The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
This
is the last in this series of 2015 interviews with philosophers on
race. This week’s conversation is with the scholar, critic and public
intellectual bell hooks, who is currently the distinguished professor in
residence of Appalachian studies at Berea College. She is the author of
many books, including “Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice”
— George Yancy
George Yancy: Over the years you have used the expression “imperialist white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the power structure
underlying the social order. Why tie those
terms together as opposed to
stressing any one of them in isolation?
bell hooks: We can’t begin to understand the nature of domination if we don’t
understand how these systems connect with one another. Significantly,
this phrase has always moved me because
it doesn’t value one system over
another. For so many years in the feminist movement, women were saying
that gender is the only aspect of identity that really matters, that
domination only came into the world
because of rape. Then we had so
many race-oriented folks who were saying, “Race is the most important
thing. We don’t even need to be talking about class or gender.” So for
me, that phrase always
reminds me of a global context,
of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism and of
patriarchy. Those things are all linked — an interlocking system.
G.Y.: I’ve heard you speak many times and I noticed that you do so with a
very keen sense of humor. What is the role of humor in your work?
b.h.: We
cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor. Every time we see
the left or any group trying to move forward politically in a radical
way, when they’re humorless, they fail. Humor
is essential to the integrative
balance that we need to deal with diversity and difference and the
building of community. For example, I love to be in conversation with
Cornel West. We always go high and we go low,
and we always bring the joyful
humor in. The last talk he and I gave together, many people were upset
because we were silly together. But I consider it a high holy calling
that we can be humorous together. How many
times do we see an
African-American man and an African-American woman talking together,
critiquing one another, and yet having delicious, humorous delight? It’s
a miracle.
G.Y.: What is your view of the feminist movement today, and how has your relationship to it changed over time?
I believe whole-heartedly that the only way out of domination is love.
b.h.: My
militant commitment to feminism remains strong, and the main reason is
that feminism has been the contemporary social movement that has most
embraced self-interrogation. When we, women of color,
began to tell white women that
females were not a homogenous group, that we had to face the reality of
racial difference, many white women stepped up to the plate. I’m a
feminist in solidarity with white
women today for that reason,
because I saw these women grow in their willingness to open their minds
and change the whole direction of feminist thought, writing and action.
This continues to be one of the most remarkable,
awesome aspects of the
contemporary feminist movement. The left has not done this, radical
black men have not done this, where someone comes in and says, “Look,
what you’re pushing, the ideology, is
all messed up. You’ve got to
shift your perspective.” Feminism made that paradigm shift, though not
without hostility, not without some women feeling we were forcing race
on them. This change still
amazes me.
G.Y.: What should we do in our daily lives to combat, in that phrase of
yours, the power and influence of white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy? What can be done on the proverbial ground?
An anthology of essays from The Times’s philosophy series, published by Liveright.
b.h.: I
live in a small, predominantly white town in the Bible Belt. Rather
than saying, “What would Jesus do?” I always think, “What does Martin
Luther King want me to do today?”
Then I decide what Martin Luther
King wants me to do today is to go out into the world and in every way
that I can, small and large, build a beloved community. As a Buddhist
Christian, I also think of Buddhist monk
Thich Nhat Hanh’s saying, “Let’s
throw this pebble into the water, it may not go far in the beginning,
but it will ripple out.” So, every day, I’m challenging myself, “What
are you doing, bell, for the
creation of the beloved community?” Because that’s the underground,
local, insistence that I be a fundamental part of the world that I’m in.
I’ve been to
the Farmer’s Market, I’ve been
to the church bazaar this morning. I really push myself to relate to
people, that is, people that I might not feel as comfortable relating
to. There are many Kentucky
hillbilly white persons who look
at me with contempt. They cannot turn me around. I am doing the same
thing as those civil rights activists, those black folk and those white
folk who sat in at those diners and who
marched.
