Love As A Radical Choice

Love gets marketed as a feeling, a vibe, a private comfort. Bell Hooks pushes back hard and says the truly radical move is to treat love as a disciplined practice, especially inside a culture shaped by domination. We sit down with her to talk about why choosing love can be heroic, why so many of us inherit confused ideas about intimacy, and why one clear line matters for survival: if someone is abusing you, they’re not loving you.

From there, the conversation widens into free speech, censorship, and the quiet ways a “marketplace of ideas” can shrink what students feel safe saying. Bell Hooks makes the case that shutting down speech often ends up silencing dissenting voices first, and she argues for critical engagement over banning. We dig into political correctness as mindful respect when it’s working, and as a shortcut for silencing when it’s used as a label. Her answer is “radical openness” the courage to hear what we dislike, think clearly, and speak precisely in a diverse democracy.

The episode also includes a moving tribute and reflection on her legacy, with Beverly Guy-Sheftall sharing why Hooks chose her name, how she taught beyond the academy, and why self-love can be a deeply political act for Black children and communities living under white supremacy. If you care about the First Amendment, courageous teaching, intersectional analysis, and the practice of love as social transformation, this conversation stays with you.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:46

I'm Bill Hooks.

SPEAKER_03 0:47

And I'm speaking freely.

SPEAKER_04 0:49

What is this on the back? Is your right to freedom of speech? Me, America great. If a church burns a flag, America is not threatened. Political speech is the heart of the First Amendment.

Love As A Heroic Practice

SPEAKER_01 1:01

We're expressing their religious beliefs. Welcome to Speaking Freely. I'm Ken Paulson. Belle Hooks is a noted author, scholar, and social critic. She's written 22 books, all of which are in print, including this thoughtful and thought-provoking Communion, The Female Search for Love. I'd like to uh read to you from your own book a line that says, This book is testimony, a celebration of the joy women find when we restore the search for love to its rightful heroic place at the center of our lives. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_03 1:41

We've always thought of our heroes as having to do with debt and war. And you know, when we think of Joseph Campbell and the whole idea of the heroic journey, it's rarely a journey that's about love. It's about, you know, deeds that have to do with conquering, domination, what have you. And so part of what I wanted to say to people is that living as we do in a culture of domination, to truly choose to love is heroic. To work at love, to really let yourself, you know, understand the art of loving.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

You say in the book there are revelations for you after the age of 40 about love. That there are insights you gained that you wished you'd had earlier?

SPEAKER_03 2:23

Well, absolutely, because I I think that like so many other people in our culture, I had very, very confused ideas about love. And you know, in the first book, All About Love, one of the ideas that was really hard for people to accept was that um if somebody is abusing you, they're not loving you. I mean, you would think that would be a basic understanding most of us would have, but in fact, so many of us have been wounded in some way in our childhoods that we really need to cling to the idea that if someone hurts you, they can also be loving you. And I tried to make a big distinction in that book between care and love. That my like saying that my parents cared for me deeply, and care is important. A lot of children don't receive any care, but it's it's only one ingredient of love.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Now love is not love. Love is a topic that uh many people have written about, and now recently you've written three very well-received books about it. What is your take on love that's different from others?

Abuse And The Myths Of Love

SPEAKER_03 3:22

I always think that part of the genius of Bell Hook, such as it is, is that I bring together standpoints that are that are often um not brought together in our nation. You know, I bring together thoughtfulness about race, gender, class when I'm writing about love. I, you know, I'm one of these fanatic readers. I read a book a day, a non-fiction book a day, and I'm a fanatical mystery reader, and I may read two mysteries a day. So I'm always bringing together, um, not unlike speaking freely, um, diverse ways of knowing. And I think that that has been kind of the the mark of a Bell Hook's books, that you may, you may, you may be reading all about, you know, Buddhism, then you may read about gangster rap, there may be a whole combination of ideas. And I I believe that in our deeply anti-intellectual society, most people read along very narrow lines and think along very narrow lines. So I think that the excitement many people feel when they come to a Bell Hook's book is God, she's brought together these things that just seem like they you would never have put them together.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

You know, I mentioned that you've had 22 books in print. And that's extraordinary. That just doesn't happen. That suggests a shelf life that most authors don't enjoy. But do you ever sit down and say, you know, I really want a bestseller? I want I want this one made into a movie.

