Gloria Watkins (1952- ), better known by her pen name of bell hooks (all lower case), is an American professor, a leading black feminist writer and thinker. She wanted to be a poet but made her name as a feminist by showing how white and racist feminism is.
Her catchphrase is “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”: not only is American society built by and for rich white men, built on divisions of race, class and sex, but the losers – blacks, women and the poor – are brainwashed into accepting it through education, television, music and film.
That is why she likes to talk about Madonna and hip hop: they both started out speaking truth to power but then sold out, singing the white man’s song, the old song of women as sex objects and black men as violent brutes. That is what those rap videos are about. Spike Lee, meanwhile, did not sell out but then wound up getting sidelined.
She says America is not so much racist as white supremacist. Racism is about how people think and feel, it is something that comes from living in a white supremacist society, that is, a society built to favour whites over others.
Blacks living in such a society are brainwashed, they have colonized minds. They learn to look down on themselves, to hate themselves. They buy into the “black is ugly” message they hear all the time. They suffer from internalized racism.
The road to freedom is education. That is why she teaches. An education, that is, based on reading books, asking hard questions and thinking for oneself, education that tears apart the lies, that decolonizes your mind. A free society can be built on nothing less.
She grew up in the American South in Jim Crow days, on the black side of a small town in Kentucky. Until she went to high school she lived in a world of home and school that was largely the creation of black women. Her school was black, even her teachers were black. It was the old black Southern world that “offers ways of knowing, habits of being, that can sustain us as a people.”
Then she won a scholarship to Stanford University and found herself thrust into an all-white world.
Even though Stanford was a world of learning and ideas and books, none of the books spoke about what being a black woman in a white world meant – the self-hatred, the injustices, the racism and the sexism both. She looked and looked for a book that would speak to her, for her, but found none. So at age 19 she started writing the book herself in between her studies and her work. In time it became “Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism” (1981).
She expected her ideas to judged, weighed and even found wanting, but she did not expect them to be crushed under a landslide of angry words. Many white feminists hated the book, but many black women loved it. In any case it made her name.
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“That is why she likes to talk about Madonna and hip hop: they both started out speaking truth to power but then sold out, singing the white man’s song”..so treating women like sex-objects is a “white mans” innovation??
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That is why she likes to talk about Madonna and hip hop: they both started out speaking truth to power..
Madonna!? Seriously..?
So what’s revolutionary about “Everybody”
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/madonna/everybody97and81.html
or Into the Groove..?
There were attempts to suppress some of the more salacious rap music, the trial against Two Live Crew comes to mind.. as does the attempt by Warner Brothers to not release Ice-T’s cop killer.
If anything venues like MTV were pretty late to the game when it came to rap in any form. It would appear gangsta rap became popular in spite of the record industry, not because of it.
Where would you place N.W.A..?
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I was never a fan of N.W.A, so I cannot comment on them.
I do not think that hooks is saying that Madonna is profound or anything. Her point is that she started out with something of a feminist edge but then later made herself into a sex object. And with her it went way beyond just showing some skin or shaking her body to turn on men.
With hip hop the change is clearer: in the early days you had rap with a serious message, like Public Enemy or KRS-One – along with the Ice-Ts and the 2 Live Crews. But by 1995 that stuff was next to dead. Gangsta rap took over, hip hop had gone corporate and was going for the big money: the white audience. A serious form of black expression had gone minstrel.
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miker: hooks did not say that white men came up with the idea of making women into sex objects – just that they use it to help keep women in their place. Black men do it too. It is not a white thing or a black thing, but a man thing.
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I’ll admit to not having studied bell hooks very much. In my mind I’ve always lumped her with Andrea Dworkin — both sort of intellectual lightweights who managed to find some degree of pop culture/fringe intellectual fame via heartfelt, oftentimes shrill declarations concerning a handful of personal hangups about sex.
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Abagond: lol ok..true..
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I’m a little late to weigh in, but, I’m curious what ideas of hers, in particular, inflamed feminists or white feminists? What are the themes at the heart of Ain’t I a Woman?
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Stomped,
I believe bell hooks’ interest is in acknowledging/including the situations of women of color & other marginalized women (working class, etc.) in the Feminist Movement. Which she believes/believed is a movement focused only on middle & upper class white women. I’m about halfway through Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (published in the 1980s) and this seems to be her one of her themes so far.
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To Abagond:
Her point (Bell Hooks) is that she (Madonna) started out with something of a feminist edge but then later made herself into a sex object.
Many women that I know, almost all of whom would call themselves feminists (and a far portion of which are lesbian or bisexual..) would disagree strongly with that statement. If anything I would say Madonna clearly took charge of her own career after her first few years (as opposed to early days when she was heavily influenced by John Benitez) and added other themes to her videos and performances. The fact she is now 50 years and can still sell out shows (and has been doing so since her late 30s..) is a credit to her ability to reinvent herself beyond a straight up sex object.
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Amen!
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I love this woman.
I wrote about the colonized mindset in one of my posts and it got a lot of hits. I called it a mental illness caused by white supremacy. In a sense the answers to the question that whites ask all the time about what’s wrong with black people is simple: White supremacy, white racism, and white history. Period.
http://brothawolf.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/colonized-mental-illness/
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Looks like I need to grab up a few of her books as well – I’ll order them when ordering a couple more of Dr. Painter’s!
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