[R-G] Bell Hooks Interview (was Anarchism and Feminism)

[usman x]

>From "Talking about a Revolution"
Paperback - 140 pages (June 1998)
Language: English
South End Press ISBN: 0896085872

Also featuring interviews with: Manning Marable, Winona Laduke, Michael
Albert, Howard Zinn, Urvashi Vaid, Peter Kwong, Noam Chomsky, and Barbara
Ehrenreich.

 SOUTH END PRESS: Your work on radical black feminism has been an
inspiration for many young feminists of color, and you yourself were in your
early 20s when you wrote your first book, Ain't I a Woman. What differences
do you see in the political and cultural climate that young progressive
activists face today, compared to when you were formulating your own
politics?

BELL HOOKS: One of the major differences I see in the political climate
today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical
consciousness-in communities, in institutions, among friends. For example,
when I was coming to feminist consciousness-as one aspect of my political
consciousness-at Stanford University, there was a tremendous buzz about
feminism throughout the campus. Women were organizing in the dorms, women
were resisting biased curriculum, all of those things. So, it really offered
a kind of overall support for coming to consciousness, whereas what so
frequently happens now in academic settings is that people feel much more
that they don't have this kind of collective support.

SEP: What do you think has contributed to that change?

BH: The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of
these things led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people
and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and
changing of one's viewpoint.

SEP: Could you describe some of the influences on your own politicization?
In your writing you have focused very much on your development as a woman,
as a writer, and as a critic and political thinker. Could you describe that
process?

BH: One of the issues that I continually write about is that the words we
use to define political positions- whether we talk about being on the left
or being feminist-do not mean that people may not have arrived at positions
of resistance that could be clearly described by that language before they
come to that language. In my case, I've talked a great deal about how
growing up in a very patriarchal household was the setting for my
development of resistance. But it was not until the organized contemporary
feminist movement that I was able to give a name to that resistance.

The movement for social justice that had most affected my life prior to the
feminist movement was the '60s Civil Rights movement, the '60s Black Power
movement, especially because the town that I grew up in, like many southern
towns, was still very racially segregated, despite the existing laws that
argued against discrimination and penalized it. I grew up in a world where
we were integrating the schools for the first time, much later than
integration had occurred in other parts of the United States. I remember
going to school when I was 16 years old with the National Guard, with a
sense that we had to sacrifice, in many ways, our comfort as black people.
Before, I had attended all-Black schools where we certainly thought we
belonged, and were affirmed.

That was the beginning for me of an awakening to the incredible dilemma of
racism and white supremacy in this society: to have to face as a teenager
that the legal demand to end racism and segregation didn't affect our lives
at all, because people continued the social mores of racial apartheid
despite what the government had stated. So, I had a real sense of
conservative white anarchy, that white people in the south who were racist
did not care what the government was saying about desegregation. They were
going to continue the discriminatory practices that had governed their
lives, and they didn't care. That was a real awakening moment for me, to see
that white supremacy as a political ideology governing the social mores of
our lives was stronger for I many white people than any injunction of the
state.

I think we're seeing that kind of political anarchy, conservative anarchy,
returning now as white, militaristic, racist organizations, the neo-nazi
parties, all of these kinds of white supremacist organizations, are rising
up now and opposing the state.

SEP: You have also written about some of the conflicts you faced coming out
of that segregated setting and coming to a college campus with a liberal
attitude. Could you talk about the kinds of issues that brought up?

BH: Going to Stanford as an undergraduate and moving from the South to
California really was the experience that made me think about demography and
geography in the United States and the degree to which geographical location
often informed one's take on issues of race, gender, and class. To move from
such a provincial, conservative, fundamentalist Christian-based life in the
South to this liberal area of Palo Alto, which had an old population then-it
was not built up by the Silicon Valley as it is now-was a big, big shift for
me.

But, again, it was a shift that produced lots of awakenings about the
reality of class. Many people forget that when we had racial segregation as
the total absolute norm in this society, it was impossible for Black people
to live away from one another, so you didn't have some Black middle-class
community or upper-class community that was completely cut off from
working-class and poor Black communities. Part of what was happening, and
that we're seeing the fruits of now, was that racial integration was
ushering in a new division among Black people-not that Black people hadn't
experienced different social standing in our all-Black communities, t the
fact is that people had a much more intimate understanding of experiences
across class.