SPEAKER_03 4:46

I want all of my books made into movies. You know, because you know what? I think that I believe that I am can the embodiment of that sort of um classical idea of the intellectual as someone who really wants to um be whole. And to me, part of wholeness is I really do like the people, the mass. I really um, you know, want to be able to write books that that are touching the pulse of a diverse audience. So to me, the the only exciting aspect of having a bestseller is that you know that you have that capability, that you're spread across a wide um body of people cross-class, cross-race, and I think that's incredibly exciting, the idea of that, you know.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

And isn't that a temptation to kind of water down your message to broaden it in a way that everyone will find it appealing, sort of like who moved the cheese?

SPEAKER_03 5:42

Well, you know what I think is it in these real deep and profound times, and I don't want to make light in any way because for the past few years I have just been so concerned about the question of censorship and a censorship of the imagination that that begins even before people are censoring what we write. I think that when I look at my career as a thinker and a writer, that what is so amazing is that I have a dissenting voice and that I was able to come into corporate publishing and bring that dissenting voice with me. I mean, the fact is that there it may seem to people that the love books, which are easier to read, unlike all the other Bell Hooks books, I did write them with a mass audience in mind, mindful of my language, mindful of the a a lot of things. But in them, there are ideas that drive people wild because they feel that they're so dissenting. That idea I mentioned to you earlier that care isn't love. I mean, I can't tell you how many talks I went on where people were up yelling. How dare you say, you know, that mom and dad didn't love me because, you know, they they gave me that beating every week that I need it.

Dissent Writing And The Marketplace

SPEAKER_01 6:54

I'm curious uh about your take about the marketplace of ideas.

SPEAKER_03 6:57

Speaking freely is about about all the key word that you use, kid, was the marketplace. And I I think what's really tragic about education, particularly uh at a higher level in our nation right now, is that it has become to be something that is about the marketplace, so that there's a lot of repression that students begin to do um because they want to prepare themselves for the marketplace, for you know, getting the money and getting the power and getting the status and getting the fame. And you know, that means that you know you can't always say um, you know, what you want to say.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

You know, you have not hesitated to question uh projects, programs, or individuals. Um that frankly a lot of the African-American community embraced with pride. Um you've raised questions about Kwanzaa, the Million Man March, and and not least of all Oprah. Uh what what is um is it difficult to speak out on those topics?

SPEAKER_03 7:56

I think, you know, it's difficult to when you're misunderstood, you know, it's difficult when people stand up and say, you know, why do you hate Spike Lee so much? And I say, you know, actually there are there are moments in Spike Lee's films that I think are incredible, that I love, but that doesn't mean that that I don't have a real critical commentary about his work. And I know that as a teacher, I'm constantly encouraging my students to recognize the difference between a critical commentary about something that can illuminate it for you, that can help you to see it in a different way, and something that's just trashing. Because I I think that part of the danger for free speech in our society is the deep longing people have, both in our personal and public lives, to avoid conflict, to avoid hurting someone's feelings, to not you know be polite. And um, and I think that you know, if you think about all the work that's been done by Cecil Bach and others about how as a nation we're lying more and more, I think we have to connect that to an absence of free speech, because when you live in a country that makes truth something that is associated with a painful that should not be spoken, it becomes hard to get people to value speaking freely. Because you know, there are things that we have to say that will be warning, like for example, in in my latest book that I'm talking to you about about black people and self-esteem, there are things that I have to say about black children and how they're parented that are that would sound harsh to a lot of people, but those things have to be said if we're going to address in any way what is happening overall collectively with black children and self-esteem. So to me, you know, a lot of what I do in the classroom is to try to teach that kind of courage that allows you to speak freely. I mean, recently I, you know, I'm a big Martin Luther King fan, especially of the later sermons, and when I go back, you know, in Strength to Love, he talks about standing in the shadows of fascism. And he talks so much about the importance of protecting free speech, our our democracy, and yet, you know, I think that people don't realize how radical much of what he was saying. I mean, he was talking about we're going to see a day of terrorism, we're going to see all of these things. And I think that that's a really um amazing. I mean, here's this man, for example, that most people remember by, you know, what is what is a very poetic, oh, you know, I have a dream speech, but not by the deep, penetrating social and political analysis he had about imperialism and why, because in a sense, we censor that Martin Luther King. Even like a Martin Luther King holiday is constructed to make him more palatable, to to make him be this guy who was just about peace and love, but not about the fact that he was an incredibly sophisticated thinker about peace and love. And to me, the dangers of censorship in our nation and the forms it takes, the very subtle forms it takes, is that people don't get to that Martin Luther King, that that Martin Luther King disappears. I think that about a bell hooks that, you know, I noticed that as I I was telling you um when we talked last about how as a as a dissident intellectual, you know, there was a time when black intellectuals got a lot of press, and you know, but now you hardly ever hear um about bell hooks in the press. Um, you know, newspapers don't call me anymore to say, well, what do you think about because I was seen as the bad, the bad girl, the girl who says the things that people don't want to hear. And again, I have such a subculture of readers that I certainly can't complain, but I am ever cognizant of the fact that a lot of things like the New York Times, a lot of places never review Bell Hook's books. You know, I I my last year I came out with a book on class, where we stand, class matters. Um, and luckily these books sell, but they don't get reviewed. And I I think again, things that are not seen as topical, clever, um, wit, you know, witty in a shallow sense, we often don't hear, and I don't want to just talk about bell hooks. I think dissident speech is not valued in our nation, whether it comes from white men, you know, rich white men or poor white men. I think the real issue is we are in danger as a nation of silencing any form of speech that goes against what is perceived to be the status quo.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