It’s
about humanization. And I can’t think of another way to imagine how
we’re going to get out of the crisis of racial hatred if it’s not
through the will to humanize. Personally, I draw
incredible strength from the
images of black people and white people in social movements. I
personally did not think “Selma” was a great film, but the strength that
I gained from the film was thinking
about all of those people, those
white folks who see “Selma” and say, “My God, this is unjust! Let’s go
do our part.” And it’s awesome when we’re called. There are
many times in this life of mine
when I ask myself, “What are you willing to give your life for, bell?
When are you willing to get out in the streets knowing that you’re
risking your health?”
And if those older black women
who were there in Selma, Ala., can do this stuff, it just reminds you
how incredibly vital this history of struggle has been towards allowing
you and I to be in the state of privilege
that we live within today.
G.Y.: That point hits home, especially as I think about my own intellectual
identity and yet often fail to think about the privilege that comes with
it.
The connecting tie to black, white, Hispanic, native people, Asian people is the greed and the materialism that we all invest in and share.
b.h.: I am a total intellectual. I tell people that intellectual work is the
laboratory that I go into every day. Without all of those people engaged
in civil rights struggles, I would not be here in
this laboratory. I mean, how
many black women have had the good fortune to write more than 30 books?
When I wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning, I do my prayers and
meditations, and then I have what I call my “study
hours.” I try to read a book a
day, a nonfiction book, and 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.
G.Y.: Absolutely. You’ve talked about how theory can function as a place of healing. Can you say more about that?
b.h.: I
always start with children. Most children are amazing critical thinkers
before we silence them. I think that theory is essentially a way to
make sense of the world; as a gifted child growing
up in a dysfunctional family
where giftedness was not appreciated, what held me above water was the
idea of thinking through, “Why are Mom and Dad the way they are?” And
those are questions that are
at the heart of critical
thinking. And that’s why I think critical thinking and theory can be
such a source of healing. It moves us forward. And, of course, I don’t
know about other thinkers and writers,
but I have the good fortune
every day of my life to have somebody contacting me, either on the
streets or by mail, telling me about how my work has changed their life,
how it has enabled them to go forward. And
what greater gift to be had as a
thinker-theorist, than that?
G.Y.: How do you prevent yourself from being seduced by that? I think that
there is that temptation by intellectuals/scholars, who are well known,
to be seduced into a state of narcissism. How do you
resist that?
b.h.: First
of all, I live in a city of 12,000 people where most of them don’t have
a clue about who bell hooks is for the most part, or where someone asks
“Is bell hooks a person?”
There is humility in the life
that I lead, because one thing about having my given name, Gloria Jean,
which is such a great Appalachian hillbilly name, is that I’m not
walking around in my daily life usually
as bell hooks. I’m walking
around in the dailiness of my life as just the ordinary Gloria Jean.
That’s changing a bit in the little town that I live in because more of
me as a thinker, writer and artist
is coming out into the world of
the town that I live in.
I
think that I’ve been coming out more and more in the fact that the work
that I’m writing is about spirituality, because one of the central
aspects that has kept me grounded in my life has been spirituality.
Growing up, when my mom used to
tell me, “You’re really smart, but you’re not better than anyone else,” I
used to think, “Why does she go on about that?” And, of course,
now I see why. It was to keep me
grounded and to keep me respecting the different ways of knowing and
the knowledges of other people, and not thinking “Oh, I am so smart,” which I think can
happen to many well-known intellectuals.
I
always kind of chuckle at people labeling me a public intellectual. I
chuckle because people used to say, “How have you written so much?” and
I’d say, “By not having a life.” There
is nothing public about the
energy, the discipline and solitude it takes to produce so much writing.
I think of public intellectuals as very different, because I think that
they’re airing their work for that
public engagement. Really, in
all the years of my writing that was not my intention. It was to produce
theory that people could use. I have this phrase that I use, “working
with the work.” So if somebody
comes up to me, and they have
one of those bell hooks books that’s abused and battered, and every page
is underlined, I know they’ve been working with the work. And that’s
where it is for me.
