Dear Teacher,

I never imagined that I’d have an opportunity to thank you or formally consider the worlds your wisdom made possible. Naturally, I am struck by feelings of humility in this address, as I try to tap into the bravery that you taught me is necessary for existing and becoming as well as the love from which both grief and gratitude are rooted. How am I meant to rightly situate gratitude when our first encounter became a life-altering event? Life-altering in that your writings were the foundation for my consciousness; over time they remained a beacon for political integrity; and they remain a redemptive blueprint for transforming the shame of having come from somewhere in particular. That foundational blueprint you permitted me to sketch has guided my work as an educator, activist-scholar, white feminist race-traitor, and wounded grown child (hooks, 2004) of the rural South who aspires to co-create communities of belonging beyond the violence of whiteness, heteropatriarchy, and capital. Your teachings allowed me to create nothing short of an entire life for myself—one in which I remain skeptical of how my personal motivations have been shaped by political structures, histories, and ideas. You’ve existed as a teacher, helping me orient my spirit and practice towards horizons of joy, tenderness, and radical possibility. Your legacy is     untraceably expansive. My students—future teachers—have been touched by the ways you’ve changed me. Their visions for creating worlds more hospitable to both justice and gentleness have, likewise, been shaped by your life and work. You continue to teach me how to honor my unfinished self and delight in queerness, as a white daughter of the South whose home is hostile to anti-racist commitments. You help me consider how weaving love throughout critiques of violation is necessary to my own survival, and how to believe in the possibility of surviving whole (hooks, 2000). Thank you.

Though I’ve never attempted a direct address, I have been in dialogue with you for decades. Marginalia in each book asks you questions; your words are cradled in quotation marks in every article I’ve published. And in my teaching—there you are—in my students’ final reflections as they come to know that, although it can seem like the odds are stacked against them and their future students, revolutionary education is still possible. This is now and you are gone. This is now and, at this point in my life, I’ve become intimate with the contours of loss and the way grief stalls us out, confounds the quietest parts of our souls. Three years ago, my dad, like you, died of kidney failure. Remembering that experience, I again recognize the capitalist rhythm of production, progress, and perpetual exploitative motion that does not pause to honor the sacredness of loss.

I first met you when I was attending a small state college in Georgia studying to become a high school English teacher. While in college I worked as the receptionist at a car dealership because my dad owned dealerships in our town. It is what I had always known. I had also always known the social and cultural position prescribed upon my white woman body. I knew the patriarchal racist training that defined my body’s history and my place according to the conventions of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal values that adults taught me through fear-based relational practices. Though, until I met you, I didn’t have language or framing to speak about the violence of all I’d ever known. You helped me distinguish between what I had always known and learning that it wasn’t all I knew. For instance, I knew how the dominating power of my white caretakers felt and the emotional scarcity that it bred in my spirit and in my community. I knew the logic of segregation and supremacist thought felt incompatible with my daily experiences of attending integrated public schools and learning alongside others from different races and class positions. I knew I wanted to escape the country-minded people I came from as quickly as possible. I knew the person the confines of rural life meant for me to be sought to determine the limits of who I might become.

I went to college, unlike my parents, became a vegetarian, stopped watching television, and wore bandanas around my head as a signifier      of rebellion, but my only motivation was running—my opposition was not rooted in consciousness. Teaching to Transgress was assigned my junior year, and in this first encounter, your words invited me—and all my unattended angst—to feel something different. It was the first time I met so many other would-be teachers, like Paulo Freire and Audre Lorde, and learned the language of becoming. It was my first introduction to the long and harmful history of white women who call themselves feminists… it was me, crucially, learning that I was white. You wrote about how personal experience keeps us from striving; how desire itself becomes too heavy so we let go of dreaming; and how the classroom is the most radical site of transformation. As I read your words, I felt what transformation does inside a body. I felt expansion’s momentum, the opposite of what I had always known.

