intersections of class and race were made apparent. Within the institutionalized race, sex, class social system in our society black females were clearly at the bottom of the economic totem pole. Initially well-educated white women from working class backgrounds were more visible than black females of all classes in the feminist movement. They were a minority within the movement, but theirs was the voice of experience. They knew better than their priviledged class comrades of any race the costs of resisting race, class and gender domination. They knew what it was like to struggle to change one’s economic situation. Between them and their privileged-class comrades there were ongoing conflicts over appropriate behavior, over the issues that would be presented as fundamental feminist concerns. Within the feminst movement women from privileged class backgrounds who had never before been involved in leftist freedom fighting learned the concrete politics of class struggle, confronting challenges made by less privileged women, and also learning in the process assertiveness skills and constructive ways to cope with conflict. Despite constructive intervention, many privileged white women continued to act as though feminism belonged to them, as though they were in charge.
Mainstream patriarchy reinforced the idea that the concerns of women from privileged class groups were the only ones worthy of receiving attention. Feminist reform aimed to gain social equality for women within the existing structure. Privileged women wanted equality with men of their class. Despite sexism among their class they would not have wanted to have the lot of working class men. Feminist efforts to grant women social equality with men of their class neatly coincided with white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal fears that white power would diminish if non-white people gained equal access to economic power and priviledge. Supporting what in effect became white power-reformist-feminism enabled the mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism.
Only revolutionary feminist thinkers expressed outrage at this co-optation of the feminist movement. Our critique and outrage gained a hearing in the alternative press. In her collection of essays, The Coming of Black Genocide, radical white activist Mary Barfoot boldly stated:
“There are white women, hurt and angry, who believed that the ’70s women’s movement meant sisterhood, and who feel betrayed by escalator women. By women who went back home to patriarchy. But the women’s movement never left the father Dick’s side. There was no war. And there was no liberation. We got a share of the genocide profits and we love it. We are Sisters of Patriarchy, and true supporters of national and class oppression, Patriarchy in its highest form is Euro-imperialism on a worldscale. If we’re Dick’s sister and want what he has gotten, then in the end we support that system that he got it all from.”
Indeed, many more feminist women found and find it easier to consider divesting of white supremacist thinking than of their class elitism.
As privileged women gained greater access to economic power with men of their class, feminist discussions of class were no longer commonplace. Instead, all women were encouraged to see the economic gains of affluent females as a positive sign for all women. In actuality, these gains rarely changed the lot of poor and working class women. And since privileged men did not become equal caretakers in the domestic household, the freedom of privileged-class women of all races has required the sustained subordination of working class and poor women. In the 1990s, collusion with the existing social structure was the price of “women’s liberation.” At the end of the day class power proved to be more important than feminism. And this collusion helped de-stablize the feminist movement.
When women acquired greater class status and power without conducting themselves differently from males feminist politics were undermined. Lots of women felt betrayed. Middle- and lower-middle class women who were suddenly compelled by the ethos of feminism to enter the workforce did not feel liberated once they faced the hard truth that working outside the home did not mean work in the home would be equally shared with male partners. No-fault divorce proved to be more economically beneficial to men than women. As many black women/women of color saw white women from privileged classes benefiting economically more than other groups from reformist feminist gains, from gender being tacked on to racial affirmative action, it simply reaffirmed their fear that feminism was really about increasing white power. The most profound betrayal of feminist issues has been the lack of mass-based feminist protest challenging the government’s assault on single mothers and the dismantling of the welfare system. Privileged women, many of whom call themselves feminists, have simply turned away from the “feminization of poverty”.
The only genuine hope of feminist liberation lies with a vision of social change which challenges class elitism. Western women have gained class power and greater gender inequality because a global white supremacist patriarchy enslaves and/or subordinates masses of third world women. In this country, the combined forces of a booming prison industry and workfare-oriented welfare in conjuction with conservative immigration policy create and condone the conditions for indentured slavery. Ending welfare will create a new underclass of women and children to be abused and exploited by the existing structures of domination.
Given the changing realities of class in our nation, widening gaps between the rich and poor, and the continued feminization of poverty, we desperately need a mass-based radical feminist movement that can build on the strength of the past, including the positive gains generated by reforms, while offering meaningful interrogation of existing feminist theory that was simply wrongminded while offering us new strategies. Significantly, a visionary movement would ground its work in the concrete conditions of the working class and poor women.
From the Anarchist Library

