Gloria Jean Watkins was a professor and social activist known by the pen name bell hooks. Her work purposes later questioned gender conventions, black femininity, class, and capitalism, among other things. In her whole life she didn’t simply talk about the challenges of today; she also talked about the possibilities for the future.
She wasn’t just a social feminist. She was an agent provocateur, a critic, and an interrogator. Hooks favored the phrase “imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy” over the more scholarly term “intersectionality.” She wasn’t afraid to criticize other women, even Black women when their politics and viewpoints differed from hers.
Bell was an articulate writer, a theorist, and a rigorous thinker. She desired her ideas to reach a wide range of people, from kitchen tables to book clubs to jail yards, and they did. The feminist study group created by incarcerated men in California is one of the most impressive testaments to hooks’ influence and ability to reach people in unexpected places.
“I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”
– bell hooks in “Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism,” 1981
“Ain’t I a Woman?” by bell hooks was published in 1992. One of the 20 most influential women’s books of the last two decades was Black Women and Feminism. She claimed that under slavery, a combination of racism and sexism lead to black women having the lowest status and living conditions of any group in the United States. She established the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Kentucky in 2014.
She was a firm believer in the power of literature and ideas to effect significant social change. Her novels include Teaching to Transgress, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Intellectual Life, and Remembered Rapture, to name a few. In her books, she candidly discussed a rough childhood and a tyrant father who was nevertheless protective and compassionate at times.
Through her perspective, hooks invited us to care, feel, and experience the world. She could never be accused of being a sporadic radical; she carried her Black left feminist politics everywhere she went. She received a chorus of boos from parents and graduates as a college commencement speaker in Texas when she strongly opposed war, violence, and racism. When she spoke truth to power, not everyone loved her back.
By choice, Hooks chose an unconventional career path. She forged her own path, spoke her own truths, and won many hearts and minds in the process. Rest in power, my sister; your mission has been accomplished, and we are all the better for it. She will always remain a prominent figure in Black feminist thought and practice, as well as in the work of all groups striving to advance us beyond imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.
The iconic educator was born in a working-class African-American family. Her father worked as a janitor and her mother was a maid in white households. Her family issued a statement that hooks died Wednesday 15 December at the age of 69 in Berea, Kentucky. With her, we lost a superior feminist writer, radical thinker, and teacher.