If in your uh classroom your students came to you and said, you know, there's a Nazi coming to campus to speak, he's clearly a racist, there's no question about it. And um and a local organization decided to recruit them to uh recruit this individual to stir things up and uh and they want to enlist you to to fight the appearance. What's your take on that? Well, how do you respond?

Political Correctness And Mindful Talk

SPEAKER_03 13:07

You know, uh my response is always on behalf of free speech because basically I always tell my students if you look at the history of you know silencing, ultimately the people that get silenced are the dissident radical voices that anytime we try to shut down people, it in fact ends up being something that causes us to suffer more. I think that people need to know how to hear information and think critically about it, not to, and that's usually my whole whole thing is to say, what does it mean for us to hear something that we have to think critically about and that we can make a choice about, as opposed to the idea that we should eliminate um people saying certain things, um, people thinking certain things, take certain books out of the library. Well, let's talk about those books, let's talk about those ideas.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

If you listen to conservative talk radio and uh two of the phrases you hear most often are liberal elites and uh political correctness. And uh I I have to tell you, I initially I thought political correctness was a pretty good concept, just in terms of um it's about showing respect for other people, and and and that's a good place to be.

SPEAKER_03 14:19

And yet there seems to be there seems it seems to have been an evolution where political correctness has become more of a code and uh it's become more of a tool of censorship, of silencing, that all you have to do to silence someone um is to say they're politically cor incorrect. And frequently it's a tool that conservatives use to silence or belittle the voices of liberal and radical people. I mean, I like the fact that gangster rappers used to have this phrase, come correct. And you know, that's exactly what it meant. To come correct was to be mindful, to be respectful, to be aware of who you're speaking to. And that was the initial positive thrust of political correctness, which was to be mindful of who you're talking to. And I talk about this in in communion, the female search for love, that women often will talk about men in an extraordinarily hateful way that that is considered quite normal. But in fact, if men talk about women in that extraordinarily hateful way, um, we often get up in arms. And I think that all of those issues, to me, political correctness simply said, be mindful of how you're talking about groups and be mindful of what you do and say. And what is really tragic is the way conservatives and right-wing forces have made political correctness something so negative that there's the kind of backlash now where people feel like, well, I shouldn't have to be mindful. You know, I shouldn't have to think about what I'm saying. And that's too bad because I think, you know, the real freedom of democracy requires of all of us that kind of civility and courtesy where we are mindful, where we think about what we say, because we live in a nation that is incredibly diverse, and yet our language is incredibly binary, incredibly either or. Um, so that we really have to work to be inclusive, you know. When I'm talking about white people who are racist, I have to work to make sure that my language isn't bringing all white people into that. Because I know that's not so. When I'm talking about men who are misogynist and patriarchal, I would have to work to use a language that doesn't just make it seem like this is who all men are.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

You mentioned gangster rap, and I know that you received phone calls, especially when it was the stuff of headlines. They expected you to denounce gangster rap, uh, to be a voice that says this is hurtful to women and hurtful to the culture. Um, and yet you in a way defended gangster rap. Can you talk about that?

