Ringing bell hooks: A Brilliant Feminist Calling for Liberation

Spirituality Calls

bell hooks sought the transcendent. She was and remains a spiritualist, perhaps more so than a “Black feminist.” 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: “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.¹

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,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.

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, Jr., she notes that our spiritual crises and political crises are mended if we remember 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 ancestors who care so deeply about the power of love in political 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 over 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 that her contributions came with contradictions.

bell hooks self-identified as a black feminist not a “womanist.” In my view, 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, hooks left the halls of elite academia (Stanford, Yale) and 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 has 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 members of 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.

Amid a plurality of political identities, diverse feminisms range from centrist through liberal to radical. 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 were Lani Guinier, Johnetta Cole, and Angela Davis, to which a fourth could have been added. I 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 did 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 an ancestor is more embraceable. Her abrasive critiques were difficult to gloss over when she spoke directly; after her transition, readers can filter hooks’ “talk back” into a more conventional liberal voice. Her analyses and social criticism often had a ringing effect. Yet, her understanding of political and material struggles seemed constrained by her academic environment.

Are Academic/Feminist Pedagogies Deaf to Radical Organizing?

It might have been rare, but bell hooks’s political analyses at times were distanced from facts and the material aspects of political struggles; this can be replicated among academics and authors who do not participate in local risk-taking activism for social justice. 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. If one examines the NYC 1989 Central Park Case, one finds in academic feminist writing distance from material struggles shouldered by community activists who risk losing their safety and employment. Despite her analyses of white supremacy and patriarchy, hooks failed to see the racism in New York Times narratives on the 1988-89 Central Park Five. Mainstream media narratives of the NYPD that falsified facts in order to obtain convictions of five Black and Brown teens falsely accused of and incarcerated of the rape of a young white Wall Street

investment banker. Classroom discussions on the Central Park Five failed to include the intellectualism and analyses of community activists and impacted family members. Hence hooks publicly wrote that the youths were guilty of horrific violence, echoing a false narrative pushed by the police. (The actual rapist, Mathias Reyes, was incarcerated for multiple rapes and murder[s] of women; while in prison he confessed to the Central Park attack over a decade after the assault.) Multiracial women/LGBTQ folks organizing in opposition to rape and police violence attended Yusef Salaam’s trial, where he professed his innocence before an indifferent multi-racial jury. Working with such groups, I met Yusef’s mother, Sharonne Salaam, and learned from radical organizers. Communal educational encounters could not and cannot be replicated in a classroom hosted by a college/university. Political education on the streets and in under-resourced communities showed that the hypocenter radical movements supported fair-trial activism. Academia and its classrooms are not zones of revolutionary struggle. Productive collaborations exist between the formal classroom and community resistance. The 1994 anthology Black Women in America, edited by Kim Vaz, includes “Searching for a Tradition: African-American Women Writers, Activists, and Interracial Rape Cases.” (https://sites.williams.edu/jjames/files/2019/05/Black-Women-in-America.pdf) In that chapter which focuses on interracial rape, fair-trial activism, Black feminism and the Central Park Case I directly question Black feminists, as well as hooks’, writing on the Central Park Case defendants. Those literary condemnations of the teen defendants became a form of political pedagogy that mis-educated and mis-informed the public and gendered and racialized communities. Academia has educational productivity in the epicenter, e.g., years after the teens were exonerated (and received financial compensation for wrongful incarceration) faculty worked with UT-Austin graduate students to create an extensive bibliography on the Central Park Case to educate the public.  (https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/9fc81473-9c4d-4180-a8d3-0964e866a97e/content).

The classroom is not the street, the projects or the prison and detention center. The epicenter and hypocenter cannot be conflated; they are distinct zones of learning that is invested in struggle (most often literary and rhetorical if based in the academy). What is rooted in conventional politics and academia is not equivalent to street activism against repressive policing. The two zones can and do collectively work together but their functions do not overlap. They do not replace each other’s functions even if they work as Captive Maternals. This is a pedagogy of radicalism that is not contained in rhetoric, debate, or writing and publishing. hooks’ contributions ring throughout academic intellectualism. Academic intellectualism isolated from militant “grass roots” movements and influenced by bourgeois culture cannot replicate the functions of the underground and the capacity of “on-the-ground” organizers.

Something that we cannot always remember, we should remember: What “rings a bell” is the dichotomy between pedagogies developed in the epicenter and pedagogies developed in the hypocenter. That is, academic radicalism is not the same construct or practice as street/community material struggle.

Shouts from the Epicenter to the Hypocenter of Politics

Distinctions between the hypocenter and the epicenter exist; their pedagogical contributions are diverse due to vulnerability and radicality. The two sectors do not collapse into each other, thus the zones of political struggle—from liberal through radical to revolutionary— do not merge in political struggle on the ground. Pedagogies recognize the contributions of material radicalism but they cannot engage with such pedagogies without risk-taking organizing against social, political and state violence. For example, during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement, students left their college and university classrooms to “drop out” and organize for low-income and racially-communities and face police/white supremacist violence. The Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) students dropped out of formal schooling to create the civil rights militancy that led the youth to describe the movement as the “second civil war” while SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Council) called it the second “Reconstruction.”

Within the hypocenter of militancy, pedagogies for civil and human rights were led by teachers such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Their teaching methods as elders and now ancestors led to integration and thus bell hooks could attend or teach at Stanford, Oberlin, Yale, New School University, Berea etc. hooks shaped pedagogy as a practice of liberation. Yet, there were/are educational zones within which she would not wander. she identified and radiated as a radical; yet, she stayed within progressive politics. she was devoted to her students, those who were in the “free world” and those who were incarcerated. Negatively impacted by sexism, racism, imperialism, and academic denigration, drama, and aggression, hooks still remained sheltered and stabilized by the epicenter. Although repression of human rights advocacy is expanding, sectors of academia remain stable shelters for progressive advocacy. As was true for bell hooks, most of us seek liberation pedagogies with courage and risk. Working to understand how we might murmur or shout beyond the campus in solidarity with those trapped in   occupations, femicides, genocides, environmental devastations and war zones. Learning with and from bell hooks we can build pedagogies that will determine what knell brings us home.