The Black feminist and radical intellectual bell hooks joined the ancestors on December 15, a day before my thirty-seventh birthday. When I read news of her death that morning, I experienced a range of emotions: grief, certainly, but also peace, love, and gratitude. For a moment, admittedly, I was bereft as I experienced states of disbelief that were disrupted by HVAC service people working on my home’s cooling and heating system. When I turned away from them, without thinking, I glanced at my bookshelf and saw the numerous books by bell hooks displayed on the top right shelf. What surprised me most was not that I had a number of her books—let’s face it, I love hooks, always have, always will—but the fact that I had placed them alongside works by the late Toni Morrison and the late Maya Angelou, literary foremothers whose writings also imagined a poetics of joy, life, critical insight, and love beyond the entrenching institutional life of anti-Black racism, sexism, and misogynoir undergirding ideas about what “American” and “America” mean. That’s when it suddenly hit me: I found myself confronted by the emotion that all of these women are now dancing with the ancestors—indeed dancing as ancestors.
“Lorde,” I said to myself, calling on another late Black feminist thinker, “they are all gone.”
In the spirit of literary critic Michael Awkward’s Inspiriting Influences, I took to social media, vis-à-vis Instagram and Facebook, to share my thoughts on the deaths of these titans.
In my post, I sought to evoke how these Black feminist intellectuals shaped my life as a feminist and Black gay male educator. As I continued on with my day—running errands, getting a COVID-19 booster—I kept thinking about hooks, her death, and especially how her work influenced me. While my social media reflections joined a chorus of folk mourning hooks’s death, it was—as a standalone memoriam—quite measurably inefficient. “Hooks deserves more than a fleeting social media status,” I said to myself. As a result of my reflection, I now offer the lessons she gifted me as a Black gay man and feminist educator. I also offer a mini-syllabus aimed at helping Black men engage with Black feminism in the spirit of love and liberation.
Lesson 1: Feminism is for Everybody
Black feminist thought saved my life. I will always be a student and practitioner of Black feminism. It is because of my identity politics as a Black gay man that hooks’s Feminism is for Everyday holds a very special place in my heart, mind, and soul.
For me, Feminism is for Everybody invites Black men to value vulnerability as a practice of liberation. Hooks inspires Black men to live each and every day of our lives free of the toxic masculinity that endangers and kills us. Furthermore, hooks challenges Black men to see—like literally SEE our sisters, Black women and girls, because they are always placing their lives on the line for all Black people, especially Black men and boys. Despite their exhaustion due to their tireless work of saving the planet, working multiple jobs, enduring systems of exploitation, and graduating from every educational institution in the world, Black women still find ways to love us, even with our too often collective practices of ignoring them. Feminism is for Everybody encourages Black men to see and value Black women and girls with love, care, appreciation, and a willingness to battle the forces of violence, racism, and sexism so invested in destroying them.
I read Feminism is for Everybody as a fully realized adult Black gay man. I was moved by hooks’s sweeping conviction that our ability to love, in the everyday, has spiritual and healing powers. She devoted a whole series to exploring “Black people and love” to remind us of love’s spiritual sacredness within our communities. I firmly believe that hooks wanted me—and Black people, men, women, and children—to know that we are a loving, spiritual people and that these are sacred truths that we must unlock.
After reading Feminism is for Everybody, I often asked myself, “How do I unlock these scared truths? What do I need to do in my own life?” The answer: I must move beyond simply uttering that I am a Black gay male feminist. Indeed, I must deal with my own privileges and not rest on my Black queerness as enough. “To be truly visionary,” hooks write in the conclusion of Feminism is for Everybody, “we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality” (hooks 2000, 110). From this quote I learned I must move beyond lip service and actively do all that I can to create spaces centered on truth, power, and justice in my teaching, living, relating, conversating, and loving.
Lesson 2: Teach to Transgress
By profession, I am an educator. I teach social justice and empowerment education by attending to the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in U.S. culture, and I especially center these politics through histories of Black queer life and culture. Although Paulo Freire influences my teaching, I discovered his practices, like so many others, by first reading bell hooks. Hooks considered herself a life-long student of Paulo Freire’s teaching, and she writes about him in Teaching to Transgress. After completing my doctoral degree, I began asking myself what does it mean to be a Black educator. I remember reading hooks’s text because I wanted to know how to bring my Black queerness to the classroom.
Teaching to Transgress taught me that the best thing that I can do for students is to bring my whole self to the classroom. Bringing myself to the classroom allows me to shape my teaching with my lived experiences. At the heart of sharing our lived experience is embracing vulnerability and, thus, radical ways of knowledge production.
Every student has a story, and these stories empower them and us. Once shared, these stories might release students from the terror of living outside of traditions that often silence them. We can also use our lived experiences to explore our emotions. These emotions can exist on a spectrum, which can include rage, anger, or hatred. Black feminists insist that we weaponize these particular emotions to challenge systems of power, ideologies of destruction, and injustice. Hooks also insists that we can use emotions in our classroom through what she calls “a passion of experience”:
When I use the phrase “passion of experience,” it encompasses many feelings but particularly suffering, for there is a particular knowledge that comes from suffering. It is a way of knowing what is often expressed through the body, what it knows, what has been deeply inscribed on it through experience. (hooks 1994, 91)
This complexity of experience, hooks concludes, “can rarely be voiced and named from a distance.” Hooks taught me not only to acknowledge my experiences—along with my pain, my feelings—but also to sit with my emotions very closely. She guided me to examine them subjectively—not objectively from a distance—in order to accept my feelings and their meanings as valid, as truth, as invaluable.
