HONORING BELL HOOKS

I don’t want to get too far into Black History Month without honoring the late bell hooks.

She was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Kentucky, to a Black working class family in a small segregated town. Her mom worked as a domestic worker for white families and her dad as a janitor. Growing up the child of a Black working mother helped to shape her views of feminism, of women’s roles in society, and specifically how Black women should be included in a movement where they were necessary and important—but so often excluded hooks was a powerful writer, a force of literary and intellectual might, and she changed the way we all think about intersectionality—and feminism. hooks dove deep into what race, capitalism, gender and all their accompanying systems meant for people who experienced them simultaneously. Plainly put, she wrote about what it meant to be a black woman in America.

In 1981, she wrote her first of many books, titled AIN’T I A WOMAN, inspired by Sojourner Truth's speech of the same name. In that she writes: “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.”