I didn’t feel defensive or afraid, but rather I grew angry that none of my white caretakers, none of my country teachers, had taught me what was real about history and, therefore, my own life. You, having learned from your own experiences, offered me theory as “a location for healing” (hooks 1994, 59). Like you wrote, I was away from home and no longer “forced to conform to someone else’s image of who I should be,” and like you told me, “school [became] the place where I could… through ideas, reinvent myself” (hooks 1994, 3). Your teaching changed me, woke me up, helped me feel the fury that was always alive underneath other peoples’ notions of what I oughta do and be. Fury for the white women who scolded me into dresses, crossing my legs, and tending to the silence that—like tablecloths for Sunday supper—covered over white men’s violence. I related to how you wrote about your life as a child; in my upbringing a confrontational gesture resisting my father’s control (hooks 1992) could also result in a violence. I knew how the crust of a pound cake and a cheekbone could easily crumble, and that my submission kept the structures intact. You transformed my original motivation of escape into a responsibility that I was eager to fulfill. After I met you, I stopped running away and began running towards the places that also dreamed of possibility and expansiveness. Teaching became a vocation, sacred and spiritual work worthy of pursuing.

Consciousness undoes us. Once I understood that everything is political, I developed an appetite to understand why and in what ways. You made it possible for me to recognize the ways in which I had been malnourished. I’ve learned that the political is sparked by a feeling, an interruption in the habitual daily practices of all we’ve ever been taught to take for granted. I’ve recognized the experiences of coming undone in my own teaching: those disquieting instances when my students came to learn how their identities intersect with history; how those histories constitute contemporary structures of domination; and how they are connected to systems of power and oppression. When despair would be too simple to allow, I asked my students, “who ever told this was going to be easy?” I also told them that I love them, I am responsible to them. I want you to know that you are the reason I am unafraid to grapple alongside them with love, openly sharing how the weight of ongoing violations is hard for me too. It is you who taught me to think of a teacher as a healer, of education as a practice of spiritual growth requiring mutual vulnerability (hooks 1994). You made education and teaching sacred healing practices for me.

For me, a college degree was my escape from conventional, white supremacist, patriarchal domination. I didn’t expect to become curious about my own complicity in these historical structures and patterns as a white woman. Though I was born to white parents with no formal education, I was raised by a Black woman whose care-based loving practices nurtured the seeds of my desire to pursue justice. From you I first learned about the structures of white supremacy that historicized her role of raising white peoples’ kids, about how sexist norms are intertwined with race and class. Though I thought I loved her as a child, you helped me interrogate my own love practices, to ask myself how it      is ethically possible for me to love the people of color in my life when my inheritance—and my body—means I live intimately in relationship to violence. The gifts you have given me are an ability to bring history into dialogue with the supremacist cultural identity within which I had been positioned and trained—one      which made explicit rules about relationships with Black people and forced me into an emotional solidarity with white adults in my life that was not to be questioned, or else. 

It wasn’t simply that my status was “overdetermined by [my] relationship to white men” (hooks 1994, 95), but in a structural and social context of abuse (Thandeka 1999), I was made to believe my safety depended on that loyalty. Luckily, white men consistently fail. Those who were burdened by the responsibility of caring for me failed. Your teachings allowed me to reframe my personal past within the material past of racist patriarchal violence. Moreover, they allowed the experiences shaping my relational capacity for intimacy, safety, and trust with regards to white men to become a force for delightfully refusing to cover their violence. Thank you for illuminating what is real in the contexts of refusal, love, and violence; for teaching me about choice and responsibility; and for feeling like a safe place to return again and again when I felt afraid.

