bell hooks - People Quotes

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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
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
As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.

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
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
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
Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.

bell hooks
I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another's differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this In order to love you, I must make you something else. That's what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.

bell hooks
People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities.

bell hooks
Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

bell hooks
It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.

bell hooks