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by Paulette Sankofa, WAMM
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| Dr. bell hooks speaks to WAMM co-director Paulette Sankofa about her current social justice projects. |
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When we are called to a life of love,
we are called first and foremost to a
life of risk.
—bell hooks
On April 2, 2003, I had the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with bell hooks, whom I affectionately refer to as “Sistah-Dr. bell hooks.” She is a scholar, a distinguished professor of English, a feminist theorist, and is passionate about her life’s work around critical consciousness and activism for an anti-racist, non-sexist, loving, peaceful, and just society. She is the author of Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, Teaching to Transgress, and All About Love: New Visions, to name only a few of her works.
She invited me to gather some of my friends for a “Sistah-girl” dialogue following her presentation at Hamline University. We discussed everything from women’s health to the challenges Black males face in the United States culture of patriarchy, racism, and dominance. The following are excerpts from my dialogue with bell and another sistah-friend, Rev. Marchelle Hallmon:
Paulette: I want to start off by asking what you’re working on now, and what was your influence for it?
bell: I’m working now on several things, [including] one book on teaching, Teaching Community, Pedagogy of Hope. I was just concerned that I was seeing so much cynicism and despair about social justice and about peacemaking and I really wanted to write words focused around the positive things that people were doing around the direction of social change and social justice. And it also addressed various issues that we don’t address about masculinity and really why we don’t address patriarchy, and that in our culture there are a lot of systems that reinforce patriarchy as a system of dominance.
Paulette: How do you see organized religion as a resource for the African-American community? I know sometimes I’m concerned that the church is not living out its social justice principles to feed the poor, clothe the naked, bring sight to those that are spiritually, emotionally, or socially blind.
bell: I think today the church is often very much a corporate entity that is concerned about money-making and maintaining its own existence. I think that is in contrast between spirituality and religion. I think that we shifted from being an African-American people concerned about our beliefs and issues of faith to being focused on issues of prosperity. I grew up in a church where I had my mission duties as a child, to go around in my neighborhood to write for those who couldn’t write, to read for those who couldn’t read. To be active and ask myself how I was realizing God in my actions. It was more than just having a doctrine. It was about action . . . praxis.
Paulette: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced as a feminist writer in trying to integrate a holistic perspective in your work?
bell: Well, I think that I see myself more as a visionary feminist. That is that I see the interlocking systems of domination. I think my critique as a feminist leads to analysis of anti-racism, anti-homophobia, and other systems of domination, and not to just a format of women’s rights and women’s equality with men. I’m more interested in the total transformation of patriarchal culture. As Black people, I try to see the impact of feminism on our daily lives, and the ways that are relevant to our lives, and that the basic definition of feminism to end oppressive systems can be a useful definition for us to work with.
Paulette: That leads to my last question. You write a great deal about issues of racism, sexism, and love. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., talked about related issues that he called the “three evils” poverty, racism, and militarism. However, he never spoke of sexism and you have spoken about that.
bell: Dr. King spoke of racism, militarism, and in speaking of poverty, he always spoke of it as it related to imperialism. Whenever I use Dr. King’s quotes, I like to live in the hope that if he had lived longer, he would have included gender. He was assassinated at such an early time—in his early thirties—and we don’t know what evolutions in conscious-ness may have taken place. However, it is clear that Malcolm had already begun to include gender more than Martin Luther King before he, too, was assassinated. However, when we add all those interlocking systems together, we start to see their interrelated-ness and interdependencies.
We sat around and talked and laughed for a while longer. On the next day, I had the privilege and honor to hear Sistah bell speak on the subject “Make Love, Not War.” She did not disappoint those gathered for a packed house at Hamline United Methodist Church. |
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W A M M Action!
Voices in the Wilderness (www.nonviolence.org/vitw/) has called on the anti-war movement to support the role of the UN and NGOs in addressing the humanitarian crisis and power vacuum that the U.S. war created in Iraq. Please consider taking the following actions:
Call or fax members of both the Senate Committee on Armed Services and the House Armed Services Committee to demand that U.S. occupying forces allow UN organizations and other NGOs to perform the work they are commissioned to do and have been doing the past thirteen years. This work should not be done by soldiers bearing massive armaments.
Send the same message to your senators, representatives, the White House, and the Pentagon. Demand meetings with any of the above to insure your message is heard.
U.S. Capitol Switchboard
202-224-3121
Senate Committee on Armed Services
http://armed-services.senate.gov/
House Armed Services Committee
www.house.gov/hasc/
White House
202-456-1111 (comment line)
202-456-2461 (fax)
U.S. Department of Defense
703-697-5737
Also, support relief agencies providing humanitarian support to the people of Iraq. There are many NGOs doing this work. Here are two to consider:
UNICEF
212-326-7000 (phone)
www.unicef.org
Mennonite Central Committee (MCC)
877-517-5673 (phone)
www.mcc.org
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© 2003 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete May 2003 Index - click here
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