Professor
hooks Lord Saunders Audience
by Alec Scott
Two
weeks after an African American won the Academy Award for Best Actress
for the first time, intellectual and scholar bell hooks spoke to
a diverse audience of Oberlin students, faculty, and staff in Lord
Lounge. hooks Wednesday evening presentation, an hour of question
and answer, More on Love: A Conversation with bell hooks
focused on the use of feminist-based love as a method for achieving
spiritual liberation in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
Formerly an Oberlin College professor, hooks currently teaches at
City College in New York City and has written over 13 books.
Ive been thinking a lot about love, hooks said,
opening her talk with a reading from her latest book, Feminism is
for Everybody, Feminist politics is a choice to love.
The author spoke in great detail about the phenomena of love being
gender-classified as a womans thing, and the need for both
men and women to reclaim the emotion.
Professor hooks then talked about a passage from Feminism is for
Everybody, that references the recent Charlies Angels remake,
commenting on the films portrayal of women as having to be
beautiful, brilliant, but stupid in matters of the heart.
Upon opening for questions, sophomore Aaliyah Bilal asked hooks
for strategies in developing self-confidence in the struggle to
become politicized. hooks empathized with the dilemma, speaking
of mainstream media outlets, such as television and film, as tools
of society which make it impossible for women and people of color
to love themselves fully. hooks urged students to turn off the media
and open themselves up to more life affirming outlets of communication.
Certain things you dont want to take in, hooks
stated. If you think about all the sex were fed, its
a wonder we dont think about it all the time.
The next question prompted the author to speak about the need for
conscious people to be relentless in the pursuit of their objectives.
The author commented that the award-winning Halle Berry film, Monsters
Ball exemplified many American stereotypes, characterizing the black
characters as flat and pornographic. The author stated that Hollywood
serves as the best propaganda institution for reinforcing the white
supremacist power structure in America.
The first black person to win an Oscar was a maid, hooks
said, The second person was a ho. We moved from mammy to ho!
After an explosion of applause and laughter on that point, hooks
tackled a question on the principles of feminism. The author described
feminism as a movement based upon the desire to end sexism, and
sexist exploitation and oppression. She urged students to get
out of the box, and not base the movement upon a single gender
or race.
Senior Vivian Ip asked hooks what her favorite movies were. The
author described Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as groundbreaking
in its ability to draw mainstream society into theaters across a
language barrier. She credited the popular movie for getting a mainstream
audience to sit through three hours of subtitles.
Another question cited hooks essay, All About Love, in which
the author examined familial love. hooks then talked about the difference
between care and love. She defined love as marked by commitment,
knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust. She described her
own childhood as emotionally and physically abusive and that she
felt her intellectual gifts went unnoticed. Show love in actions,
hooks said.
The conversation then moved to the subject of the appropriation
of Third World culture. Professor hooks argued that appropriation
was not all bad. She stated that the most important consideration
in determining the merits of an act of appropriation is the objective
of the usage. She cited the illegal downloading of music on-line
as just appropriation.
I had never heard it spoken of as anything but negative. A
lot of Obies feel that theyre copying or taking something
thats not theirs to take. But that hinders a lot of possible
collaboration, first-year Althea Lazzaro said.
Inter-racial dating was the next topic of conversation. Professor
hooks first and foremost argued that love is hard to come by, so
everyone must find it where they can. She did, however, express
her sentiments that people of color cannot find true love in unconscious
white men and women.
All kinds of things shape desire, she said, consider
desire in complex ways. People can make political choices about
who they want to love.
hooks then discussed the recent trend of white female attraction
to dredlocks on black men, highlighting the submission of both parties
to white supremacist exotification of an Afro-centric tradition.
First-year Jyoti Bhatt next asked hooks for suggestions on forming
alliances with conscious women outside of Oberlin. The author talked
about the need for racial openness to exist and for small steps
to be taken in ones immediate setting.
She was great. She was saying the way to create solidarity
between women is to look in the mirror and work on an individual,
local scale. You cant build a revolution overnight,
Bhatt said.
Imagination was hooks final subject of reflection. She noted
the ability of a Holocaust survivor to withstand concentration camp
horrors by imaging the mutual love he held with his wife. hooks
likened this miracle to her own ability to look beyond the white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy of her youth, and urge her
grandmother to make her a brown-skinned Barbie doll. The author
recommended that students shift their focus away from deconstructing
and instead focus on creating something liberating within the space.
I felt enlightened. She seemed very down to earth. I liked
her presentation style. She was able to reach a lot of people,
first-year Morgan Shelton said.
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