Radical Openness Beyond Labels

SPEAKER_03 16:55

Well, again, I think that you know, one of the ways that censorship takes in our culture is the censorship of manners, where we assume that we gotta we know who Ken Fawston is. We know his opinions that he's gonna take. People assume, oh, Bal Hooks is a feminist, these are the opinions that she's gonna have. And to me, that kind of compartmentalization and labeling is very, very anti-not just free speech, but the whole n sense of recognizing that as individuals we can hold very different opinions about things, you know, that I can like for example, I I grew up in Kentucky, I learned how to shoot. Guns are not something that scare me, and you know, I went to the university where I teach most frequently now is in Texas, and they have a a gun exhibit in in a building, and all the feminist people thought I was gonna look at it and say how horrible. And I said, Well, you know, actually, because I like guns, I don't find this horrible, but there are people here who whose families maybe have been wounded by guns or who come from countries where they've been wiped out by guns, maybe they don't want to see guns every day. So I personally would put this kind of exhibit in a gallery so people could choose to see it or not. But I wasn't saying what people thought that as a feminist who is very much anti-violence, I would say. So I think that part of what I hope for us as a nation, and particularly in our educational institutions, is that we will teach what I I use in a phrase in my books, radical openness. Radical openness allows for the fact that you and I might totally disagree about some things. But there may be other things that we have a resonance and a harmony about, and when we compartmentalize each other in such a way that, you know, it's like when someone says, Oh, he's really sexist, or you know, then it's like the shutting down of the idea that the person might be really sexist, but have some other thought idea that might be useful to hear. How do we hold those differing senses of who we are? And you know, I that's one of the reasons I like writing about love because when people love people, they never think they're gonna just think the same. They never, you know, I say to people, will say to me, Well, you know, when we when we try to get our group together to talk about race, there's gonna be conflict. And I said, Well, have you ever had a love relationship with someone where there's no conflict? Why do we expect that we're gonna get together and talk about race and racism and not have perhaps anger or conflict? You know, when we don't expect that in the deepest areas of our lives, our intimate lives, we recognize conflict will be a part of trying to have a relationship with somebody who is not you. And um, we don't recognize that when it comes to difficult issues, and often that's where we start censoring and shutting down.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

You know, I I thought I'd read a great deal about Bell Hook's the phrase, I like guns, never came up in any of those interviews. Where is that from? How do you have an appreciation of guns?

White Supremacy And Self-Esteem

SPEAKER_03 19:59

Well, just because I think of growing up in rural areas, you know, where I mean, I do think that when we talk about gun violence, that we do have to look at areas of our nation where people have always had guns, but use them wisely, courteously, um, and not where just the fact of having a gun meant that you will be violent. And um, so it's it's in I I like the artistry of guns and um and all of that I learned as a child, you know, um, starting with having a BB gun and those kind of things, but you know, as when I was introduced to guns, I was also introduced to the reality of guns and how you should deal with them and and so that you don't endanger yourself or others.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

You know, you're you're a tough social critic, and one of the uh one of the observations is that struck me um was your sense that a majority, I don't want to misquote you, a majority of of white Americans um believe themselves to be superior.

SPEAKER_03 20:57

Oh, absolutely. But I think the worst part of that is that there are lots of black people who believe ourselves to be inferior. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about in this black people and self-esteem book, that uh which is called Soul to Soul, but I think that that's how deep white supremacy is in our nation. That and often, you know, you know this, Ken, that often white people will meet a black person who completely challenges every racial stereotype that they've ever had. Rather than giving up the stereotype, they they they create a special category for that person and say, Well, you're you're not like other black people, or instead of saying, My ideas of black people were too narrow or too and and I think that's the tragedy of any kind of prejudicial thinking that w when we confront any the circumstance that tells us it's not so, we frequently don't enlarge our sense of things. We we actually come up with new ways to protect and defend that way of thinking.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Is language part of the problem and you use the word white supremacy, and I know there was an incident in which you were on a panel with two black men who sort of mocked you for using that phrase.

