bell hooks - Black Quotes

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Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women.... they ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

bell hooks
Today masses of black women in the U.S. refuse to acknowledge that they have much to gain by feminist struggle. They fear feminism. They have stood in place so long that they are afraid to move. They fear change. They fear losing what little they have.

bell hooks
Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as "not black enough."...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.

bell hooks
.. no Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.

bell hooks
In our young minds houses belonged to women were their special domain, not as property, but as places where all that truly mattered in life took place - the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls. There we learned dignity, integrity of being; there we learned to have faith. The folks who made this life possible, who were our primary guides and teachers, were black women.

bell hooks
White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or... and oppression of others.

bell hooks
Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.

bell hooks
Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it…Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves.

bell hooks
Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.

bell hooks
What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

bell hooks
No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women.... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

bell hooks
Any black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind.

bell hooks
They wanted black women to conform to the gender norms set by white society. They wanted to be recognized as 'men,' as patriarchs, by other men, including white men. Yet they could not assume this position if black women were not willing to conform to prevailing sexist gender norms. Many black women who has endured white-supremacist patriarchal domination during slavery did not want to be dominated by black men after manumission.

bell hooks
No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

bell hooks
Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?

bell hooks
While it has become cool for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.

bell hooks
To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

bell hooks