Good morning.
Good morning. I’m amazed to see so many people out this morning. I’m not surprised because bell hooks is here.
So I’m supposed to introduce bell, and I won’t try that.
And for those of you who don’t know bell.
Where have you been?
I’m glad you’re here.
And we will have a conversation with each other. Alex bell will ask some questions. She’ll ask me a couple.
We’ll have cards, so fill out your cards, and we’ll try to take questions both by cards and some live questions, depending on time, as you probably noticed. We’re always pressed for time. We have too much goodness for the time that we have.
Also, I want to acknowledge that nothing’s perfect.
And even if something were perfect, it would be someone’s idea of perfect, not someone else’s idea.
So, part of this is giving space for things to be imperfect. I’ll need to remember something. I did the first time. I might speak up against something, someone might say something to be misunderstood, or someone might say something that they should not have said.
So it’s about something other than giving people a hall pass.
But it’s about holding onto our connectedness even in those spaces where we’re imperfect. So I want to invite that into the room.
Also, you’ve heard me talk about my granddaughter. She’s somewhere running around the building. You might see her. She’s here with my daughter, and many of you know that.
I love this work. But I’m here in Berkeley, Oakland, because of my granddaughter.
Who’s five years old, hanging out with her friend Antonio? Who’s about the same age?
Could you tell me about bell?
First, I won’t do what I said I would do in introducing you.
So bell is my friend.
And bell is my teacher.
And it’s like trying to say something about something that’s so complex, so deep.
It would help if you were a poet, and I’m not a poet.
But I’ve learned from her and started learning from her by reading about her.
By seeing her from a distance and over the last several years.
I’ve learned from her up close.
I was visiting her home, visiting my home, and having her come to Ohio when I was there.
And one of the things you know about bell is that no box can hold her.
And this conference has talked a lot about love.
But not just sentimental love, although there’s nothing wrong with someone loving. But love in all its complexity.
And that reflects bell.
Love and all its complexities.
And so, even before bell got here, we’ve talked so much about love and belonging, and this is your conference. This is about you. So it’s only appropriate that you hear up on the stage. So continue teaching me and teaching all of us and sharing.
So again, it’s a delight to have my friend and teacher, bell hooks, sitting next to me.
If you have love.
Here is the proofread version of the text:
You have the sense of belonging that comes with it.
If you have love.
You have the sense of belonging that comes with it.
I am so happy to be here with John and all the other connecting forces of love that began for us at Ohio State and are now out here.
I’m thankful to be here with our singer.
Who brings us love?
In another language.
But we appreciate all the signers that have been here at the conference.
It has been a while since I have been to California.
A long while. I was surprised by how time passed for me. These years have been spent with my parents dying and a sister dying, relocating to Kentucky. So John and I will be talking about some of that because my book “Belonging” is about where we find that space of connecting, of belonging.
That space where there is no other.
So Bill, one of the things I visited bell recently in Kentucky, and at the time, you were working on bringing the bell hooks Center to fruition. So, I’ve heard now that it’s up and running. Please share with us a little bit about it. Well,
I began working at the bell hooks Institute after my sister’s death.
She gave herself in the last weeks of her life over to the patriarchy and had a very violent and sad death.
But her death was unexpected, and it reminded me so much of what happens if we don’t take care of ourselves.
If we don’t value ourselves rightly.
And I kept thinking about all the black writers, male and female, who have not taken care of our legacy.
And I felt pushed to think about what I am doing with bell hooks’ legacy.
And part of me felt the kind of frustration that I thought there should be somebody else out there who cares enough about bell hooks to work on it.
You know, preserving her artifacts, but no one came to the fore.
I attend a church called Light of the World in Florida, and my pastor told me, “Your heart has to be ready to handle the weight of your calling.”
And we were reflecting together about my calling.
What am I called to do here? And as many of you have spoken to me this morning about how you were at some low point in your life.
And you began to read “All About Love” or some other bell hooks work?
And it lifted you. You know Jackie Wilson’s song, “Your Love Has Lifted Me Higher.”
I am honored to be the vessel for that calling that allows me to speak words that lift people higher.