SPEAKER_03 22:09

And I find it such a helpful phrase because I I what I like about white supremacy is I think it does encompass black self-hate. You know, it encompasses how how do you talk, how do you call a little kid who's dark skinned, who's you know, washing themselves with bleach. You can't say this kid is a racist in the classical sense of prejudicial views against people of color or black people, and yet somewhere that child has learned that there is something wrong about themselves and they should correct it. And to me, white supremacy is a useful term. Because it inc it encompasses the fact that we can have a five-year-old who's looked at enough television in our nation to have an understanding that white is better.

Hope And Fear After 9/11

SPEAKER_01 22:58

One final question for you. Probably an unfairly broad question. You've written for years about uh the challenges we face as a society in terms of gender and race and class. In that period, have you seen encouraging signs?

A Tribute To Bell Hooks

SPEAKER_03 23:15

Well, I think that the fact that a bell hooks can have the incredible readership I have tells us. I I want to say to you, Ken, I think people are hungry for dissent. I think people are hungry for provocative voices that go to the heart of the matter. Because people want to have answers to the things that they are in crisis about. So I I mean there's an irony that on one hand, we have a mass media and a publishing industry particularly, that tells us keep it mellow, don't say anything. But what I find is people are really hungry for truth. And that hunger, as I said in my book, Yearning, I think is something that unites us across class, race, sexual preference, and practice, religion. And I and I see the hope, the hope that I feel within my own self and with other people, is that hunger for truth and for ways to live our lives more fully in a manner that's more fulfilling. And it's that hunger that keeps a place for the dissenting voice that keeps the place for speaking freely. Because that is both an endangered space and a space, on the other hand, where we have more people than ever before who are hungering to hear that dissenting voice. Um, and I think that that's the paradox. That on one hand, there were moments in our recent history as a nation where I felt truly frightened. You know, for the first time in my life, my mother called me and said, You must be really careful what you say when you get up on stages because you, you know, could be assassinated. And I think that um certainly, if nothing else, the September 11th events around the World Trade Center brought into focus that we are a nation um where many people are afraid of free speech and want to silence people. And if we cannot acknowledge that that will to silence is growing, that's what King meant when he talked about standing in the shadows of fascism. So, on one hand, I experienced for the first time ever as a citizen of this nation feeling that I had I had was taking grave risk in standing before audiences and saying the things that I believed. And at the same time, you know, I had audiences that were eager to hear. Well, what do you think about this? Audiences of people who may or may not have agreed with me. So that's the paradox that we live within. A society that is full of promise and possibility, and a society that, on the other hand, will close things down if people feel they need to to protect the lifestyles or the belief systems that they think are the only important belief systems. And that's that's the difficulty. But I'm one who believes in the outrageous pursuit of hope.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Your uh entire career has been about free speech, and we thank you for joining us today on Speaking Freely, Bell Hooks.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

And I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak freely.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

Join us next time as we continue our discussion on free expression and the arts. For more information about speaking freely, visit our website at www.speaking freely.org.org, the War and Peace Report.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

I'm Amy Goodman, the trail-blazing black feminist scholar and activist Belle Hooks died Wednesday at the age of 69. She was a prolific author who wrote about how a person's race, gender, and social class are interconnected, often referred to the quote, imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, Bell Hooks wrote more than 40 books, including the 1981 book, Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, which took its title from the speech by abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Bell Hooks was a longtime educator, most recently a distinguished professor at Berea College in her home state of Kentucky, which created the Bell Hooks Institute as a center for her writing and teaching. Bell Hooks died at her home in Kentucky, surrounded by family and friends. Her family says her cause of death was end-stage renal failure. We'll talk more about her life and legacy with her close friend of more than 40 years, Beverly Guy Shaftal, former president of the National Women's Studies Association and women's studies professor at Spelman. But first, let's hear Belle in her own words speaking in 2006 at the University of Oregon when she gave the keynote address at the Women of Color Conference.