“Love as the Practice of Freedom”
bell hooks
In this society, there is no powerful discourse on love emerging either from politically progressive radicals or from the Left. The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns. Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.
Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I have been puzzled by powerful visionary black male leaders who can speak and act passionately in resistance to racial domination and accept and embrace sexist domination of women, by feminist white women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white supremacist domination of the planet. Critically examining these blind spots, I conclude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination. Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle.
The ability to acknowledge blind spots can emerge only as we expand our concern about politics of domination and our capacity to care about the oppression and exploitation of others. A love ethic makes this expansion possible. The civil rights movement transformed society in the United States because it was fundamentally rooted in a love ethic. No leader has emphasized this ethic more than Martin Luther King, jr. He had the prophetic insight to recognize that a revolution built on any other foundation would fail. Again and again, King testified that he had “decided to love” because he believed deeply that if we are “seeking the highest good” we “find it through love” because this is “the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.” And the point of being in touch with a transcendent reality is that we struggle for justice, all the while realizing that we are always more than our race, class, or sex. When I look back at the civil rights movement which was in many ways limited because it was a reformist effort, I see that it had the power to move masses of people to act in the interest of racial justice—and because it was profoundly rooted in a love ethic.
The sixties Black Power movement shifted away from that love ethic. The emphasis was now more on power. And it is not surprising that the sexism that had always undermined the black liberation struggle intensified, that a misogynist approach to women became central as the equation of freedom with patriarchal manhood became a norm among black political leaders, almost all of whom were male. Indeed, the new militancy of masculinist black power equated love with weakness, announcing that the quintessential expression of freedom would be the willingness to coerce, do violence, terrorize, indeed utilize the weapons of domination. This was the crudest embodiment of Malcolm X’s bold credo “by any means necessary.”
On the positive side, Black Power movement shifted the focus of black liberation struggle from reform to revolution. This was an important political development, bringing with it a stronger anti-imperialist, global perspective. However, masculinist sexist biases in leadership led to the suppression of the love ethic. Hence progress was made even as something valuable was lost. While King had focused on loving our enemies, Malcolm called us back to ourselves, acknowledging that taking care of blackness was our central responsibility. Even though King talked about the importance of black self-love, he talked more about loving our enemies. Ultimately, neither he nor Malcolm lived long enough to fully integrate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that would provide a blueprint for the eradication of black self-hatred.
Black folks entering the realm of racially integrated, American life because of the success of civil rights and black power movement suddenly found we were grappling with an intensification of internalized racism. The deaths of these important leaders (as well as liberal white leaders who were major allies in the struggle for racial equality) ushered in tremendous feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and despair. Wounded in that space where we would know love, black people collectively experienced intense pain and anguish about our future. The absence of public spaces where that pain could be articulated, expressed, shared meant that it was held in—festering, suppressing the possibility that this collective grief would be reconciled in community even as ways to move beyond it and continue resistance struggle would be envisioned. Feeling as though “the world had really come to an end,” in the sense that a hope had died that racial justice would become the norm, a life-threatening despair took hold in black life. We will never know to what extent the black masculinist focus on hardness and toughness served as a barrier preventing sustained public acknowledgment of the enormous grief and pain in black life. In World as Lover; World as Self, Joanna Macy emphasizes in her chapter on “Despair Work” that
the refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life . . . but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.
If black folks are to move forward in our struggle for liberation, we must confront the legacy of this unreconciled grief, for it has been the breeding ground for profound nihilistic despair. We must collectively return to a radical political vision of social change rooted in a love ethic and seek once again to convert masses of people, black and nonblack.
A culture of domination is anti-love. It requires violence to sustain itself. To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture. Many people feel unable to love either themselves or others because they do not know what love is. Contemporary songs like Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” advocate a system of exchange around desire, mirroring the economics of capitalism: the idea that love is important is mocked. In his essay “Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?” Thomas Merton argues that we are taught within the framework of competitive consumer capitalism to see love as a business deal: “This concept of love assumes that the machinery of buying and selling of needs is what makes everything run. It regards life as a market and love as a variation on free enterprise.” Though many folks recognize and critique the commercialization of love, they see no alternative. Not knowing how to love or even what love is, many people feel emotionally lost; others search for definitions, for ways to sustain a love ethic in a culture that negates human value and valorizes materialism.
The sales of books focusing on recovery, books that seek to teach folks ways to improve self-esteem, self-love, and our ability to be intimate in relationships, affirm that there is public awareness of a lack in most people’s lives. M. Scott Peck’s self-help book The Road Less Traveled is enormously popular because it addresses that lack.
Peck offers a working definition for love that is useful for those of us who would like to make a love ethic the core of all human interaction. He defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Commenting on prevailing cultural attitudes about love, Peck writes:
Everyone in our culture desires to some extent to be loving, yet many are in fact not loving. I therefore conclude that the desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
His words echo Martin Luther King’s declaration, “I have decided to love,” which also emphasizes choice. King believed that love is “ultimately the only answer” to the problems facing this nation and the entire planet. I share that belief and the conviction that it is in choosing love, and beginning with love as the ethical foundation for politics, that we are best positioned to transform society in ways that enhance the collective good.