SEP: You mentioned the idea of coming to political consciousness without
necessarily having the words to describe r express it, and your work is
notable in that it has reached any readers who may not initially describe
themselves as progressive. Do you think there are limitations in the way at
the left has addressed its audience that has kept it from broadening its
base?

BH: One of the greatest difficulties the left faces in reaching out to
masses of people in America is its profound disrespect of spirituality and
religious life. Books like Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief remind
us that more than 80 percent of the people in this nation lay claim to
religious faith, whether it be Islam, Judeo-Christian faith, Buddhist faith.
People on the left need to acknowledge-we need to grapple with-the question
of religion.

SEP: Within the feminist movement, the divisions have often been cast in
terms of race-the line is that the white, middle-class feminist movement
doesn't address women of color....

BH: You just hit upon one of the big difficulties of the mass media response
to feminist movement, because the very same women of color who demanded that
feminism call attention to race were usually also demanding a recognition of
class. But the larger, more mainstream media-and that includes the media
generated by reformist white feminists, that is to say, the books they
published, the conferences they held and hold-tend to refuse to acknowledge
the extent to which women of color, and Black women specifically, were
almost always also calling attention to class. There was never just an
intervention that said, "Oh, you're racist, pay attention to race only."
There was always a recognition that race and class positionality were so
linked that it was impossible to talk about race without talking about
class. When women of color critique privileged-class, white feminism, people
often hear that as simply a racial critique, but, in fact, it is a critique
rooted in an understanding of the dynamics of class and race as they work
together to create biases.

SEP: Are some of the left critiques of "identity politics" obscuring the
same things?

BH: Absolutely. I mean, if we just take Native American thinkers as an
example, there is no Native American progressive thinker who has not called
attention to the reality of class while talking about the fate of Native
American Indians in this culture, because it's impossible to talk about
Native American peoples without talking about the reality of class
divisions-without talking about the fact that the takeover of American
Indian land by the American government was essentially a strategy of class
disempowerment as much as it was a gesture of racism. We, as people of color
on the left, have never not evoked the issue of class. But what's
interesting is that we are often perceived as not talking about class at all
because we often don't talk about class by using the language and
terminology that was most accepted by the radical white left.

SEP: What other lessons do you see that we have yet to learn on the left?

       BH: I think the most difficult lesson for people on the left to
understand, especially those people who are on the left but situated in
privileged-class realities, is what really links various struggles of
liberation and what empowers people to connect with one another. For
example, my disappointment in the position that people like Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., and Cornel West have taken on welfare, or joining with the
Million Man March-which was so conservative politically in its critique of
welfare and its support of militarism and imperialism-as Cornel West did,
comes from seeing how patriarchy on the left, whether it's expressed by
Black men and other men of color, or more powerful white spokesmen on the
left, continues to provide a skewed vision that does not allow for
meaningful political solidarity between men and women because it always
divides our interests.

SEP: What keeps you engaging in the dialogues and debates that focus on
those points of contention?

BH: Dialectical exchange is about engagement, and even when I disagree with
Cornel West or other Black male thinkers, more conservative ones like
Stanley Crouch, or more biased ones like Adolph Reed, I feel it's important
to keep open a space for dialogue. By and large, most Black male thinkers
don't show any interest in dialoguing with Black women, and I don't think
it's any accident that as Cornel West has become more firmly situated within
a mainstream, patriarchal, white institution like Harvard, he has been less
interested in dialoguing across boundaries with myself and other progressive
thinkers who don't agree with a lot of the positions that he now takes.

SEP: What achievements of the left have given you hope for the future, and
where is there room for success?

BH: We have to recognize that to the degree that revolutionary feminism
critiques and intervenes on racism, class elitism, and sexism, which
includes homophobia, it is the most left movement that we have in our
nation. The traditional white male left leadership has never fully divested
of its allegiance to patriarchy, and therefore it never has offered us a
truly hopeful vision of liberation. The economic insights of the
intellectual, radical, white male left were rarely coupled with a wise
understanding of the dynamics of race and gender. And I don't think that we
have any male-dominated left thinking that has truly been anti-patriarchal.
I think of people like Noam Chomsky-whose work certainly inspires and
enlightens me, but if you read his books and look at the people he refers
to, they're almost always men, and gender is always subordinated. So, to me,
radical feminism-and I'm making a real distinction here between reform
feminism and revolutionary feminism, which I believe is a left politics-has
had the most far-reaching, hopeful intervention of any contemporary social
movement.