Naming Love Teaching Legacy

SPEAKER_03 31:01

Committed to the struggle to end domination in all its forms since my teenage years, in midlife, I find myself constantly seeking to understand why we have heightened awareness about the suffering caused by exploitation and oppression, both in our nation and in the world. Yet this awareness has not inspired us at all to move towards the collective action needed to bring peace, love, and healing. In my 20s and early 30s, I was most obsessed with finding words to explain systems of domination, to critique and to find a voice to express militant resistance. My voice was at times shrill and piercing, full of the pain, feelings of powerlessness and gender, coupled with awareness of the chokehold dominator culture had on my consciousness. In those days, that voice was often interpreted by the status quo as angry, and more often than not too angry to be worthy of being listened to or heard. Allies in struggle, liberal and progressive, were often eager and still are to portray people of color coming to voice as always and only angry. For radical white folks who had not fully unlearned their racialized sex system, their projected image of an angry black woman letting it all hang out was often superimposed over the reality of voices that were simply boldly speaking truth to power. Ellen Herman, who teaches here in the history department, was the editor of my very first book, A N I Woman, Black Women in Feminism. And I remember the day that she called me and said, you know, we really want to publish your book, but we feel that it's so angry. And I said, Well, Ellen, you know, I can't accept that. It wasn't anger that I was feeling when I wrote this book. It was the keenness of insight. It was the clarity of truth telling. It was the power of breaking out of the bondage of oppression and exploitation. We have to think about why, when people of color find our voice, white people so often can only hear that voice as an angry voice.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

The acclaimed feminist scholar and activist Belle Hooke, speaking in 2006 at the University of Oregon, when she gave the keynote address at the Women of Color conference and read from some of her recent writing. Belle Hooks died Wednesday. She was the author of more than 40 books, ranging from essays and poetry to children's books, such as Skin Again. In 2000, she published the book, All About Love, New Visions, and wrote, quote, It is essential to our struggle for self-determination that we speak of love. For love is a necessary foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our spirits intact. It is love that allows us to survive whole. For more, we're joined by her dear friend, Beverly Guy Shefthal. She is the former president of National Women's Studies Association, Professor Wen Studies at Spellman College. First of all, Professor Guy Sheftal, our condolences on the loss of your close friend Belle Hooks.

SPEAKER_04 34:43

Thank you very much, Amy. And I am really happy to be here. And I love that particular speech that you all uh quoted from.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

Talk about your friend and the icon, the um African feminist, African American feminist trailblazer, Belle Hooks. First, her name. Talk about how she kept it in lower case and why she chose to take that name, Belle Hooks.

SPEAKER_04 35:18

So Belle Hooks uh chose the name of her great-grandmother, Belle Hooks, because she learned from family and other members of the small rural Hopkinsville community in Kentucky that her great-grandmother was fierce and always talking back. And so rather than attach her name to her books, she wanted to create some distance between me, the author, and the words. And the choice of Belle Hooks, her great-grandmother, which she put in lowercase letters, uh said to us that it is not me, Gloria Watkins, uh, who is the most important. It's what these words are. And the model of my great-grandmother, Belle Hooks, who stays in my consciousness. And the the the the small letters also captured, I think, uh Bell Hooks's always transgressive oppositional self. So I'm not gonna even use capital letters, I'm not gonna use my name, I'm going to use my transgressive great-grandmother's name on those books.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Can you talk about Bell Hooks' life and the message she felt which was so important to understand?

SPEAKER_04 36:48

The first thing I'll say about Bell Hooks is that she was always the teacher. I mean, we we know she was a professor uh at many, many um places, Oberlin College, Berea, where she uh spent her last 20 years as a teacher, as a professor. She had a PhD in English, where she wrote a dissertation on Tony Marson. But fundamentally, she was a teacher. And by teacher, I meant she believed that her audience was broader than the academy or broader than higher education. And she wanted to reach the largest number of people, regular people, young boys, children that she could. And she wanted to have the broadest impact on the broadest amount of people. And so when I think of Bell Hooks, I think about her primarily as a teacher. And she was very much impacted by teachers. Uh, she was very much impacted, for example, by the uh Buddhist uh person, um Tik Not Han. Um and I think that she saw herself in some ways as a person who would sit with, sit with young people and community people and students and help them understand this world in which we live, which is full of all kinds of domination. So I see her as a teacher. She was hard-hitting, she was sometimes merciless in her critiques, she was unrelenting, she was courageous, she was in your face, but she was also gentle. And I'm I'm I was just listening to that sort of soft voice, gentle spirit, passionate, and um always, always trying to uh tell the truth from her respect.