You made clear that the choice of intentionally living an anti-racist life was possible for me and helped me recognize that, despite dominant frameworks, I had been born into a life of diversity and intimacy with those who had been framed as dangerous others. I took your charge that it is necessary to become intimate with history and power quite seriously. I pursued a master’s degree in African American Studies despite feeling like graduate school wasn’t for people like me. By that I meant, people who would be deemed white hillbillies that didn’t grow up reading books or witnessing their parents model that behavior; whose drawls were so thick, city folks perceived me as slow; who learned to make stew from squirrels killed that evening in the woods; whose parents listened to country rather than Liberal radio and didn’t hide their -isms in empty performances of “knowing better.” I learned to drive when I was eight years old on my dad’s farm and how to bottle feed a calf whose mother died in birth when I was eleven. I value how country life taught me to befriend imagination. Though, because I didn’t grow up reading books or challenging the status-quo, I carried this alternative education around like a dirty secret.

While pursuing this degree, the shame of class (and race and gender) traveled with me all the way to Boston. There, I turned to your writings on class to give me the necessary courage to think more critically about my own shame. I carried your wisdom that “it is impossible to talk meaningfully about ending racism,” which is what I thought I was there to do, “without talking about class” (hooks 2000, 7). You opened Class Matters by writing, “I began to write about class in an effort to clarify my own personal journey from a working-class background to the world of affluence, in an effort to be more class conscious” (hooks 2000, 8). I needed you and this book as I navigated this new world. I was only able to attend Boston University because I was, inexplicably, offered a tuition scholarship for my one year of study. Thinking this would make my pursuit a point of pride for my family because I wouldn’t be spending money, I was disappointed when it didn’t. Their disapproval affirmed their racist positions and their fear of my pursuits to change. Choosing that degree, something my friends from more privileged class positions never understood, was also the choice to risk losing my family, but I had to choose what felt right to me. You birthed the new blueprints for ethics that required courage, and feeling the sharp edges of this choice, despite the familial risks, made the belonging I found in your writing more sacred than ever before.

Though I was terrified that people would judge me for being a white Southern girl studying African American Studies, I was surprised that my fears were not confirmed. I was also surprised by how much I missed the South. At first, it was the pace—I missed that unhurried way of moving through the world that allowed for attention-paying. Then I grew nostalgic for porch chats that were filled with as much silence as sound, and I recalled longingly      the nice-nasty of how Mama Grace would say “interesting” instead of “ugly” to describe my new sweater. Of all the works you’ve written, it was Belonging: A Culture of Place (hooks 2009), that became most significant to me. In reflecting on your own experience of leaving the South, you wrote, “I was never able to truly ‘get away.’ In my mind and imagination, I was always returning to the Kentucky hills, to find there a way to ground my being, a place of spiritual sustenance” (hooks 2009, 58). In that book, you wrote about the South with grace, and you honored cultural practices and the sanctity of stewarding those practices as well as the land. Yet still, you remain critical of the violent structures, the racist patriarchal values that undermined all that was sacred to you. You wrote about your family with critical accountability, which I came to understand as love. I read this book again and again over the course of my time studying in Boston because, in it, I was able to find belonging in a new place where I never felt like I fit quite right. I was able to feel at home and recognize the crucial differences of your experiences as a Black, queer, feminist scholar. I was able to begin loving my own queerness as difference because you existed.

Though people in the Northeast were kind to me, there was a particular mode of fetishizing where I came from that felt uncomfortable. I wonder if the sensation is familiar to you too? Maybe “same,” but importantly different. You wrote about the “painful leavetaking” (hooks 2009, 59) and about how, from a distance, you could reflect on your “homeplace differently separating all that [you] treasure, all that [you] needed to cherish, from all that [you] dreaded and wanted to see destroyed” (hooks 2009, 60). I took direction from you despite the fetishization or overt condemnation of the South, and I sought out an intimacy with my homeplace that could resurrect some aspect of where I came from and give me an opportunity to feel like an integrated self despite inhabiting worlds that were hostile towards one another. Your writings on a porch’s essential femininity, the ways in which country ways were the best ways to be, and the answers to my questions about difference held me. Your love moved me forward with political integrity and with a personal safety that class differences didn’t think to allow in those years. Thank you. It became possible, for me as a white Southerner, to love the South and continue becoming more integrated in myself as an educator dedicated to naming and exposing my inheritance of white violence. You taught me to understand this work as the practice of love.

