Bell Hooks Quotes About Racism

Quotes about: Racism

• Patriarchy, like any system of domination (for example, racism), relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and a superior party, one person is strong, the other weak, and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless. To those who support patriarchal thinking, maintaining power and control is acceptable by whatever means.

  Bell Hooks

  Strong, Powerful, Party

• …“white supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e slavery, apartheid) than the term “internalized racism”- a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term “white supremacy” enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise “white supremacist control” over other black people.

  Bell Hooks

  Attitude, Exercise, Color

• When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.

  Bell Hooks

  White, Racism, Support

  bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.125, Routledge

• Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Emotional, Thinking

  bell hooks (2014). “Black Looks: Race and Representation”, p.167, Routledge

• 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

• The struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.

  Bell Hooks

  Struggle, Fighting, Racism

  bell hooks (2014). “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center”, p.57, Routledge

• I believe that this nation can only heal from the wounds of racism if we all begin to love blackness. And by that I don't mean that we love only that which is best within us, but that we're also able to love that which is faltering, which is wounded, which is contradictory, incomplete.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Mean, Racism

• Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation.

  Bell Hooks

  Stress, Commitment, White

  "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center". Book by Bell Hooks, 1984.

• Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now ... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.

  Bell Hooks

  Acceptance, Men, Racism

  bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.89, Routledge

• I was teasing my brother that he was penniless, homeless, jobless. Right now in his life, racism isn't the central highlighting force: it's the world of work and economics. It doesn't mean that he isn't influenced by racism, but when he wakes up in the morning the thing that's driving his world is really issues of class, economics and power as they articulate themselves.

  Bell Hooks

  Morning, Brother, Mean

  Source: nefac.net

• Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?

  Bell Hooks

  White, Racism, Feelings

  bell hooks (2014). “Black Looks: Race and Representation”, p.15, Routledge

• I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.

  Bell Hooks

  Book, Issues, Racism

  "A chat with the Author of "All About Love: New Visions"". CNN Chat Room, www.cnn.com. February 17, 2000.

• As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.

  Bell Hooks

  Voice, White, Racism

  "Killing Rage: Ending Racism". Book by Bell Hooks, September 15, 1995.

• The notion that black folks have nothing to learn from scholarship that may reflect racial or racist biases is dangerous. It promotes closed-mindedness and a narrow understanding of knowledge to hold that "race" is such an overwhelming concept that it negates the validity of any insights contained in a work that may have some racist or sexist aspects.

  Bell Hooks

  Race, Racism, Understanding

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