Introduction to bell hooks and Ken Paulson

I’m bell hooks, and I’m speaking freely. What this is all about is your right to freedom of speech. What made America great is an independent, rigorous price. What jerk burns a flag? America is not threatening political speech; it is the heart of the First Amendment expressing their religious beliefs. How is the pie, the big bucks, the reality? But all across Chile, welcome to speak freely. I’m Ken Paulson and bell hooks, a noted author, scholar, and social critic. She’s written 22 books, all in print, including this thoughtful and thought-provoking “Communion: The Female Search for Love.”

Discussing “Communion: The Female Search for Love”

I want to read to you from your book. This line says, “This book is testimony, a celebration of the joy women find when we restore the search for love to its rightful rogue place at the center of our lives.” Could you tell me about that?

bell hooks on Heroism and Love

We’ve always thought of our heroes as having to do with death and war. When we think of Joseph Campbell and the whole idea of the heroic journey, it’s rarely a journey about love. It’s about deeds that have to do with conquering domination, what-have-you. So, living as we do in a culture of domination, indeed, choosing to love is heroic, working at love and letting yourself understand the art of love.

Insights on Love After Age 40

You say in the book that revelations for you after age 40 about love were insights you gained that you wished you’d had earlier.

Like so many other people in our culture, I had very confused ideas about love. In the first book, “All About Love,” one of the ideas that was hard for people to accept was that if somebody abuses you, they’re not loving you. That would be a basic understanding most of us would have. But in fact, so many of us have been wounded in some way in our childhoods that we need to cling to the idea that if someone hurts you, they can also be loving you. And I tried to distinguish between care and love in that book. It’s like saying that my parents cared for me deeply, and care is essential. Many children don’t receive care, but it’s only one ingredient of love. Love is a topic that many people have written about, and now you’ve recently written three very well-received books about it. What is your take on love that’s different from others?

bell hooks’ Unique Perspective on Love

Part of the genius of bell hooks, such as it is, is that I bring standpoints often not brought together in our nation. I bring together thoughtfulness about race, gender, and class when writing about love. I’m one of these fanatic readers; I read a book a day, a nonfiction book a day, and I’m a passionate mystery reader, and I read two mysteries daily. So, I’m always bringing together diverse ways of knowing, not unlike speaking freely. And that has been the mark of bell hooks’ books, that you may be reading all about Buddhism, and then you may read about gangsta rap. There may be a whole combination of ideas. In our profoundly anti-intellectual society, most people read along very narrow lines and think along very narrow lines. So I think that the excitement many people feel when they come to a bell hooks book is, “God, she’s brought together these things that just seem like they would never have put them together.”

A Desire for Best-Selling Books and Impact

You mentioned that you’ve had 22 books in print. That’s extraordinary; that doesn’t happen. That suggests a shelf life that most authors don’t enjoy. But do you ever sit down and say, “I want a best-seller. I want this one made into a movie. I want all of my books made into movies”?

I embody that classical idea of the intellectual as someone who wants to be whole. And part of wholeness is I like the people, the masses. I want to write books that touch the pulse of a diverse audience. So the only exciting aspect of having a best-seller is that you know that you have that capability, that you’re spread across a vast body of people, cross-class, cross-race, and that’s incredibly exciting. The idea of, “Do you ever feel tempted to kind of water down your message to broaden it in a way that everyone will find it appealing?” sort of like “Who Moved My Cheese?”

bell hooks on Censorship and Free Speech

Well, in these profound times. I don’t want to make light in any way because, for the past few years, I have just been so concerned about censorship and the censorship of the imagination that begins before people censor what we write. When I look at my career as a thinker and a writer, what is so unique is that I have a dissenting voice. Then, I could come into corporate publishing and bring that dissenting voice. It may seem to people that they love books, which are easier to read. Unlike all the other bell hooks books, I did write them with a mass audience in mind, mindful of my language, mindful of a lot of things. But in them, some ideas drive people because they feel so dissenting.

Let the idea I mentioned earlier be that care isn’t love. I mean, I can’t tell you how many talks I went on where people were up yelling, “How dare you say that mom and dad didn’t love me because they gave me that beating every week that I needed?”