And part of my coming into that fuller sense of self-love is not to be ashamed to gather my resources. The bell hooks Institute, so far, is mainly supported by Bill.
And I’ve been so jealous of John. John has all these wonderful helpers surrounding him. I wish I could take them all back to Kentucky, no, not Kentucky, Korea.
But anyhow, I saw a lot of very elite white schools that wanted my papers and other things. When you go to the library or other places to see someone’s artifacts or their work, you have to sign in. You have to show ID increasingly. You have to go through metal detectors, and that’s different from what my work has been about. My work has been and hopefully will continue to be for the people.
And so I wanted to create a space where anybody who walks in can see some artifact and work with it. And it’s been interesting because my first naysayers were other black women academic people telling me, “bell, you don’t know what you’re doing. You know, you don’t know anything about preserving artifacts.” And I thought, you know, they’re right. I am trying to figure out what I’m doing, but I am willing to learn. And so the bell hooks Institute houses the contemporary African-American art collection I have been gathering for years. It houses an artifact room with all these little bell hooks things that don’t necessarily interest me. But I was very fascinated when a young woman came to my house. And she came up to my bedroom, and there was the little brown baby doll I had written so much about. She just began to weep and said, “You know, there’s the brown baby doll,” I recognized that artifacts mean different things to different people and that there is a reason to hold onto and display them. So all of that happens at the bell hooks Institute. And most excitingly, what happens is that I have to educate beyond the academy.
So, at the bell hooks Institute, people come from our Appalachian world, where 40% live below the poverty level, but people can come and talk together. Conversation, even though I’m going on too long, John, I’m sorry, is the best learning mode.
So I’ve had people come, and we bring people from the hollers and hills of Kentucky to meet with some academic people. We just had the marvelous Laverne Cox, the opening featured guest at the bell hooks Institute, which was great. Laverne came ultimately without any funding from bell. I wanted to fund and pay her, but she wouldn’t allow me to because I heard Laverne is an example of somebody who, “Oh, well, Laverne is really into your work.”
As I learned more about her, I thought her brother had turned her into my work, this wonderful gay black man. I thought about how those connecting forces, again, that through Laverne, Laverne had begun to read and study bell hooks. And so I honor those black males who read my work, who learn from it, who share with others, but that sense of working with the work John asked me, “Well, will you talk about where you are now?” And one of the places I am at now is wanting to engage people working with the work in the dailiness of their daily life. I said to Laverne, of course, I didn’t know anything about “Orange Is the New Black.” I don’t watch TV, but the pastor of my other church, our lesbian pastor, gave a sermon about “Orange Is the New Black,” and I was like, “What is that?” And so I looked at all the quotes and was not impressed.
But I was most impressed by the characters of Laverne, Sophia, and Crystal, her wife because you saw a level of non-othering in their interaction.
Of Crystal’s attempt to understand where Sophia comes from in her transition.
And I think we have few models in popular culture and media, especially for black folks, showing that level of loving-kindness and compassion. And it doesn’t mean they don’t have conflicts because you remember that one scene when Sophia wants Crystal to bring the drugs into the prison for her, and Crystal is like, “Are you out of your mind? I have a child to care for and love. I can’t be putting him at risk.” They don’t speak to one another with aggression or rage. Still, they speak to one another to understand different standpoints, which moved me.
When Laverne and I had our first conversation in New York, I wanted her brother to join us. She said, “Are you out of your mind? You don’t like orange. He doesn’t like orange. I’ll just be slotted up there on the stage,” so we didn’t have him. But I went on a little bit too long. I’m sorry, John. No, no, no.
So one of the things you mentioned, bell, and many of you know me personally, is an opportunity to talk to 700 of my new friends.
You mentioned your sister dying, and I think it’s hard to live life and hard to love unless you acknowledge and, in some profound way, start to come to terms with death.
And we all come with an expiration date; we don’t know precisely when it is, but it is. This year, I’m visiting my father. You hear me talk about my father a lot. He’s turning 95; he grew up as a sharecropper. He’s legally blind, and I feel so lucky to have him and to have had my mother, and now they have my children, but also, I’m aware that this expiration date is soon.