It is truly amazing that King had the courage to speak as much as he did about the transformative power of love in a culture where such talk is often seen as merely sentimental. In progressive political circles, to speak of love is to guarantee that one will be dismissed or considered naive. But outside those circles there are many people who openly acknowledge that they are consumed by feelings of self-hatred, who feel worthless, who want a way out. Often they are too trapped by paralyzing despair to be able to engage effectively in any movement for social change. However, if the leaders of such movements refuse to address the anguish and pain of their lives, they will never be motivated to consider personal and political recovery. Any political movement that can effectively address these needs of the spirit in the context of liberation struggle will succeed.
In the past, most folks both learned about and tended the needs of the spirit in the context of religious experience. The institutionalization and commercialization of the church has undermined the power of religious community to transform souls, to intervene politically. Commenting on the collective sense of spiritual loss in modern society, Cornel West asserts:
There is a pervasive impoverishment of the spirit in American society, and especially among Black people. Historically, there have been cultural forces and traditions, like the church, that held cold-heartedness and mean-spiritedness at bay. However, today’s impoverishment of the spirit means that this coldness and meanness is becoming more and more pervasive. The church kept these forces at bay by promoting a sense of respect for others, a sense of solidarity, a sense of meaning and value which would usher in the strength to battle against evil.
Life-sustaining political communities can provide a similar space for the renewal of the spirit. That can happen only if we address the needs of the spirit in progressive political theory and practice.
Often when Cornel West and I speak with large groups of black folks about the impoverishment of spirit in black life, the lovelessness, sharing that we can collectively recover ourselves in love, the response is overwhelming. Folks want to know how to begin the practice of loving. For me that is where education for critical consciousness has to enter. When I look at my life, searching it for a blueprint that aided me in the process of decolonization, of personal and political self-recovery, I know that it was learning the truth about how systems of domination operate that helped, learning to look both inward and outward with a critical eye. Awareness is central to the process of love as the practice of freedom. Whenever those of us who are members of exploited and oppressed groups dare to critically interrogate our locations, the identities and allegiances that inform how we live our lives, we begin the process of decolonization. If we discover in ourselves self-hatred, low self-esteem, or internalized white supremacist thinking and we face it, we can begin to heal. Acknowledging the truth of our reality, both individual and collective, is a necessary stage for personal and political growth. This is usually the most painful stage in the process of learning to love—the one many of us seek to avoid. Again, once we choose love, we instinctively possess the inner resources to confront that pain. Moving through the pain to the other side we find the joy, the freedom of spirit that a love ethic brings.
Choosing love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not have to change by ourselves. We can count on critical affirmation and dialogue with comrades walking a similar path. African American theologian Howard Thurman believed that we best learn love as the practice of freedom in the context of community. Commenting on this aspect of his work in the essay “Spirituality out on The Deep,” Luther Smith reminds us that Thurman felt the United States was given to diverse groups of people by the universal life force as a location for the building of community. Paraphrasing Thurman, he writes: “Truth becomes true in community. The social order hungers for a center (i.e. spirit, soul) that gives it identity, power, and purpose. America, and all cultural entities, are in search of a soul.” Working within community, whether it be sharing a project with another person, or with a larger group, we are able to experience joy in struggle. That joy needs to be documented. For if we only focus on the pain, the difficulties which are surely real in any process of transformation, we only show a partial picture.
A love ethic emphasizes the importance of service to others. Within the value system of the United States any task or job that is related to “service” is devalued. Service strengthens our capacity to know compassion and deepens our insight. To serve another I cannot see them as an object, I must see their subjecthood. Sharing the teaching of Shambala warriors, Buddhist Joanna Macy writes that we need weapons of compassion and insight.
You have to have compassion because it gives you the juice, the power, the passion to move. When you open to the pain of the world you move, you act. But that weapon is not enough. It can burn you out, so you need the other—you need insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. With that wisdom you know that it is not a battle between good guys and bad guys, but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. With insight into our profound interrelatedness, you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern.
Macy shares that compassion and insight can “sustain us as agents of wholesome change” for they are “gifts for us to claim now in the healing of our world.” In part, we learn to love by giving service. This is again a dimension of what Peck means when he speaks of extending ourselves for another.
The civil rights movement had the power to transform society because the individuals who struggle alone and in community for freedom and justice wanted these gifts to be for all, not just the suffering and the oppressed. Visionary black leaders such as Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Howard Thurman warned against isolationism. They encouraged black people to look beyond our own circumstances and assume responsibility for the planet. This call for communion with a world beyond the self, the tribe, the race, the nation, was a constant invitation for personal expansion and growth. When masses of black folks starting thinking solely in terms of “us and them,” internalizing the value system of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, blind spots developed, the capacity for empathy needed for the building of community was diminished. To heal our wounded body politic we must reaffirm our commitment to a vision of what King referred to in the essay “Facing the Challenge of a New Age” as a genuine commitment to “freedom and justice for all.” My heart is uplifted when I read King’s essay; I am reminded where true liberation leads us. It leads us beyond resistance to transformation. King tells us that “the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.” The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.
From bell hook’s Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations


Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)
bell hooks
1.hear them crythe long deadthe long gonespeak to usfrom beyond the graveguide usthat we may learnall the waysto hold tender this landhard clay directrock upon rockcharred earthin timestrong green growthwill rise heretrees back to lifenative flowerspushing the fragrance of hopethe promise of resurrection2.such then is beautysurrenderedagainst all hopeyou are here againturning slowlynature as chameleonall life changeand changing againawakening heartssteady moving fromunnamed lossinto fierce deep griefthat can bear all burdenseven the long passageinto a shadowy darkwhere no light enters3.night movesthrough the thick darka heavy silence outsidenear the front windowa black bearstamps down plantspushing back brushfleeing manmadeconfinementroaming unfetteredconfidentany place can become homestrutting downa steep hillas though freedomis allin the nowno pastno present4.earth worksthick brown mudclinging pullinga body downheard wounded earth crybequeath to methe hoe the hopeancestral rightsto turn the ground overto shovel and siftuntil historyrewritten resurrectedreturns to its rightful ownersa past to claimyet another stone lifted tothrow against the enemymaking way for new endingsrandom seedsspreading over the hillsidewild rosescome by fierce wind and hard rainunleashed furieshere in this touched wooda dirge a lamentationfor earth to live againearth that is all at once a gravea resting place a bed of new beginningsavalanche of splendor5.small horses ride mecarry my dreamsof prairies and frontierswhere oncethe first people roamedclaimed union with the earthno right to own or possessno sense of territoryall boundariesplaced by unseen oneshere I will give you thundershatter your hearts with rainlet snow soothe youmake your healing waterclear sweeta sacred springwhere the thirstymay drinkanimals all6.listen little sisterangels make their hope herein these hillsfollow meI will guide youcareful nowno trespassI will guide youword for wordmouth for mouthall the holy onesembracing usall our kinmaking home hererenegade maroonedlawless fugitivesgrace these mountainswe have earth to bind usthe covenantbetween uscan never be brokenvows to live and let live
bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), “Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)” from Appalachian Elegy. Copyright © 2012 by bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins).
From Poetry Foundation

For The Guardian obituary, click here, and The New Yorker’s, here.

There are 3 Comments

--- I think part of Western metaphysical dualism is, we’re always being asked to choose one over the other.--- Sooo true,,,,my kinda gal, rip.

I haven't read a lot of bell hooks, mostly essays in Z magazine from way back.
Liked this exchange-

"Randy: I’m reminded of Murray Bookchin and the analogy of society to ecology. Were you at all influenced by that?
hooks: No."

Sweet.

there are a few things she said in that interview that i take issue with, but overall i found bell hooks to be a solid critical thinker with a good knack with words sometimes. rip.

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