Free Speech and the Marketplace of Ideas

I’m curious about your take on the marketplace of ideas. “Speaking freely” is about all those ideas floating around and the need to hear them and share viewpoints. And yet, in recent years, especially on college campuses, we’ve seen a different take on freedom of speech. I know that you teach; you see college students up close. Do they have the same feelings for freedom of speech that you may have had when you were going to school?

Well, the keyword you used, Ken, was the marketplace. And what’s tragic about education, particularly at a higher level in our nation right now, is that it has become something about the marketplace. So there’s a lot of repression that students begin to do because they want to prepare themselves for the marketplace, for getting the money, power, status, and fame. And you know, that means you can only say what you want sometimes.

Challenging Popular Narratives and Individuals

You have not hesitated to question projects, programs, or individuals that many in the African-American community proudly embrace. You’ve raised questions about Kwanzaa, the Million Man March, and, not least of all, Oprah. Would you like some help to speak out on those topics?

It isn’t easy when you’re misunderstood. It’s difficult when people stand up and say, “Why do you hate Spike?

Lee so much?” And I say, “There are moments in Spike Lee’s films that I think are incredible that I love.” But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have an honest critical commentary about his work. And I know that as a teacher, I’m constantly encouraging my students to recognize the difference between a critical commentary about something that can illuminate it for you, that can help you see it differently, and something that’s just trashing. Part of the danger of free speech in our society is people’s deep longing, both in our personal and public lives.

To avoid conflict, to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, to not, you know, be polite, and I think that, you know if you think about all the work that’s been done by Susilo Bach and others about how as a nation, we’re lying more and more. We have to connect that to an absence of free speech because when you live in a country that makes truth something associated with pain that should not be spoken, it becomes hard to get people to value speaking freely. Because, you know, there are things that we have to say that will be wounding. For example, in my latest book that I’m talking to you about, about black people and self-esteem, there are things that I have to say about black children and how they’re parented that would sound harsh to a lot of people. But those things have to be said if we’re going to address in any way what is happening overall, collectively, with black children and self-esteem. So, a lot of what I do in the classroom is to teach that kind of courage that allows you to speak freely.

I recently became a big Martin Luther King fan, especially of his later sermons. And when I go back, you know, in “Strength to Love,” he talks about standing in the shadows of fascism, and he talks so much about the importance of protecting free speech, our democracy. And yet, people need to realize how radical much of what he was saying was. I mean, he was talking about we’re going to see a day of terrorism; we’re going to see all of these things. And that’s amazing. I mean, here’s this man, for example, that most people remember by, you know, what is very poetic, you know, “I have a dream” speech, but not by the deep penetrating social and political analysis he had about imperialism. And why? In a sense, we censor that Martin Luther King, even like a Martin Luther King holiday is constructed to make him more palatable, to make him be this guy who was just about peace and love, but not about the fact that he was an incredibly sophisticated thinker about peace and love.

And to me, the dangers of censorship in our nation, and the forms that take the very subtle forms it takes, is that people don’t get to that Martin Luther King, that Martin Luther King disappears. That’s about bell hooks, you know. I noticed that, as I was telling you when we talked last, about how, as a dissident intellectual, you know, there was a time when black intellectuals got a lot of press. And, you know, you hardly ever hear about bell hooks in the press. Newspapers don’t call me anymore to say, “What do you think about…” because I was seen as the bad girl who says things people don’t want to hear. And again, I have such a subculture of readers that I certainly can’t complain. But I know many things like the New York Times and other places never review bell hooks’s books. You know, last year, I came out with a book on class, “Where We Stand: Class Matters,” luckily, these books sell, but they don’t get reviewed. And things that are not seen as topical, clever, with, you know, witty in a shallow sense, we often don’t hear. And I don’t want to talk about bell hooks; I think dissident speech is not valued in our nation, whether it comes from white men, you know, rich white men or poor white men. The real issue is we are in danger as a nation of silencing any form of speech that goes against what is perceived to be the status quo.

Addressing Controversial Speakers and Free Speech in Education

If in your classroom, your students came to you and said, “You know, a Nazi is coming to campus to speak. He’s a racist, there’s no question about it, and a local organization decided to recruit them, to recruit this individual to stir things up. They want to enlist you to fight the appearance,” What’s your take on that? How do you respond?