Years later, your teachings guided me towards a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies in Education. The first time I’d ever heard anyone speak of the field of Cultural Studies was you. In Outlaw Culture you described cultural studies as a site where you could “freely transgress boundaries” and as a “location that enabled students to enter passionately a pedagogical process firmly rooted in education for critical consciousness, a place where they felt recognized and included, where they could unite knowledge learned in classrooms with life outside” (hooks 1994, 3). My research and writing have been dedicated to exposing and refusing whiteness, settler logics, and masculinity as dominant frameworks which uphold ordinary violences as everyday routines in educational institutions. Doctoral work would have been something I might’ve never imagined possible without your generous teachings and vulnerable writings exposing your own personal trajectory. My teaching led to a course designed for future teachers that interrogated settler histories of American education and contemporary structural realities with regards to race, class, gender, sexuality, ideology, power, and politics. The first time, and every semester since, I assigned “Engaged Pedagogy” (hooks, 1994, 13) as our final reading. Extending my own beginnings, I would offer your critical lessons to my own students, who now have their own students. In this way, your life and work gave shape to the long trajectory of my life as a teacher and made it possible for me to model honest discussions of power with a commitment to vulnerability and our own unfinishedness in struggles towards more liberatory futures. In this way, your work lives on and will transform the lives of so many others. Thank you.

This is at once a too-long letter and not enough. I want to say what else? I want to account for all the lessons, the courage, the possibilities you provided me so I could begin learning how to love justice into reality. That is the essential quality of all your teachings: love. Love as a verb. Love as commitment. I know how hard it is to interrogate the behaviors of those who’ve harmed me and to not recreate intimate inheritances which have harmed people I love— like you. To orient this work through a framework of love makes it possible. In All About Love (2001), you reflect on grief’s role in relation to a love ethic. You write that:

To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love. Since loving lets us let go of so much fear, it also guides our grief. When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame. Given that commitment is an important aspect of love, we who love know we must sustain ties in life and death. Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion (hooks 2001, 200-201).

In 2018 my father was informed he was in the late stages of renal failure. For two years I split my life between teaching these “radical” visions of pedagogy, praxis, and possibility and reminiscing about life on the farm and walking alongside my dad on his journey towards death.

The split in my consciousness was never more powerful than teaching my students a chapter of Pedagogy of the Oppressed during an online class from my dying father’s porch then coming inside to make him a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich. I read Belonging again and tried to remember, with love, that everything I’ve become began there, on a porch, or slathering too much mayonnaise on a sandwich. You allowed me to hold the complexity of my identity with compassion and commitment; to understand the work of accountability in relation to work around whiteness as responsibility (which is another way of saying love); to understand my queerness and be content with being at odds with everything around me; to understand that from this rebellious spirit, creation is born as we are forced to invent ourselves again, and again, and again. You showed me that to strive towards wholeness with integrity means that new ways of being in old worlds must give way to creating new ones and that this world-making must be practiced every day. 

Already grieving your loss, when I learned that you and my dad both died of the same cause, I was jolted back into the sorrow of permanence. After losing my dad, I returned to your language on grief again and again—and I still do. What does it mean to grieve without shame when we are captured in neoliberal rhythms that refuse to honor our undoing? I am still learning to sustain the ties that bound me to both him and, now, you in life and death. Though I do not quite know how to thank either of you for this life that has unexpectedly become one that I call “mine,” I am committed to the work of trying every day.

Thank you for the worlds you make real, the ones you exposed and refigured, and for loving us all so excellently.

With gratitude, eternally,

Courtney

References

hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press.

___. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

___.2000. Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge.

___. 2001. All about Love. New Visions. New York: William Morrow.

___. 2004. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books.

___. 2009. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Taylor and Francis.

Thandeka. 1999. Learning to be White: Money, race, and God in America. New York: Continuum.