He’s aware of that. And so when you talk about your sister and in some way that motivates you, could you talk briefly about death and love and how that helps us give meaning to life?
I think one of the things that’s so annoying about imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is that it not only does not afford us lives of optimal well-being, it does not afford us the right to die with optimal well-being. And I am deeply concerned. John asked me to talk about some of the things motivating me at this point in my life; one is the whole issue of women as caretakers of elders and women who are often left alone without caregiving and taking care of themselves. My older sister, who cared deeply for Mom and Dad during the last years of their life, shortly after they died, was diagnosed with dementia. Her husband, who we had previously thought was a sweet and loving man, quickly put her in an institution, not a great one. It just reminded me again that this is a feminist issue, the issue of elder care and how we die.
And I think about it all the time, John, how not to be afraid of death because I think that just as this culture of domination abuses and assaults so many of us in the dailiness of our lives, it abuses and assaults so many people at the time of their dying. We don’t seem to take it seriously. I find so many people don’t want to think about dying, and even when I talked about the Institute and starting it, so many people said, “Oh, well, you don’t need to do that now. Why are you thinking about what happens beyond your death?” And I think about all the black folks who haven’t thought about the writers, especially those who did not think about what happened beyond their death, and think about uncaring dysfunctional families now controlling their work, the gay writers whose families won’t let anything be presented about them that says they’re gay. So many things can happen if you don’t take care of your living and you die.
So again, two of my favorite subjects are loving and dying. I am loving and dying.
One of the things we’ve been doing here at this conference is trying to redefine boundaries. They don’t go away; they become reconstituted and redefine groups, redefining our connection with each other, ourselves, and the Earth. And I’m aware that even as we think about who in our tribe is not here, we must constantly redefine our tribe. Who is willing to be members with me, who will be in a tribe with you, who are willing to be in a relationship with the Earth? So, you talk about loving; we can think about loving oneself, loving each other, and loving the Earth. Can you tell me about that? And how do we lean into that realistically so that it’s not just an idea?
First, we lean into it by not thinking about a tribe. Or a bounded sense of love. One of my deepest struggles around love is with people who turn me off. And people that I don’t want to include in the circle of compassion. And that, to me, is the challenge. Henry Nowen, in “Return of the Prodigal Son,” writes that it’s not hard to love the people we like and share with, and that’s not where the challenge of love is. The challenge of love is to extend belonging to someone we may not even know. Someone who may have hurt us. And you know, many of us are hurt within our families. And yet, at the same time, we’re often still enmeshed with family. And so, how can we extend that level of compassion to family members whom we may not want to know or talk to or not want to talk to us? The true belonging that Thich Nhat Hanh has helped me to see is inclusive.
That doesn’t make me choose people who look like me to care about. I have recently become very engaged with a conservative white male businessperson. I am his daughter. In her junior year of college, she went on a road trip with her roommate, and the roommate fell asleep at the wheel, and his daughter died. He was so moved, and they had argued throughout their friendly conversations about feminism. She had hoped for him that he would become what she called a hardcore feminist. In the wake of her death, he raised two-point something million dollars to Pure Interior, Wisconsin, at Saint Norbert’s College to open up the Women’s Center there.
And to have the Women’s Center.
Which is now the Cassandra Voss Women’s Center. She was a reader of bell hooks, and in their celebration of this moment, they invited me to come for the year of bell hooks. They had a whole year reading bell hooks and having people come, and when I went there and met him, I was deeply moved. I kept thinking, how many places in our nation do we have Conservative Christian white businessmen committing themselves? Raising the money for a women’s center took five or six years.
To Ascend, where gender can be talked about expansively and thoroughly.
It was a real challenge to meet this person and open my heart and my life because he was different. And it’s been interesting because we talk about inclusivity all the time.
But, as I have drug Kurt around with me to talk about his work, so many of my black friends have said, “bell, he’s just a four-year-old. He doesn’t belong with us. He’s not like us; he’s not hip and cool.” And I have to admit that there are times that I felt like, “Wow, he isn’t hip.”
And so, where does that put that space of belonging? And that is our world’s global challenge right now.
To have the willingness
To embrace
All of the conditions of the world. And it starts with the Earth. I mean, to think about water.