SPEAKER_00 38:39

You know, I got a chance to interview her um and uh asked her, it was to remember Paolo Freire, uh, the great educator who wrote uh the pedagogy of the oppressed, where she also laid out her philosophy of education. This is Bell Hooks.

SPEAKER_03 39:01

In our culture, so often people teach um beliefs, values, ideas that have no relationship to how they live their lives. And each of the many times that I saw Paulo, I saw him exemplify again and again um a unity between theory and praxis. And that has inspired me both as an intellectual and as a teacher to want to have that kind of unity, to believe that it to and to know that it's not a dream or a fantasy, but that you can um teach by by by being in the world as much as you can by the books you write.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

And I wanted to turn to an excerpt from Belle Hook's 1999 speech at the Los Angeles Public Library. Here she talks about her conception of love and her book Yearning Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.

SPEAKER_03 39:57

When I go and I I talk a little bit about the question of love, people will start saying to me, Oh, I hope you're not gonna lose that, you know, critical edge, that daring, you know, like angry voice that we had in all the other writings. And and I I say to them that that's exactly um what I think about the question of love, that to talk about love and to talk about um the big question of why choose love and why our nation has to choose love again as one of the ethical values driving our daily lives, is in fact to be doing that which is courageous and daring and enormously difficult to do, precisely because of the profound trivialization of love in our culture. We might do well to not just problematize our difficulties around race, gender, and other things, but to also then talk about what brings us together. You know, what kinds of yearnings do we share across all of those things? And it seems to me that the desire to love and be loved is one of those yearnings people share, irrespective of class, race, sexual preference practice. And that it might be interesting for us to theorize in terms of our struggles to end all forms of domination from that place of love.

SPEAKER_00 41:29

So that's Belle Hooks talking about her book Yearning, Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. If you can talk about that and also her talking about white capitalist, um, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, Professor Guy Shaftal.

SPEAKER_04 41:47

You know, it might you know it might be good to remind all of us that to have black people love themselves, that is a radical act in the US context. And it wasn't, it's not just black women. She wanted little black boys to love themselves. She wanted little black girls with so-called nappy hair to love themselves, which is why she wrote that book about being nappy. So we might think about love as a sort of innocuous, trivial, non-political project, but she knew that loving ourselves, all people, but particularly people of color and black people in the US, to love ourselves is a radical political act. And um that's one of the people's favorite books, all about love, because I think uh we understood that. That if you don't love yourself, if you don't engage in self-love, you cannot possibly change the world. And so that was an extremely important intervention uh in terms of her writings. Her constant naming of imperial white supremacist patriarchy, which can also be framed if we borrow Kimberly Crenshaw's term intersectionality. Bell didn't use the term intersectionality, she wanted us to hear imperial white supremacist patriarchy, and later she added heteropatriarchy, because she wanted to name what that was. But it is essentially the concept of intersectionality which goes back to the 19th century by women such as Mariah Stewart and Ida B. Wells. And so she never stopped saying it. Imperial, white supremacist, heteropatriarchy, because she wanted us to hear it over and over and over again so that we could eradicate it.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

And as you talked about children loving themselves, particularly black children, she wrote that acclaimed children's book, Skin Again, beautifully illustrated by Chris Rashka. The book reads in part, the skin I'm in is just a covering. It cannot tell my story. If you want to know who I am, you have to come inside and open your heart way wide, Professor.

SPEAKER_04 44:22

Yes. She also, her favorite children's book was Be Boy Buzz, which she talked about a lot. And you have a little more protagonist. And she talked about the fact that the uh publishers were sort of reluctant to have a little black boy protagonist, but of course she insisted in the same way as she described earlier, insisting uh to those publishers of that very first book that uh she was not angry, uh, she was committed, and she always again insisted, lived the life that she wanted to live, uh lived it on her own terms, and that was with book publishers, her employers, her family, her partners, and her friends.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

Beverly Guy Sheftal, I want to thank you so much for uh remembering Belle Hooks. It's hard to say remembering. She died just this week at the age of 69. Uh, Professor Beverly Guy Sheftal is a professor of women's studies at Spellman College, former president of the National Women's Studies Association. Next up, we hear from Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock. Stay with us.