bell hooks

I have recently been reading bell hooks work, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. For the first ten chapters I would honestly say that at times it has been tedious. She is a strong black woman that has very serious issues that relate to black feminism or the lack of a black feminist voice in the feminist movement. As a result, she tends to bash white, privileged feminists who are not only closed to dissenting views, but also many steal from black feminists without giving them their proper credit. This being said, I have found a lot of the things that she talks about to not only be very true but also very thought provoking. So, I will present you with the two nuggets that I found very interesting early-on in my reading.

1. "Significantly, I learned that any progressive political movement grows and matures only to the degree that it passionately welcomes and encourages, in theory and practice, diversity of opinion, new ideas, critical exchange and dissent."

What really caught me about this was the portion "in theory and practice". It is and has been throughout the past common practice for Americans to talk the good talk (theory) but never to back up this talk (practice). And hooks mentions this in reference to the feminist movement but also in the civil rights movement. She mentions that it was expected that people within these movements should "support the party line" and not introduce their dissenting ideas.

In the political atmosphere today I think this is especially true. Just four months from now we are all going to be asked to go to the polls and vote for the next president. We have essentially two possible choices (to win). If there was ever a time that the government was telling us that dissent is not going to be tolerated it is in politics. I talk with a friend of mine on a regular basis about how we are unable to vote for someone that actually represents what we want for our country. The reason for this is that there will never be a presidential candidate bold enough to admit that they are an atheist, or an agnostic. That would be committing electoral suicide. Additionally, right now we have a candidate like Barack Obama who is apparently the most liberal candidate ever to run for president. I sure as shit can't tell because he cannot say what he truly feels or again he would be committing electoral suicide. Without the moderate vote in states like Ohio, in the midwest and some of the swing states along the east coast he has no chance of winning. And deep down inside he knows that the far left liberals will fall in line because they all fear another four years of republican politics.

The next excerpt from hooks' book I will just let you think about, because it relates to my life and I imagine most of my friends lives as we are all well to do, for the most part.

"Then, as now, I was findamentally anti-burgeois. To me this does not mean that I do not like beautiful things or desire material well-being. It means that I do not sit around longing to be rich, and that I believe hedonistic materialism to be a central aspect of an imperialist colonialism that perpetuates and maintains white supremacist capitalist patriarchy."