G.Y.: Is there a connection between teaching as a space of healing and your understanding of love?
b.h.: Well,
I believe whole-heartedly that the only way out of domination is love,
and the only way into really being able to connect with others, and to
know how to be, is to be participating in every
aspect of your life as a
sacrament of love, and that includes teaching. I don’t do a lot of
teaching these days. I am semi-retired. Because, like any act of love,
it takes a lot of your energy.
I
was just talking with a neighbor about what it feels like to be working
at a need-based college like Berea, where none of our students pay
tuition, and many of them come from the hills of Appalachia. We often
get
discouraged anytime we feel that
our college isn’t living up to its history of integration and of racial
inclusion. But then we’d see we have students who are doing such
amazing things, from the hills
of Virginia, or Tennessee. You
just know, I am right where I am meant to be, doing what I should be
doing, and giving and receiving the love that comes anytime we do that
work well.
Poverty has become infinitely more violent than it ever was when I was a girl. You lived next door to very poor black people, but who had very joyful lives. That’s not the poverty of today.
G.Y.: You’ve conceptualized love as the opposite of estrangement. Can you say something about that?
b.h.: When we engage love as action, you can’t act without connecting. I often think of that phrase, only connect.
In terms of white supremacy right now for instance, the police stopped
me a few weeks ago here in
Berea, because I was doing something wrong. I initially felt fear, and I
was thinking about the fact that in all of my 60-some years of my life
in this country, I have never felt afraid
of policemen before, but I feel
afraid now. He was just total sweetness. And yet I thought, what a
horrible change in our society that that level of estrangement has taken
place that was not there before.
I
know that the essential experience of black men and women has always
been different, but from the time I was a girl to now, I never thought
the police were my enemy. Yet, what black woman witnessing the
incredible
abuse of Sandra Bland can’t
shake in her boots if she’s being stopped by the police? When I was
watching that video, I was amazed the police didn’t shoot her on the
spot! White supremacist white
people are crazy.
I
used to talk about patriarchy as a mental illness of disordered desire,
but white supremacy is equally a serious and profound mental illness,
and it leads people to do completely and utterly insane things. I think
one of the things that is going
on in our society is the normalization of mental illness, and the
normalization of white supremacy, and the evocation and the spreading of
this is part of that mental illness. So
remember that we are a culture
in crisis. Our crisis is as much a spiritual crisis as it is a political
crisis, and that’s why Martin Luther King, Jr. was so profoundly
prescient in describing how the work
of love would be necessary to
have a transformative impact.
G.Y.: And of course, that doesn’t mean that you don’t find an important place in your work for rage, as in your book “Killing Rage”?
b.h.: Oh,
absolutely. The first time that I got to be with Thich Nhat Hanh, I had
just been longing to meet him. I was like, I’m going to meet this
incredibly holy man. On the day that I was
going to him, every step of the
way I felt that I was encountering some kind of racism or sexism. When I
got to him, the first thing out of my mouth was, “I am so angry!”
And he,
of course, Mr. Calm himself, Mr.
Peace, said, “Well, you know, hold on to your anger, and use it as
compost for your garden.” And I thought, “Yes, yes, I can do that!” I
tell that story
to people all the time. I was
telling him about the struggles I was having with my male partner at the
time and he said, “It is O.K. to say I want to kill you, but then you
need to step back from that, and
remember what brought you to
this person in the first place.” And I think that if we think of anger
as compost, we think of it as energy that can be recycled in the
direction of our good. It is an empowering
force. If we don’t think about
it that way, it becomes a debilitating and destructive force.
One of the things white people gave us when they gave us integration was full access to the tormenting reality of desire, and the expectation of constant consumption.
G.Y.: Since you mentioned Sandra Bland, and there are so many other cases
that we can mention, how can we use the trauma that black people are
experiencing, or reconfigure that trauma into compost?