People are constantly talking about oil and gas, but you know what? We can live without oil and gas. Well, we cannot live without water.
And millions
Of people in this world
Are
We are struggling to have clean water. Thousands of children die daily because they don’t have clean water. So there, we see that our connection to love begins in the body.
And the needs of the body. And one of those needs of the body is the need for water.
To live.
So I think that if you see the film “A Fierce Green Fire,” it shows how many people of color and how many black people in this nation have been a part of the environmental movement from its beginning.
And so we don’t forget that we do not let ourselves be bothered by being told, “Well, black people aren’t interested in the environment.” We know Manuel Pastor; I don’t know if he’s here. He makes the point that Latinos, as a group, are the most avid environmentalists in the country. That’s not the stereotype, and we know the first environmentalists in the country were people called Native Americans. So, as Shakti suggested, who gets to define who says?
Can we bring in all those who don’t think of themselves?
As an environmentalist, I suggest that.
To be inclusive
To be an environmentalist, to love
The cost can’t be you have to be excellent.
Because it’s so hard for me to have to be here.
Now, please fill out your index cards and hold them up. We’ll be taking questions in a little bit. I want to ask you any questions you have.
I’m interested, John, in your move from Ohio to California and what you find different about the California context.
There are a lot of differences. First, when I tell people I was in Columbus and now I’m here in the Bay Area, people often say, “Wow, you know, you’re so lucky to get out of Columbus.” I don’t feel that way, and I jokingly tell people, “I came to the Bay Area because I wanted to be in the center of the universe.”
And people started looking at me like, “Well, that’s kind of egotistical in terms of the Bay Area being the center of the universe.” The conference was opened by a friend of mine, Gabor Boris, one of the few black astrophysicists in the country, and he would tell you that every place in the universe is the center of the universe.
So we are in the center of the universe, but so is Ohio. And as I said to me, the work is vital. You know, we talked a little bit about death; my daughter’s here, and when she blessed me by giving me my granddaughter, you know you can hope for a second blessing sometimes. But I talked to her and said my life was complete.
What if I died the next day, I could die in peace. And we’re going to send my daughter said, “No, no, don’t be talking about death, and you know, come on, you know, you got to stay around and watch your granddaughter grow up.” But that was real, and
I was about to attend the University of Texas, UT Austin, and they’ve given me a great deal. I love it down there, and Cynthia called me. She said you got to be in the Bay Area with your granddaughter.
So the work is vital, but so is my family, and so are those that I love at a distance but also love up close and personal. So the most significant difference is to have
My daughter and my granddaughter are here. It’s a fabulous area, but it’s an area with a lot of problems; this is what I call a lot of.
Sort of progressive Libertarian
people who are who think they’re all that?
And more like the Notions of Cool. Yeah, precisely excellent. And in some ways, for all of the diversity and greatness here, the lack of authentic community and deep egotistical individualism.
With a progressive hip tinge.
Is problematic.
I think that.
I want to say
I’m permanently moved when John talks about caring enough as a black man in our society, making the work of being with your family because this is undoubtedly a counter-hegemonic vision of black masculinity.
That you care enough to move with your family to do the work of love with your family.
Because we recognize How Deeply wounded black males are.
Who is fatherless?
Who are familyless?
I’ve read three memoirs in the last few weeks.
Kevin Powell’s new memoir is coming out.
The memoir by Jan Gaye of Marvin Gaye.
Charles
Blow’s memoir.
In each of those books, males, black males, are subjected to such violence by other black people, by mothers; the violence in Kevin Powell’s book, of his mother towards him, his violence as a child. So, one of the things I was thinking about was that I was recently on a panel with Beth Richie, who the NFL has hired.
To teach and do work around domestic violence. And one of the things we talked about in terms of violence and violence as it begins in the family is that violence is othering.
So that when we work for peace.
We’re already doing the work of belonging.
Because violence estranges us; I mean, just reading Charles’s memoir, which starts with the incestuous scene of the older young black male towards him.
And how that thread of a certain kind of violence runs throughout his life.
Until he begins to reclaim himself, as he tells us that certain forms of violence estrange you from yourself and wound you in that place where you would know love.
