Calling to Better Comprehend a Brilliant Writer tied to Liberation Struggles

Hooks was and remains a shiny star who created a blazing path for Black feminism, often without a co-pilot. She received accolades for decades of writing, while being isolated at times by academics. Prolific and powerful, she wrote what she thought fit to be published. As she matured and aged, she fell into a zone of grace. Transitioning in her early sixties, she would read and reflect on spirituality, ethical commitments and feminism against empire and violence. The author of 40 books, her work would be celebrated for decades and across two centuries. Acknowledging this gifted writer and dedicated Black feminist would be skewed if we did not note her that her contributions came with contradictions.

bell hooks, self-identified as a black feminist not a “womanist.” In the view of this author, she labored and worked as a “Captive Maternal.” Not a radical one that moved into war resistance, but a caretaker who contributed as an educator and author. In the stages of the Captive Maternal—caretaker, protester, movement maker, maroon, war resister and defender of sanctuaries—hooks focused on her intellect and texts offered care through reflection and meditation and analyses, protested capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy, and avoided mass movements and radical materialism to settle in Berea, as a multi-racial maroon site of intellectuals and academics who would allow her a private sanctuary.

Deeply invested in her reflections and writings left the halls of elite academia (Stanford, Yale) hooks returned to the state where she was born and raised in small towns(s) nestled or nailed to Kentucky. Her roots were in the segregated, rural south. She uprooted herself to become a hyper intellectual and precocious author, only to later plant herself in Berea College. Founded in 1855 by antislavery abolitionists, Berea College became the first interracial and coeducational college in the South. Its epicenter was higher education of interracial students, and charity and advocacy for human rights. However, Berea had a hidden hypocenter. The epicenter is the surface of political struggle, the hypocenter is “ground zero” where revolutionary resistance from a colonial regime or imperialism is a life-and-death struggle. (Hence, in New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner, I view hooks as an influential contributor to the epicenter of liberation politics and Assata Shakur as representative of the hypocenter of revolutionary struggles). Beneath college buildings, abolitionists had dug an underground railroad akin to Harriet Tubman’s courageous endeavors to steer enslaved Black people from slave states to “free states.” When the Civil War began in April 1861, Berea had already trained in rebellion and resistance to slavery for six years. Nearly a century and a half later, bell hooks came “home” to Kentucky, but more precisely nestled into Berea as her maroon camp, where with multi-racial, nonbinary, and multi-disciplinary intellectuals she planted her roots.

Before Berea, hooks as a young intellectual published Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism in 1981. Her stellar star rising led her to engage in public intellectualism in which she criticized prominent and older Black feminism. Her early 1990s stunning critique of Oprah Winfrey called out Winfrey for performing as a “mammy” who “s**ks the di*k of white culture” (paraphrase, content is largely scrubbed from online). That boldness alienated hooks among some respectable Black academia, especially prominent Black feminists, and limited her appearances in some liberal arenas such as the highly influential Oprah Book Club. Winfrey built a book-reading empire that serviced more than the intellectual and emotional needs of middle-class white women. hooks’ appeal to edgy or critical hip hop communities clashed with the liberal and capitalist sensibilities of Winfrey’s Book Club that made Black feminist authors wealthy and famous.

Embraced and Rejected while Shouting from the Epicenter to the Hypocenter of Politics

A product and fugitive from the segregated Deep South hooks, the author ten years after the publication of her influential book Ain’t I a Woman also had a patience when rejected or criticized herself. During a 1994 planning committee at University of Massachusetts-Amherst for the “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Names, 1894-1994” conference held at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the majority of Black feminist committee members insisted that hooks was not to be selected as a keynote speaker. The chosen speakers, a fourth could have been added, were Lani Guinier, Johnetta Cole, and Angela Davis. This author argued with the committee that hooks was the most influential Black feminist author among the chosen speakers. Likely, hooks’s transgressive public criticizing of prominent Black intellectuals led the majority of the committee to insist that she submit a workshop proposal for review in order to determine if she could present at the conference. With less patience than hooks, and some ire, I completed my work on the planning committee and did not attend the 1994 MIT conference. I later learned that hooks in fact had submitted a proposal and it was accepted for a panel in a side room, not on the main stage. (hooks knew that she was marginalized as the “bad girl” with “dissident speech”; yet, her intellectual autonomy remained central to her identity.)

hooks displayed extraordinary patience when slighted by Black feminists. In the early 1990s, without an invitation, she showed up knocking at the front door of the home of a prominent black feminist. I answered the door and then went upstairs to announce her presence. hooks settled in the living room, sitting on the couch, when I soon returned and informed her that the feminist and homeowner was not available for a conversation. For several hours, I listened to hooks speak on a variety of topics. Several ventures upstairs to not lead to her having an audience with the only person she wanted to speak with. I finally told her that it was becoming late and she quietly, showing no embarrassment or ire, left the home. Black feminists embraced hooks uneasily until she transitioned in 2021. hooks as ancestor was more easily welcomed after. Her abrasive talks and critiques were no longer an issue because she could not “talk back” easily in a conventional voice. The author-educator’s analyses and social criticism often had a ringing effect, her understanding of political and material struggles seemed constrained by her academic environment. Her thoughts seemed distanced from the material aspects of political struggles, radical organizing on the ground seemed foreign to her. Nowhere was this more evident than in the New York City 1989 Central Park 5 Case in which five Black and Latino teen boys from Harlem were falsely accused of raping and brutally beating a white woman investment banker from Wall Street.

