What I Learned from bell hooks
On a new documentary and a refreshing look at Appalachia
There’s a lot of talk about Appalachia these days with the news that a senator from Ohio and author of the most mean-spirited memoir I’ve ever read, J.D. Vance, will be the running mate of 45. Vance’s stolen valor claim to have survived poverty in Appalachia is part of his elaborate political mythology of being from a place that he simultaneously despises as he does all poor people. The folks over at “If Books Could Kill,” have re-released their episode about this guy and it’s a banger of an episode. You might also read, my friend Beth Howard’s excellent and refreshing piece, “Rednecks for Black Lives,” (from 2020).
What you certainly would not have learned from any of the mainstream coverage about Appalachia in the last few weeks is that Black people live there. Among those was the Black feminist writer and cultural critic, bell hooks.
There’s a new (2024) documentary called “Becoming bell hooks,” which offers a luscious view of the hills of Kentucky where she grew up and returned at the end of her life. The film also provides a lovely introduction to her work built around my theme here this week, that feminism is for everybody, the name of one of her forty books.
I’ve learned so much from bell hooks since I first discovered her writing in the mid-1980s, when I first encountered her on the page through Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. She was the first person I’d ever heard of who changed her name as a way “…to construct a writer-identity,” something that would lay the foundation for my own name change.
In her ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism, hooks writes about the double-bind that Black women faced when asked to support the "women’s vote,” while denying Black men’s right to vote. She observed that the passage of the 19th Amendment was “more a victory for racist principles than a triumph of feminist principles,” an insight it still seems hard to get across with some.
Of course, she continued to point out the hazards of white feminism through its various iterations, such as Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and its focus on employment as the path to women’s liberation when Black women had already been laboring. This was especially helpful for me in realizing the limits of the feminism I was first taught and expanded my view of what feminism could be. She also went on to criticize Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” sometimes to the dismay of those closest to her.
The film also includes a discussion of her use of the term “white supremacy,” which she preferred to use instead of “racism,” because it so easily reverts to the individual attitude rather than an entire system. That is always how I’m using the term, which is easily confused with the people in the pointy hats. I’m grateful to bell hooks for this insight and it’s part of why I keep a quote from her in my signature file:
“When we use the term white supremacy, it doesn't just evoke white people. It evokes a political world that we all can frame ourselves in relationship to.” ~ bell hooks
Just last year, I attended a symposium on bell hooks in Philadelphia (you can watch the whole thing here). Since she had just passed in 2021, it was also kind of a memorial to her, with lots of people who knew her sharing their memories. One thing that I will never forget is that Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who was a good friend of hers, said that she never took a traditional academic job because she wanted time to read, and thus, would have no time for faculty meetings. A she-ro for our times! Eschewing faculty meetings and administrative work to read! And, Dr. Guy-Sheftall said bell hooks read three to four books every day. Every. Day.
Something else I heard at the memorial was that bell hooks died thinking that people wouldn’t remember her and that her work had no impact. This film is a powerful refutation to her fear of being forgotten and a dynamic testimony to her legacy. When you find this documentary at a streaming service near you, let it transform you.