And as black people, as people of color, we suffer the wounds in that place where we would know love so that we can’t begin to think about.
Inclusiveness without first healing those wounds. I mean, and I talked with Charles yesterday. What I wanted to hear more from Charles, and hopefully we will in the future, is the healing process.
He used the word “trauma” throughout his talk yesterday.
And I think as people of color in this imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as white people who are also wounded. I mean, one of the best films, I think, for showing how wounded white people are is Spike Lee’s film “Four Little Girls,” when that young white boy realizes that his family has been involved in the death of those girls and the cover-up. You see the woundedness to his Spirit and sense of self and identity, so we’re all working. We’re all under these kinds of heart attacks right now because of our hearts.
They are constantly being assaulted. You know, I talked about the violence; I talk about people calling me saying, “I’ve got to see this television show, Empire.”
And I watched one show, and it was this one show where the little boy was dressed kind of like a girl. The father, the angry black heteronormative father, you know, picks him up, runs outside, and throws him into a trash can. It was one of the most violent, anti-gay, homophobic moments, visual moments, and I didn’t need to see that. I didn’t need to have that in my head because I want to say this to us: people said to me, “Oh, but they’re dealing with gayness.” I said, “No, simply showing us violence towards gay people is not an intervention.”
So we have some questions, and as we sort of
Pivot to the questions, Bill; I want to throw out another thing and have you help me. A friend of mine, a friend of over 50 years, was here last night. I don’t know if he’s here today, and he talked about
How powerful things were and hearing things, but that even the repeating of the violence of black men, violence towards black men. He said, “I know that I want to hear something else. I want to hear something positive.” And you know, as I’ve moved through the world, I’ve been struck by almost everybody I get to know is wounded.
Almost everybody. You know, white professionals, straight people, gay people, transgender people, rich people, poor people. You know, it brings me close to the teaching of Buddhism.
That there’s profound suffering, and none of us get to go through life without that. And I would push a little bit. We should not end the suffering and then.
Engage life. Engaging in life is what ends the suffering or allows us to.
Okay, and maybe it never ends, but it allows us to hold and be with it differently. So I’ll invite that into the room, that, and invite.
What’s next, you know, we know that we have a sordid history, a shameful history, the way we even got this.
In a place called the United States, the ravishing of Native Americans, and now the disappearance of Native Americans, the enslavement, taking the land from Mexico, and putting whites in indentured servitude, and stripping them away from the Earth. So we have this sordid history, but we also have this possibility. I want us to spend some time thinking and discussing this possibility. We have to talk about the activists and their relation to possibility. I mean, Charles used the phrase at one point: pornography. I wrote about the pornography of violence when he raised the issue of when we are watching these scenes of black males being killed over and over on our television screens. I believe we are colluding in the violence against black males as a form of entertainment or stimulation. So the question becomes, how do we
You know, where is our activism about that? One way of activism is that we are not allowing that. Thich Nhat Hanh constantly says, “You are what you see.” What are we doing to raise different images of black masculinity? That’s precisely what I’m talking about. For example, when I left the streets of Detroit on a train to go out to Stanford to go to school, and I got there, people said to me.
“So, do you know your father?”
Because the image was that black people didn’t know their fathers. I’m saying, “What do you mean, do I know my father?” I mean, I didn’t even understand the question, and you know, it’s like saying to an Asian American, “Where are you from?” It’s like
And probably most of us don’t know the group that is most likely to be in a relationship with their children if they’re separated – men from the mother – are black men.
That image of black men is not lifted. It’s not celebrated. So I’m saying, I mean, I feel so fortunate to have my dad and my family, and I feel like
All of you are a little bit deprived and don’t know my dad and my family.
But you probably have your own. Anyway, that leads us, John, to ask. What are you doing every day?
I gave a sermon at Saint Norbert’s. This is still Easter week for practicing Christians and believers of other faiths on Resurrection, and we discussed it. I talked about
Jesus Simon Peter’s betrayal of Jesus and that when Jesus brings him back from otherness into belonging, he raised the question. “Do you love me?”
And then the third question is, “If you love me, feed my sheep.”