My response is always on behalf of free speech because, basically, I always tell my students that if you look at the history of silencing, ultimately, the people who get silenced are the dissident radical voices. Any time we try to shut down, people end up being something that causes us to suffer more. I think that people need to know how to hear information and think critically about it, not to… and that’s usually my whole thing is to say, “What does it mean for us to hear something that we have to think critically about and that we can make a choice about?” as opposed to the idea that we should eliminate people saying certain things, people thinking certain things, take certain books out of the library. Well, let’s talk about those books and those ideas.

The Evolution and Misuse of Political Correctness

If you listen to conservative talk radio, the phrases you hear most often are “liberal elites” and “political correctness.” Initially, political correctness was a pretty good concept, just in terms of it’s about showing respect for other people, and that’s an excellent place to be. And yet, there seems to have been an evolution where political correctness has become more of a code. It’s become more of a tool of censorship, of silencing. All you have to do to silence someone is to say they’re politically incorrect. Frequently, it’s a tool that conservatives use to silence or belittle the voices of liberal and radical people. I mean, I like that gangsta rapper used to have this phrase, “Come correct,” and, you know, that’s precisely what it meant: to come correct was to be mindful, respectful, and aware of who you’re speaking to. And that was the initial positive thrust of political correctness: to be mindful of who you’re talking to. And I talked about this in “Communion: The Female Search for Love,” that women often will talk about men in an extraordinarily hateful way that is considered quite normal. But, if men talk about women in that extraordinarily hateful way, we often get up in arms. And I think that all those issues, such as political correctness, said, “Be mindful of how you’re talking about groups; be mindful of what you do and say.” And what is tragic is the way conservatives and right-wing forces have made political correctness something so hostile that there’s the kind of backlash now where people feel like, “Well, I shouldn’t have to be mindful. I shouldn’t have to think about what I’m saying.” And that’s too bad because I think, you know, the absolute freedom of democracy requires of all of us that kind of civility and courtesy where we are mindful and think about what we say because we live in an incredibly diverse nation. Yet, our language is incredibly binary, incredibly either-or, so we must work to be inclusive.

You know, when I’m talking about white people who are racist, I have

You know that I can, like, for example, I grew up in Kentucky and learned how to shoot guns. Guns are not something that scares me, and you know, I went to the University where I teach most frequently now, which is in Texas, and they have a gun exhibit in a building. And all the feminist people thought I was going to look at it and say how horrible. I said, well, you know, because I like guns, I don’t find this horrible. But there are people here whose families may have been wounded by guns or who come from countries where guns have wiped them out. Maybe they don’t want to see guns every day. So, I would put this exhibit in a gallery so people could choose to see it. But I wasn’t saying what people thought that as a feminist who is very much anti-violence, I would say. So, I think that part of what I hope for us as a nation, and particularly in our educational institutions, is that we will teach what I use in a phrase in my books: radical openness. Radical openness allows for the fact that you and I might disagree about some things. Still, there may be other things that we have a resonance and harmony about. And when we categorize each other in such a way that, you know, it’s like when someone says, “Oh, he’s sexist,” or, you know, then it’s like the shutting down of the idea that the person might be sexist but have some other thought idea that might be useful to hear. How do we hold those differing senses of who we are? And, you know, that’s one of the reasons I like writing about love because when people love people, they never think they will think the same. They never, you know, I say two people will say to me, “Well, you know, when we try to get our group together to talk about race, there’s going to be conflict.” And I said, “Well, have you ever had a love relationship with someone without conflict? Why do we expect that we’re going to get together and talk about race and racism and not have perhaps anger or conflict? You know, when we don’t expect that in the deepest areas of our lives, our intimate lives, we recognize conflict will be a part of trying to have a relationship with somebody who is not you. And we don’t recognize that when it comes to difficult issues, and often that’s where we start censoring and shutting down.”

I thought I’d read a great deal about bell hooks; the phrase “I like guns” never came up in interviews. What is that from? How do you have an appreciation of guns?