We must hold lived experiences and knowledge together, in the same space, at the same time, because they are critical to our liberation, which will free us from the fears of being labeled traitors to the race, our family, and our community. By exploring our lived experiences, we have the opportunity to see each other in our glory and in our ugly. We can create spaces where I can be me and you can be you without the need of weaponizing violence or hatred to make myself or yourself seen, heard, or valued to our collective destruction.
Lesson 3. Write on Your Own Terms
Hooks was a very prolific writer. Throughout her writings, she often shares that folk did not always perceive her work as “scholarly” or “rigorous,” and by folk, I do mean those in higher education. However, hooks wrote anyway. As someone who has faced criticism for my writing—literally, in graduate school I was told by a queer male faculty of color, “Your writing is terrible”—I wrote any damn way. What this professor did not know was that I had bell hooks on my side. In fact, I had hooks’s Remembered Rapture inmy get-through-graduate-school-and-this-damn-dissertation arsenal.
Across all of her writings, and in Remembered Rapture in particular, hooks taught me to write on my own terms. Many Black women writers, including hooks, Morrison, and Angelou, insist that the best way to write is on your own terms, in your own voice, and without concern for elitist notions of scholarly or rigorous writing. Writing on her own terms as a Black woman, hooks kept herself grounded in Black culture. In so doing, she made writing accessible to those in and beyond her community. In Remembered Rapture, hooks writes:
I write with the intent to share ideas in a manner that makes them accessible to the widest possible audience. This means that I often engage in a thinking and writing process where I am pushing myself to work with ideas in a way that strips them down, that cuts to the chase and does not seek to hide or use language to obscure meaning. The longing to pattern the words and ideas so that they are “in your face”—so that they have an immediacy, a clarity that need not be searched for, that is present right now—allows me to transfer the act of writing vernacular modes of verbal exchange that surface in the expressive culture of the southern black working class. (hooks 1999, 40)
The Southern Black working class. Sit with that. If staying connected to your “roots” could be summed up in one sentence, then the sentence, for me, would be: We can be professors, we can obtain degrees, and we can learn to master the Queen’s English, but we must not write in ways that alienate the community from which we come. As a Black Southerner, I understand this instruction in the marrow of my bones. Indeed, hooks teaches me to write to inspire people who look like me so that, hopefully, my writing will always be an act of reaching back, lifting up, and looking forward to repeating this practice, ad infinitum, ever more and always.
When I return to Remembered Rapture, I’m instructed, reminded, and inspired by hooks to do my research, read widely, stay grounded, and write from the heart and on my own terms.
Lesson 4: The Will to Love
Books such as We Real Cool, The Will to Change, and Feminism is for Everybody collectively imagine a world where Black men and boys can live with “feminist manhood,” which frees us from toxic masculinity. As a Black feminist, hooks believed in Black men’s and Black people’s capacity to hold each other tightly, an act of intimacy that releases us from the fear, terror, and shame of loving ourselves out loud and unapologetically. However, it was her essay “Homophobia in Black Communities” that made me feel that hooks saw me without ever having met me. In this essay she holds the Black community accountable for the ways it inflicts violence against Black women and queer folk. This is no small or easy feat, as there is a rule in Black communities that we don’t air our dirty laundry. Yet, hooks invited Black communities to liberate ourselves from all the ways that we destroy each other as a direct result of systemic racism, oppression, and the legacy of slavery. If we can address homophobia in Black communities, then we can address health concerns like HIV and AIDS, issues within the Black church, and white supremacy. Then we can move closer to something like freedom. We can also find ways to heal, care, and love ourselves beyond any expectations that the world holds for us. She concludes the essay by stating:
It is essential that non-gay black people recognize and respect the hardships, the difficulties gay black people experience, extending the love and understanding that is essential for the making of authentic black community. One way we show our care is by vigilant protest of homophobia. By acknowledging the union between black liberation struggle and gay liberation struggle, we strengthen our solidarity, enhance the scope and power of our allegiances, and further our resistance. (hooks 1989, 126)
By no means was hooks the first or only Black feminist to seek alliances between Black queer folks and our heterosexual counterparts. Black lesbian feminists and Black gay men, including Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Pat Parker, June Jordan, Cheryl Clarke, Joseph Beam, and Essex Hemphill, among countless more, articulated these concerns, too. What hooks teaches me is the courage of conviction required for radical and transformative allyship. She was straight, from what I know, but she did not shy away from calling out how social dis/ease and disease are fatal combinations always threatening Black existence and perpetuating homophobia in Black communities. I would also add that dis/ease and disease stokes transphobia. We cannot remain silent about the countless fatalities this duality causes, not in the name of community, God, the church, or respectability politics.
We need each other—always and ever more. This philosophy voices the core intervention and contribution of hooks’s writings and intellectualism. I take it with me, ever more. Always. My dear bell hooks, thank you. Thank you for risking it all so that a Black gay man like myself can simply be. May you rejoice, dance, and enjoy the ancestral light.
References
Awkward, Michael. 1989. Inspirited Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels. New York: Columbia University Press.
hooks, bell. 2000. Feminism is for Everybody: Passion Politics. Boston: South End Press.
___. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
___. 1999. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. New York: Holt Paperbacks.
___. 2003. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge.
___. 2004. The Will to Change Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square Press.
___. 1989. “Homophobia in Black Communities.” In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 120-126. Boston: South End Press.