And let me say why. Revolutionary left feminist politics created the space
for us to take differences in wages between women and men seriously. It
created the space for us to critique the patriarchal family's support and
perpetuation of violence, both at home and outside. It reawakened, through
its critique of masculinity, a strong demand that men take a stand against
militarism and imperialism. And because so many other groups have
appropriated the issues that radical, revolutionary, left feminism put on
the agenda, it seems as though those groups were always dealing with those
issues. But people often do not give praise to contemporary revolutionary
feminists' actions for really breaking down certain kind of barriers. It is
assumed by so many people that unions that never thought about the fate of
women in the workplace just do that now, not that they do that because, in
fact, feminism brought attention to that reality.

Revolutionary feminism is the one example we have of a protracted struggle
for social justice in our society where the people involved in that movement
have actually consciously grown. That is to say, when we look at where
feminism was-for example, reformist feminism, on the issue of race and where
revolutionary feminism took the thinking, it will never be possible for
white women of privileged classes to act as though their experience is the
female experience. It is no longer possible for any white feminist from a
privileged class position to act as though race and class do not matter.

I find revolutionary feminism more compelling than other left politics
because of our willingness to acknowledge when our thinking and strategies
for social change are wrong-for example, feminists' support of no-fault
divorce. Feminists spearheaded support for no-fault divorce, but later
realized that when you had no-fault divorce, the people who suffered the
most were women who were in long-term marriages who had not been in the
workforce and who did not have the earning power of the men they might be
divorcing. But feminists didn't just hunker down and insist, "We took this
stand, and we have to stand by it." People were able to engage in
self-critique and say, "We were not clear about how we approached these
issues." I think we've seen the same self-criticism in revolutionary
feminism's acknowledgment that early on, white, western, privileged women's
ways of looking at women in the Third World and women in other nations, less
privileged nations, was skewed by imperialism and colonialism and what
Edward Said so accurately described as "Orientalism."

Often these kinds of self-reflexive critiques within revolutionary feminist
movements for social justice never get
acknowledged because the mainstream isn't interested in portraying this
movement as one that has grown, that has changed, that is not spearheaded
simply by liberal women like Gloria Steinem or the original white mother
figure, Betty Friedan. There is tremendous radical writing by left white
women and other groups of women that people don't acknowledge in the
mainstream. I think, for example, of Charlotte Bunch, a white lesbian
feminist who has really tried to make interventions in international
relations around how western women approach people of color in other parts
of the world.

SEP: Do you see any changes in the way that young men today envision
masculinity and gender issues? Do you see any kind of transformation within
the new generations?

BH: A major intervention of the feminist movement, both reformist and
radical, has been in contrast to what the mass media tells us and continues
to try to sell: that feminists don't like men. Feminists have always been
very aware that if we don't get males involved in feminist thinking and
actions, we will not be able to change the heart of sexism. So, there was
this tremendous shift in the early to mid-'70s around our thinking about the
place of men in feminist movements. And we began to see change. The changes
that were the fruit of feminist labor came when so many men, young men,
became involved in feminist thinking and taking Women's Studies classes.

We are about to witness a new generation of men about to be 30 who were
completely born into a world altered by feminist thinking. I must have been
almost 40 before I saw a woman pilot, but there are men in our society now
whose mothers are those women pilots. So, we have for the first time a
generation of men coming to adulthood who were not born into a world
automatically submerged with sexist socialization that says that women are
not the intellectual or work equals of men. In fact, they were born into a
world where that fiction, that false consciousness, was being challenged on
all levels. Part of the reason why feminism became such a threat to our
culture in the last ten years is because of the radical critical
consciousness of these young men, who are as daring in their critiques of
gender as many of us were when we were first coming to feminist thinking
when we were 18 years old. That's a tremendous threat to the culture,
particularly to the militarism of the culture. Any profound critique of
patriarchal masculinity that touches the minds and hearts of men of all ages
in our culture threatens patriarchy in such a way that it engenders fierce
backlash. It is no accident that the arenas where we have most worked to
raise male consciousness-around domestic violence, reproductive rights for
women, sexual harassment-have been the space of patriarchal, anti-feminist
backlash.

And it's no accident that in popular culture, particularly in movies, we
have seen a return to pro-imperialist, propatriarchal, masculinist movies,
where a certain notion of male citizenship is revived that is patriarchal to
its core. Simultaneously, of course, we see a film like G.I. Jane, where
sexism is being questioned, but only insomuch as it reinforces the existing
white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal state. So, G.I. Jane becomes one
of the prime examples of how reformist feminist thinking gets incorporated
by the existing state structure to reinscribe its own values, as opposed to
actually engaging in any type of radical, transformational questioning.