And the point of my sermon was, what sheep are you feeding?
So I think all of us can ask ourselves, what is our relationship to Black masculinity?
Or to all the other lives, the pain and sadness that so many black women endure as we are rendered invisible and the violence against us going unseen – trans black women who are murdered every day in our society. So what are you doing? If you love me, feed my sheep.
Because if we don’t ask what we’re doing in the dailiness of our lives.
It’s not activism; it’s about rushing to Ferguson.
They are part of spectacles of resistance, which have their place but the dailiness of life.
Where change happens – the local. I’m involved in the local because we can do much where we are. Pema Chödrön says, “Start where you are.” So I think I invite all of you to start where you are about.
changing images
Changing who you value? How do you show your value?
You know, how do white people who are inactive in resistance to white supremacy show their love of people of color? I’m always unhappy when I’m in circles of very leftist, liberal white people. Then, they have no people of color in their lives.
They’re saying all the right things.
About anti-racism, but then they’re not practicing.
And one of the things that drew me to Buddhism, John, more than Christianity, was the notion of an active practice.
What am I doing in the service of that which I say I believe and hope for? So I think that’s something we’d like our white brothers and sisters to think about. You know, what are you doing in the dailiness of your life in the service of anti-racism? What are you doing?
to bring
a person of color into your life. What does that mean? I don’t even know how people can live lives without people of color.
Well, so
bell, I want to make one comment on that and then and then
pivot to one of the questions. You know, I jokingly say to my students sometimes that
in a world that’s
fair and kind, no one will have to live their whole life as a white person.
And I’m only partially joking.
But also, I want to suggest that, you know, there’s
injuries and wounds that we inflict on each other, even those of us who are
Often in a vulnerable position. So, you know, sometimes, for example, I’ve watched black people not only inflict harm on white people.
But black people click harm on other black people, and gay people not only inflict harm on straight people but inflict harm on other gay people. So, part of the inclusiveness is not just from whites to blacks. Still, it’s like everybody’s injured, and everybody has accountability. I have to recognize that there are times when I’m a victim, and there are times like, for example, in my class positionality. We’ve not talked enough about capitalism and what the fact is.
How those of us who have class privilege, me and John both. He has a little more class privilege, and I have
The point is that
to be able to look at ways in which I’m both oppressed potentially and then an oppressor because it’s that sense of that understanding of accountability that we are all accountable for. That’s our democratic.
Space of belonging that as long as we’re only projecting out there to the other who is oppressive. We cannot have belonging. Belonging is about acceptance, the profound acceptance. First of all, of the reality of what is, and the reality is we are all capable.
Of enacting that violence, that estrangement, that colonialism, that imperialism, and to be able to be vigilant in our lives about where do I enter into that? You know, one of the things I’ve noticed is that as black people become more famous or more privileged, we don’t like to talk about capitalism and money and what we’re doing.
You know, where are my resources going?
I think that all of us are called to question our participation in capitalism because we live within this imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and to be able to say where do I enter into that as a person with the potential power to harm others and what keeps me from engaging in those violent acts of estrangement.
So, let me ask one question.
Talk about being an ally, the sacrifices that need to be made for equity, and how to talk to people so that we understand the question they’re asking: How do groups be allies with other groups? Would you like me to comment on that?
I am working with Laverne. I mean, I live in the Bible Belt, and it was very sad to me that there were professors where I teach who would not come to hear Laverne because they said that she was an abomination. And so I think that
You know.
I considered the weight of bell, you’re opening The Institute in the Bible Belt here,
with a trans person, you know, and how is that going to affect how people perceive The Institute, how people perceive you, and so I think that when we think about I like the fact that the person brought up sacrifices because I think that when we choose
to allow ourselves fully
for freedom with groups that are not ourselves or, you know, I got a letter from a young woman who said that here in California in 1986. She said in my class, and she didn’t say a word.
However, she began to experience that the teaching was transforming her life. Her mother said to her, “You can follow that lesbian mess if you want to,” speaking of me, “but you will end up manless and miserable.” But she was saying how she was stating her joy that she hadn’t ended up miserable, that feminist.
Theory and practice had brought her to a new level of satisfaction, joy, and self-love.