Well, just because I think of growing up in rural areas, you know, where I mean, I do think that when we talk about gun violence, we do have to look at areas of our nation where people have always had guns but use them wisely, courteously, and not where just the fact of having a gun meant that you would be violent. And so, it’s… I like the artistry of guns, and out of that, I learned as a child, you know, starting with having a BB gun and those kinds of things. But, you know, when I was introduced to guns, I was also introduced to the reality of guns and how you should deal with them so that you don’t endanger yourself or others.

bell hooks on Racism and Self-Esteem

You’re a harsh social critic, and one of the observations that struck me was your sense that a majority, I want to misquote you, a majority of white Americans, believe themselves to be superior.

Oh, absolutely. But I think the worst part of that is that there are lots of black people who believe themselves to be inferior. I mean, that’s the stuff I’m talking about in this black people in self-esteem book called “Soul to Soul.” But I think that that’s how deep white supremacy is in our nation. And often, you know, you know, the scam that often white people will meet a black person who ultimately challenges every racial stereotype that they’ve ever had. Rather than giving up the stereotype, they create a particular category for that person and say, “Well, you’re not like other black people.” Or instead of saying, “My ideas of black people were too narrow or too.” I think that’s the tragedy of any prejudicial thinking. When we confront any circumstance that tells us it’s not, we frequently don’t enlarge our sense of things. We come up with new ways to protect and defend that thinking.

The Challenge of Language in Addressing Prejudice

Is language part of the problem? You use the word “white supremacy,” and I know there was an incident in which you were on a panel with two black men who mocked you for using that phrase. And I find it’s such a helpful phrase because what I like about “white supremacy” is I think it does encompass black self-hate. You know, it encompasses how do you talk, how do you call a little kid who’s dark-skinned, who’s, you know, washing themselves with bleach? You can’t say this kid is a racist in the classical sense of prejudicial views against people of color or black people. And yet, somewhere, that child has learned something wrong about themselves, and they should correct it. To me, “white supremacy” is a helpful term because it encompasses the fact that we can have a five-year-old who’s looked at enough television in our nation to have an understanding that white is better.

Signs of Progress in Addressing Gender, Race, and Class

One final question for you, probably an unfairly broad question. You’ve written for years about the challenges we face regarding gender, race, and class. In that period, have you seen encouraging signs?

Well, the fact that bell hooks can have the incredible readership I have tells us, I want to say to you, Ken, that people are hungry for dissent. People are hungry for provocative voices that go to the heart of the matter because people want answers to the things they are in crisis about. So, I mean, there’s an irony that, on one hand, we have a mass media and a publishing industry, mainly, that tells us, “Keep it mellow, don’t say anything.” But I find that people are hungry for truth and that hunger, as I said in my book “Yearning,” I think, is something that unites us across race, sexual preference and practice, and religion. And I see the hope. The hope that I feel within myself and with other people is that hunger for truth and ways to live our lives more fully in a more fulfilling manner. And it’s that hunger that keeps a place for the dissenting voice, that keeps the place for speaking freely because that is both an endangered space and a space, on the other hand, where we have more people than ever before who are hungry to hear that dissenting voice. And that’s the paradox: On the one hand, there were moments in our recent history as a nation where I felt terrified. You know, for the first time in my life, my mother called me and said, “You must be careful what you say when you get up on stage because you could be assassinated.” And I think that, um, indeed, if nothing else, the September 11th events around the World Trade Center brought into focus that we are a nation where many people are afraid of free speech and then want to silence people.

And if we cannot acknowledge that, that silence is growing; that’s what King meant when he talked about standing in the shadows of fascism. So, on the one hand, I experienced for the first time as a citizen of this nation feeling that I had taken grave risks in standing before audiences and saying the things that I believed. And at the same time, I had audiences eager to hear. “What do you think about this?” Audiences of people who may or may not have agreed with me. So, that’s the paradox that we live within a society that is full of promise and possibility and a society that, on the other hand, will close things down if people feel they need to protect the lifestyles or the belief systems that they think are the only essential belief systems. And that’s the difficulty. But I believe in the outrageous pursuit of hope.

Closing Remarks and the Importance of Free Speech

Your entire career has been about free speech, and we thank you for joining us and speaking freely, bell hooks. And I thank you for allowing me to speak freely. You join us next time as we discuss free expression and the arts. For more information about speaking freely…