Bell Hooks Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.

  Bell Hooks

  Race, Talking, Class

• I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society — because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.

  Bell Hooks

  Thinking, People, Important

  "You Don’t Have to Wear White: Rethinking Those Disney-esque Marriage Traditions" by J.N. Salters, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 26, 2013.

• All of us in the academy and in the culture as a whole are called to renew our minds if we are to transform educational institutions-and society-so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom.

  Bell Hooks

  Educational, Passion, Justice

• No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

  Bell Hooks

  Women, Writing, Black

• We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

  Bell Hooks

  Media, White, Culture

  bell hooks, Amalia Mesa-Bains (2017). “Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism”, p.66, Routledge

• Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.

  Bell Hooks

  Meaningful, Moving, Differences

  bell hooks (2013). “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope”, p.197, Routledge

• Fame is fun, money is useful, celebrity can be exciting, but finally life is about optimal well-being and how we achieve that in dominator culture, in a greedy culture, in a culture that uses so much of the world’s resources. How do men and women, boys and girls, live lives of compassion, justice and love? And I think that’s the visionary challenge for feminism and all other progressive movements for social change.

  Bell Hooks

  Girl, Fun, Live Life

• I think our culture doesn't recognize passion, because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries.

  Bell Hooks

  Real, Passion, Thinking

  Bell Hooks (1996). “Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies”, p.122, Psychology Press

• The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.

  Bell Hooks

  Men, Justice, Principles

• as females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing-- yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves

  Bell Hooks

  Female, Culture, Longing

• While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white people do not feel that this pleasure should be linked to unlearning racism.

  Bell Hooks

  White, Racism, People

  bell hooks (2014). “Black Looks: Race and Representation”, p.17, Routledge

• In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love.

  Bell Hooks

  Pain, Men, Practice

• When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.

  Bell Hooks

  Expression, Names, Profound

  bell hooks (2013). “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope”, p.14, Routledge

• In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

  Bell Hooks

  Culture, Preoccupation, Inevitable

• This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust. If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.

  Bell Hooks

  Girl, Loss, Men

  bell hooks (2004). “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”

• 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.

  Bell Hooks

  Confused, Keeping Secrets, Space

• We don't really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don't encourage boys to be whole.

  Bell Hooks

  Children, Boys, Culture

  Source: nefac.net

• This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy.” Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionaliz ed gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?

  Bell Hooks

  Children, Names, Silence

  bell hooks (2004). “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

• Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.

  Bell Hooks

  Struggle, Feminism, Western Culture

  bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.26, Routledge

• It's really important to have life strategies and part of that is sort of knowing where you want to go so you can have a map that helps you to get there. And the traditional way tells us oh we get into school and someone else advises us, helps us, but that often does not work for African Americans female and male. Because what works for the dominant culture often does not work for us.

  Bell Hooks

  School, Knowing, African American

  Interview with Pierce Freelon, blackademics.org. October, 2006.

• I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.

  Bell Hooks

  Emotional, Years, Imagination

  "Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh". www.lionsroar.com. March 24, 2017.

• Part of why I have started writing about love is feeling that our culture is forgetting what Martin Luther King taught. We name more and more streets and schools after him but that's almost irrelevant, because what is to be remembered is that strength to love.

  Bell Hooks

  Kings, Writing, School

  "Building a Community of Love". Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh, plumvillage.org. January 1, 2000.

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