So we have to be aware that there are consequences in allying ourselves.
And that when you do that work, there is an element of sacrifice and of having to learn different languages and ways of being. Language is also a place of struggle.
That’s one of the significant issues as we seek to ally ourselves with different groups of people. So, I’ll comment on that before I go to the next question. I don’t think of us as allies to some extent because I don’t think of us as separate, sound theories.
I’m trying to make it into good practice as well.
So, I am still determining where this comes from, but I’ll tell you a swift story. I think some of you know the story that my father and parents are very Christian, very fundamentalist, and I can’t remember starting to go to church. I was always in the church and started reading a lot about it when I was young.
And I lived in Detroit. I’d never seen it.
A Chinese person, but the doctrine of that church was that if you didn’t accept Jesus and be baptized, you were going to hell. And I know enough about the Chinese to know they weren’t about to accept Jesus.
And so
I went to my father’s church.
The preacher was my father, and at the end of every sermon, they always said, “Are there any questions?” And it never occurred to me that in all the time I had been at that church, no one had ever asked a question, right?
But this day, they said, “Are there any questions?” I stood up, and the whole church went quiet. I was 11 years old.
I said, “Brother, Brother Manuel was speaking.” He said, “That’s all right, Brother Powell. What’s your question?” And I said, “What will happen to the Chinese?”
This was a black church in Detroit. I never returned to that church, which probably created a significant rift in my life with my family. But it wasn’t because I was allied with the Chinese; I didn’t know, but it seemed wrong.
It seemed wrong to me and how I was trying to live in the world. So, we should expand the circle of human concern and the healing schism with the Earth. In that case, it’s not about just getting mercy into others, but we also become porous. We work out our salvation, love, and life through our relationships, remembering and holding all those parts.
To me, you’re talking about an ethical dimension. When Charles says he wishes people would make a moral and ethical decision, John, at 11 years old, had weighed, “Can all these people be wrong for us to be right? Are all these Chinese people going to be condemned to hell?” And he made an ethical leap of community, a sense of “I can’t accept this.” As we talk about our visionary struggles for liberation, we must include ethics and ethical sensibility. How do we know what is right, what is just if we don’t have an ethical sensibility?
Another question, John?
So here’s a question. This is one of those profound questions that come up all the time. Please capitalize your name. Both of you. That’s John being a copycat.
Let’s move on to something else. Okay, bell doesn’t like that question, one response, though. It’s okay to copy as long as you copy the right person.
What daily life habits allow for active service without burnout or self-care? Paul’s Spirit talks, and people can come to me. I was trying to find an economical way out of academia, so I thought, “Well, I will do these Spirit talks for $20. People can come and talk to me and bring a problem, and we will work together to solve it.” I found that people would bring the problem, and we would solve it, but they wanted to avoid paying me the $20.
That was an exciting sense. I’m always part of looking at daily life. Like, how can I, as a theorist, because I think of myself as an intellectual and a theorist, how can I give of service? Because as a committed bodhisattva, my concern is service to others. So, in my daily life course, I begin my day with meditation, inspirational reading, and prayer, and then think about what service will unfold. How can I make that change where I am in the local world that I live in? That is important to me. Wayne Dyer and others have written a lot about intentionality. I think about what our intentions are every day. I write down my intentions for the day because they guide me toward service, love, giving, and serving.
Thank you. So, here’s one more. That’s a great question. This conference is about transformation. What advice do you have for assessed philanthropy? But this is not just a one-off, and this goes forward. How do we make this conference a reality to create belonging in a transformative way? In the future, we won’t stop at that. We might have what the next meeting together will be, where people give testimony to what the conference has done and what they have done about the teachings of the conference. Many of you have come up to me to give your testimony, to bear witness to what bell hooks’ work has done for you. Many people have said, “Well, I know you hear this all the time.” I say, “Oh, but you know, I can’t hear enough,” because that is the spark that ignites me, that reminds me who lives in a little, primarily all-white town in the Bible Belt, a life of tremendous solitude, that people are listening, people working with the work. So, even if we just had a newsletter published from this conference, people talk about what they learned and how they put it to work.