      SEP: As a cultural critic and a writer, you have explored how radical
transformation can take place in part through the relationship of art and
politics. Could you talk about how  you've been able to walk the line
between political commitment and aesthetic appreciation?

BH: I've had two very strong literary mentors, Lorraine Hansberry and James
Baldwin, and both of them were people who loudly proclaimed that there is no
art that is politically neutral. These two artists, then, who were both
creative writers and social critics, were people who really embraced the
notion of artistic integrity and artistic excellence, while at the same time
insisting that artists could not remain divorced from politics. As mentor
figures who entered my life when I was 17 and 18, as did African thinkers
such as Amilcar Cabral and Kwame Nkrumah, they were all people who embraced
an understanding of the critical thinker and/or intellectual as somebody who
could have a multi-dimensional self, where you could champion literary
excellence and at the same time still see creative writing as a location
where progressive political values and beliefs could be realized
aesthetically.

To me, there isn't a line to be walked. It's part of a false consciousness
of the existing mainstream, dominant culture that one should have to
struggle between one's political beliefs and one's aesthetic and artistic
vision. We don't act as if Shakespeare had to struggle between his political
beliefs and his artistic vision. In fact, what we now know through
incredibly wonderful Shakespearean scholarship is that his art mirrored a
lot of his political vision, and that this does not make it less artistic.
Again and again, what we see is that whenever people on the left allow their
political visions to be overtly expressed in artistic creations, that is
called into question. But with an artist like Vermeer, whose class
affiliations were completely present in the type of images he painted-or
Gauguin, with his particular colonialist and Orientalist way of viewing the
Third World and Third World women-this was not seen as something that
inhibited their capacity to offer us transcendent artistic vision. Yet
whenever it's a question of the left deploying similar art strategies, it's
always viewed by the mainstream as a vehicle to suggest that our artistic
work is diminished.

SEP: There has been a lot of criticism of many of the left media
organizations because they remain very heavily dominated by white,
privileged males, and have yet to bring in different editorial views and
different writers. Do you see any movement in that area at all?

BH: I don't see a lot of movement in that area. But the issue is not that an
organization on the left is all white, because theoretically, if white
people are progressive-have truly engaged in radical consciousness or
concientizacion - I would like to believe that we could have a setting where
everything's run by white people, but the perspectives are not biased. In
the same way that I feel that as a Black woman I could be the head of a
company or the head of a university or the publisher of a magazine, but my
being Black wouldn't mean that I would focus the magazine only in the
direction of what Black people might be interested in or concerned about.
It's really important for us to remember that, while diversity is
meaningful, the essence of divesting of all of these things is that you
should not need the presence of women or the presence of people of color of
both genders in order to have progressive, non-biased action take place.

To offer an example: One class reality is that the writing we do on the left
is the least financially lucrative writing you can do in our culture. Many
of the young white people who have come into their writing often come from
circumstances of economic privilege, so their choice to work for a left
press and make very little money may not mean that they will never be able
to buy a house, because they may be given support from other family members
who have access to money, or they may inherit money. So, part of the
difficulty we've had throughout the history of the left in America is that
it's much more difficult to get people of color and white people who are
poor to invest their livelihood in writing and cultural production that has
no financial return.

One of the reasons I became a professor and have kept my job up until right
now-I'm on leave, but I would like to leave my academic job-was so I would
have the freedom to be able to write dissident work without having to depend
on that work for my livelihood. That's a very luxurious position, but it's
important for me to say that strategically, I didn't just enter the realm of
radical political thinking and writing hoping that it would be the place
where I would make my living. I entered this realm knowing that it was not
the place where I would make my living.

It's about having a radical political commitment to ending domination that
is powerful enough, and a love of justice that is intense enough, that it
makes me want to spend those hours when I'm not making a living doing work
that I feel will have a meaningful impact and raise consciousness. In my
case, I've also been fortunate to live in a historical period where that
work has begun to generate a certain amount of money. That was not the case
as late as ten years ago. This suggests there is a mood in the culture where
many people are seeking to understand the nature of injustice, and seeking
ways to be politically engaged and ways to resist. That's very important.
It's a sign of hope. Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical
change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

----------------------
"We have to recognize that to the degree that revolutionary feminism
critiques and intervenes on racism, class elitism, and sexism, which
includes homophobia, it is the most left movement that we have in our
nation." - bell hooks