The Teachings of a Loving Radical

bell hooks (1952-2021)

In 2014 bell hooks came to The New School— where I currently teach—to do a public dialogue with Cornel West. West and hooks were very close friends, having met back in Yale while teaching there in the 80s. Their animated exchange — an encounter of two of the most important American public intellectuals — was far ranging in topics, but also with many hilarious personal moments, at some point touching on hooks’ love life. Hooks started reminiscing about “meeting a [Black] man who wasn’t very intellectual” and how she was not inclined to date him, and recalling how West told her at the time: “Well, he don’t have to be intellectual bell. You can talk to me”. West added, after some laughter: “what I meant was I could see the direction of the flow of your heart […] and I didn’t want you to trump it by somehow not giving this brother a chance just because he hasn’t read Paulo Freire.”

That kidding aside, bell hooks’ role in that conversation — and in her writings and her role in American public life— was at all times the one of a fiercely intelligent thinker capable to clearly articulate and lay out the components of , in her words, “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” of the American political system, but also the one of a deeply approachable, warm and generous individual. This aspect of hooks was one of the things that made her so unique in my view: not just the clarity of her critique, but the way in which her critical intellect was accompanied by deep generosity and the ability —which is the indicator of a true educator— of being open to listening to others. It is for that reason, I believe, that after the sad and surprising news yesterday of her untimely passing at 69 social media was alight with a veritable outpouring of posts, photos, quotes and testimonials about meeting her, being inspired by her writings, and more. Many of my friends and contacts — artists and writers— spoke about her wisdom, and the powerful way they felt they connected to her.

The takeaway for me was that hooks’ legacy is not just the one of a major postmodern political thinker, socially engaged educator and fierce critic of racism, patriarchy and toxic masculinity but it is also one of generosity, empathy and, yes, love.

In her book All About Love: New Visions (1999), hooks builds a series of arguments that depart from the very personal, starting and the role that affection and compassion play in childhood to reflect on how it shapes us as adults and citizens.  In an interview given around the time when she wrote this book, hooks discusses how “greed has made us less loving as a nation” and then makes a statement that feels really prescient two decades before the Trump era:

“Part of what has happened to us as a nation is we have confused discipline with a kind of blind obedience to authoritarianism whether it is children to parents or us to a government or a nation that is acting in a way that is autocratic and wrong.”

Furthermore, in that same interview she points at the importance of attending to another kind of affective need, which in her view is a blind spot of progressivism.

“The American left has never been interested in attending to the needs of the spirit— and this is why the conservative right wing always reaches out more to masses of people because it acknowledges emotional needs.”

Given that hooks was shaped by the legacy of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights era, I wonder if/how she felt that MLK’s theology of liberation was precisely that which had been lost in the political evolution of the left.

As a minimal tribute I have included below a few quotes where hooks dwells on the topic, primarily in All About Love. But first I want to end with a brief thought.

While hooks was not technically a visual arts educator, her ideas on visual culture, race, and critical pedagogy shaped the discourse of inclusivity, critical thinking and education practices that informed all of us who worked in art institutions over the last 30 years, making her a revered and central figure. 

A few years ago, I was at a gathering of art museum education directors where the discussion briefly went toward the subject of how the profession was not properly respected or recognized outside the field. At some point, one of the veterans of our group said: “this will not change until the day that the Nobel prize is awarded to an arts educator.”

I thought about that comment today, and I concluded that if there is anyone in that category that deserved such recognition that would be bell hooks.

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“If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.” (1999)

From All About Love:

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”

“the wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”

“In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information.”

“We fear that evaluating our needs and then carefully choosing partners will reveal that there is no one for us to love. Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all. What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.”

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”