Tone Deaf on the Central Park 5 Case

Hooks’s intellectual engagement seems distanced from mobilized movements; she relied deeply invested on texts and apparently accepted prestigious publishers as credible despite her analyses of white supremacy and patriarch. When the New York Times narrated the 1988-89 Central Park Five case through the racist narratives of the NYPD (New York Police Department), hooks took the media assertions as facts. Without research, speaking to community organizers or family members of Black and Brown youths, she wrote that the five teens were guilty of rape and assault. (The actual rapist, Mathias Reyes, was incarcerated for other heinous crimes, and murder[s] of other women when he confessed years after the attack on the survivor.) Organizing with other women in opposition to rape and police violence, I attended the trial on the day that Yusef Salaam (now exonerated NYC Councilman with oversight of the NYPD) took the stand to declared his innocence before a bored, multi-racial jury. hooks’ writing in 1990 that the youths were guilty (other Black feminists/progressives such as Barbara Smith, Michael Eric Dyson echoed the false narratives of the NYPD) allowed her theories of predatory patriarchy to distort actual facts.

She was supported though by white feminists, Black academics who portrayed working class and poor Black male youths as guilty before trial. Her faith in mainstream media as a gauge on reality of violence was not deterred by the NYT taking money from Donald J. Trump to print a full-page advertisement, targeted at the teens, calling for the return of the death penalty. For academics and those who do not engage in the hypocenter of radical organizing at “ground zero” reality can succumb to narrative.

Spirituality Calls

bell hooks sought the transcendent. She was/is a spiritualist, perhaps more so than a “Black feminist”; amid a plurality of political identities, diverse feminisms range from centrist through liberal to radical. At the September 24, 2022, Philadelphia “Inaugural Bell Hooks Symposium” keynote panel, prominent Black feminists asserted that hooks’ critique of “heteropatriarchy” was her greatest contribution. In an interview, philosopher George Yancy asks bell hooks to explain her phrase “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”; she replied by focusing on predatory, interlocking systems and structures of class, empire, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, colonialism. Yancy in discussion with hooks created in the December 10, 2015 New York Times conversation with Yancy: “bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness.” In All About Love, The Will to Change, Feminism, Buddhism, and Liberation, and Salvation, hooks wrote as if spirituality was her path for countering oppression. This does not negate feminism, it suggests something more transcendent.

Consider her role models for teaching. In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Routledge, 2003, x), hooks cites Paulo Freire and reflects on the Brazilian activist-educator who instructed that we “maintain hope” despite harsh realities. Freire organized

liberation educational materials at the risk of his life in Brazil. He fled from militarists in Brazil, landed in Europe with UN/NGO and re-entered struggles in the “Third World” by working with and learning from Angola freedom fighters. Hooks moved from the epicenter to the hypocenter as an intellectual to link to Freire’s pedagogies. In Teaching Community, she seeks to bring “grace to the art of teaching,” and to unify “theory and praxis” so that teachers find “practical wisdom.” Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. and Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, hooks—a Buddhist Christian— calls us to embrace global community and mass movements, as well as Black feminism:

Without all of those people engaged in civil rights struggles, I would not be here in this laboratory . . . how many black women have had the good fortune to write more than thirty books? . . . I try to read a [nonfiction] book a day . . . then I get to read total trash for the rest of the day. That’s luxury, that’s privilege of a high order—the privilege to think critically, and then the privilege to be able to act on what you know.13

Love and spirituality connect material struggles for food, housing and safety and move from the surface of politics to the core of politics. Yancy and hooks discuss the ethical and the political in “bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness.” Transformation is key. When hooks references in We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, the mythical story of Isis and Osiris, she reflects on betrayal, war, death, and resurrection in which Isis, the fierce mother-sister-lover Isis battles to restore the life of Osiris. Isis gathers his dismembered body parts, sutures them and heals her beloved. For bell hooks, the Egyptian myth is our “shared story” for “soul-healing” within “a culture that keeps black men and women further apart.” Reflecting on this ancient myth and Malcolm X (el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) she rings a bell for us to recognize ourselves as broken and mended:

Malcolm X said we have to ‘see each other with new eyes’ . . . that’s where self-determination begins and how we are with one another. . . . black males and females have suffered mental abandonment . . . more than police brutality, that’s the core for . . . our trauma. Betrayal is always about abandonment. And many of us have been emotionally abandoned. (“bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness”)

For hooks, love is “the only way out of domination” and connections to other people require that we treat “every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love.” Linking Malcolm to MLK, she notes that our spiritual crises and political crises are mended if we remember that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s prescient wisdom that “the work of love” would be essential for our transformation beyond scattered pieces of ourselves. bell hooks/Gloria Watkins is calling. Having rung many bells, we should stay in conversation with our ancestors who care so deeply about the power of love in political struggles.