So, I’ll check that with my curator here about time. Do we have any more time? Thirty-one seconds, John. Finally, she’s given us five more minutes. Let me interrupt John to say one thing we want to take is remember that humor has to be a part of the revolution. Some of you may remember the saying, “The revolution will not be televised.” It didn’t say it wouldn’t be fun. I want to do two things on the question I was asked about going forward. That’s a big issue for us, and we want all of you to help us because we don’t want this to be a one-off. We have a different framework, building on many you’ve already introduced. Still, we want this to be something other than a one-off. So, please think about that for the rest of the day and in the future. How do we connect? How do we give this life? How do we make this real? We can take two live questions if they’re short and if they’re questions.
Well, while John is busy changing the direction without collaboration, I want to say that I encourage all of you to remember that activism takes all kinds of forms and that there have not been many times in your life that you have seen a black man and a black woman, both people who are thinking in leftists cosmopolitan ways of love, together. Our very presence here together is a form of activism. I sincerely didn’t want to come because I have been working hard at the bell hooks Institute. But then I felt I needed to come and stand with John and be with John and have that Spirit that I hope will be the growing Spirit of caring, compassion, and loving-kindness among black females and males in our society. Who has that short question?
The people should have mics around, so it’s a short question. Also, I want to ensure that people have had a chance to participate in an overflow room. So, do we get any questions from the overflow?
Okay.
Okay, there’s a question over there. Okay. Your name?
John, I’ll go. Hey, good morning, everybody. I’m coming from Salinas, and my quick question is: thank you for everything. My question is for those with access to the media and who can publish things. I’ve heard a few times in this conference, like reclaiming the narrative. How can we, as people of color, really push that out there, reclaim the narrative, and yeah…
Please let me know if you understand that.
I like the idea of creating narratives rather than reclaiming them because we are always in the process in our living spaces. I mean, I brought up this whole thing about home as a place, how people of color must make our homes sites of resistance, and how my home is the one place where I’m not in any way a victim of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. So, the issue of self-determination and self-determination about the media. How do we use the resources we have to create different spaces of thinking to bring to the fore what we are doing as active resistance in changing the structure of our lives, not in reaction to whiteness or domination, but in the space of creation and creativity? And I see that, John, as a space of hope because I see more of the younger people in our lives wanting to create from a space of hope and self-determination than reaction to.
And we have time for one more question. Just one comment on that. They found that after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, there was all this stuff on the media about what happened, and what they found is that it re-traumatized people. So, you know, sometimes my friend and colleague Michael Omi said last night, “I made a mistake.” Then he told me what the mistake was, and I said it’s one thing to make a mistake; it’s another thing to keep repeating it, right? To keep retelling the story. Now, sometimes you want to tell the story because you need that to ground you, but also, you need to go beyond the story. We need actually to be willing to go beyond the story. What are we bringing in? What do we weave? What are we giving birth to? Do you have a last question?
Yes. Hello. My name is Abbasidrese. I’m a San Francisco State University grad student in the Communications Department. My question is, it looks like you could speak to how, as a black man, we can learn to love ourselves when we live in a police state that hates us.
Most of us have to say it. Most of us have learned to hate ourselves in the family. Not some white supremacy or patriarchy that’s out there or imperialism that’s out there. It’s been what is happening in the family. So, what can I change within my family if we consider how to change? How can I begin to move from dysfunction to function? That is crucial to me because we’ve already seen what happens when we’re dysfunctional and take our dysfunction into the movement, whatever the movement for social justice is. If we take our dysfunction into that, it usually then reeks of that dysfunction. So, how do we begin to undo it? You know, we do have to remember the trauma. As I was reading Charles’s book, I kept thinking that his very writing of the book was about freeing himself from the chokehold that his childhood experiences had on his Spirit and his life so that he could be free. I am a deep believer in therapy. You know, I mean, I believe that spiritual growth can be crucial to healing from trauma. Still, before we can do anything with other people, we have to find that place of healing to come in good spirits to one another. So that we come with integrity to one another. Integrity is congruency between what you think, say, and do. So, we’re going to close. Thank you for the wholeness and integrity you’ve brought to this conference and the Spirit of joy.