How can black people do that?
What does that look like therapeutically, or collectively?
b.h.: We
have to be willing to be truthful. And to be truthful, we have to say,
the problem that black people face, the trauma of white supremacy in our
lives, is not limited to police brutality. That’s
just one aspect. I often say
that the issue for young black males is the street. If you only have the
streets, you encounter violence on all sides: black on black violence,
the violence of addiction, and the violence
of police brutality. So the
question is why at this stage of our history, with so many wealthy black
people, and so many gifted black people, how do we provide a place
other than the streets for black males? And
it is so gendered, because the
street, in an imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, is
male, especially when it is dark. There is so much feeling of being lost
that it is beyond the trauma of racism.
It is the trauma of imperialist
white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, because poverty has become
infinitely more violent than it ever was when I was a girl. You lived
next door to very poor black people, but
who had very joyful lives.
That’s not the poverty of today.
G.Y.: How is the poverty of today different?
b.h.: Let’s
face it, one of the things white people gave us when they gave us
integration was full access to the tormenting reality of desire, and the
expectation of constant consumption. So
part of the difference of
poverty today is this sort of world of fantasy — fantasizing that you’ll
win the lottery, fantasizing that money will come. I always cling to
Lorraine Hansberry’s mama
saying in “A in Raisin in the
Sun,” “Since when did money become life?” I think that with the poverty
of my growing up that I lived with and among, we were always made to
feel like money
is not what life is all about.
That’s the total difference for everyone living right now, because most
people in our culture believe money is everything. That is the big tie,
the connecting tie to black,
white, Hispanic, native people,
Asian people — the greed and the materialism that we all invest in and
share.
G.Y.: When you make that claim, I can see some readers saying that bell is pathologizing black spaces.
b.h.: As I said, we have normalized mental illness in this society. So it’s
not the pathologizing of black spaces; it’s saying that the majority of
cultural spaces in our society are infused
with pathology. That’s why it’s
so hard to get out of it, because it has become the culture that is
being fed to us every day. None of us can escape it unless we do so by
conscious living and conscious
loving, and that’s become harder
for everybody. I don’t have a problem stating the fact that trauma
creates wounds, and most of our wounds are not healed as
African-Americans. We’re not really
different in that way from all
the others who are wounded. Let’s face it — wounded white people
frequently can cover up their wounds, because they have greater access
to material power.
I
find it fascinating that every day you go to the supermarket, and you
look at the people, and you look at us, and you look at all of this
media that is parading the sorrows and the mental illnesses of the white
rich
in our society. And it’s like
everybody just skips over that. Nobody would raise the question, “why
don’t we pathologize the rich?” We actually believe that they suffer
mental illness,
and that they deserve healing.
The issue for us as black people is that very few people feel that we
deserve healing. Which is why we have very few systems that promote
healing in our lives. The primary system that
ever promoted healing in black
people is the church, and we see what is going on in most churches
today. They’ve become an extension of that material greed.
One of the reasons for why so much black rebel anti-racist movements failed is because they didn’t take care of the home as a site of resistance.
G.Y.: As you shared being stopped by police, I thought of your book “Black
Looks: Race and Representation,” where you describe whiteness as a site
of terror. Has that changed for you?
b.h.: I
don’t think that has changed for most black people. That particular
essay, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” talks
about whiteness, the black imagination,
and how many of us live in fear
of whiteness. And I emphasize the story about the policeman because for
many of us that fear of whiteness has intensified. I think that white
people, for the most part, never think
about black people wanting to be
in black only spaces, because we do not feel safe.
In
my last book, “Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice,” I
really wanted to raise and problematize the question: Where do we feel
safe as black people? I definitely return to the home as a place
of spiritual possibility, home
as a holy place.
I
bought my current house from a conservative white male capitalist who
lives across the street from me, and I’m so happy in my little home. I
tell people, when I open the doors of my house it’s like these
arms come out, and they’re just
embracing me. I think that is part of our radical resistance to the
culture of domination. I know that I’m not who he imagined in this
little house. He imagined a nice
white family with two kids, and I
think on some level it was very hard for him to sell his house to a
radical black woman, a radical black feminist woman. I think all of us,
in terms of houses, have our idea, when
we love our home, of who we want
to be in it. But I think black folks in general across class have to
restore that sense of resistance in the home.
When
we look at the history of anti-racist rebels among black people, so
much organizing happened in people’s homes. I always think about Mary
McLeod Bethune: “Let’s just start the college in your
living room.” Self-determination
really does begin at home. We’re finding out that one of the reasons
for why so much black rebel anti-racist movements failed is because they
didn’t take care
of the home as a site of
resistance. So, you have very wounded people trying to lead movements in
a world beyond the home, but they were simply not psychologically fit
to lead.
G.Y.: That’s an important segue to the question about your concept of “soul
healing” with respect to black men. What does soul healing among black
men look like? And what role do
you think black women play in
helping to help nurture that soul healing?
b.h.: Every
now and then, George, I write a book that hardly anyone pays any
attention to. One such book in my life is my book on black masculinity,
“We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity.”
An aspect of that book that I
found deeply moving is when I use the metaphor of Isis and Osiris.
Osiris is attacked, and his body parts are spread all over. Isis, the
stern mother, sister and lover, goes and fetches
those parts and puts him back
together again. That sort of metaphor of harmony and friction that can
be soul-healing for black people is so real to me. Often I feel sad,
because I think we are in a culture that
keeps black men and women
further apart from one another, rather than meeting us in that place of
shared history, shared story.
I
am so grateful for the black male friends in my life. Like so many
professional black women, I don’t have a partner. I would like to have
one, but I’ve been grateful for having conscious, caring, black
male comrades and friends, who
keep me from any kind of integration of black masculinity, who just keep
me in this space of loving blackness.
To
have that kind of bonding is precious. These are the constructive
moments of our time, and they’re not televised. When Malcolm X said we
have to see each other with new eyes, I think that’s where
self-determination
begins and how we are with one
another. Let’s face it, so many black males and females have suffered
mental abandonment, and more than police brutality, that’s the core for
many of us of our trauma.
Betrayal is always about
abandonment. And many of us have been emotionally abandoned. These are
the wounds we have yet to correctly attend to so both black children and
biracial children can have the opportunity
to truly care for themselves in a
way that’s optimal for all.
G.Y.: How are your Buddhist practices and your feminist practices mutually reinforcing?
b.h.: Well,
I would have to say my Buddhist Christian practice challenges me, as
does feminism. Buddhism continues to inspire me because there is such an
emphasis on practice. What are you doing? Right
livelihood, right action. We are
back to that self-interrogation that is so crucial. It’s funny that you
would link Buddhism and feminism, because I think one of the things
that I’m grappling with
at this stage of my life is how
much of the core grounding in ethical-spiritual values has been the
solid ground on which I stood. That ground is from both Buddhism and
Christianity, and then feminism that helped
me as a young woman to find and
appreciate that ground. The spirituality piece came up for me in my love
of Beat poetry. I came to Buddhism through the Beats, through Gary
Snyder and Jack Kerouac — they all
sort of gave me this other space
of groundedness.
I
talk about spirituality more now than ever before, because I see my
students suffering more than ever before, especially women students who
feel like so much is expected of them. They’ve got to be the equals
of men, but then they’ve got to
be submissive if they are heteronormative, they have to find a partner.
It’s just so much demand that has led them to depression, to addiction,
or suicide. And it’s
amazing how spirituality grounds
them.
Feminism
does not ground me. It is the discipline that comes from spiritual
practice that is the foundation of my life. If we talk about what a
disciplined writer I have been and hope to continue to be, that
discipline
starts with a spiritual
practice. It’s just every day, every day, every day.
This
interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in
this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky,
Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth and others) can be found here.