bell hooks, a cultural critic, feminist theorist, and political activist, is recognized as one of America’s leading intellectuals. She is a distinguished professor at the City College of New York. She takes her name from her great-grandmother in recognition of her female legacy and uses lowercase letters to reflect her wariness about ego and fame. Her previous books, “Ain’t I a Woman” and “Black Looks,” provide new scholarship, mixing academic writing with personal testimony. “Killing Rage: Ending Racism” is her latest book, and I’m pleased to have her back here. Welcome back.

It’s good to be back. Last time you were here, we were having a conversation, and I received a bunch of letters saying, “Why did you allow those men, these African-American men in this case, to beat up on bell?” And I said, “bell hooks can take care of herself, thank you very much.”

Absolutely. I thought I took care of myself that evening, even though I felt they tried to silence me, which is interesting. It wasn’t a silent you, but they wanted to meet you; you came down with different sides.

Well, the exciting thing was that the issue that night was white supremacy, and one of the things they were doing was saying it’s not that important. It’s interesting that shortly after that, we had the tragedy in Oklahoma, and then there was the O.J. Simpson case, drawing out the tension that’s been in our culture for such a long time.

And what do you say about white supremacy today?

Part of what I say is that white supremacy, first of all, isn’t a white thing; it’s part of this culture. It’s part of how all of us have been taught to think about difference – who’s better, inferior, and superior. I prefer “white supremacy” to “racism” precisely because it says that we’re all being socialized to think along certain dualistic lines. The notion that which is light or white is better and that which is dark or black is worse, inadequate, or inferior is something that everyone in the culture is socialized to think.

Let’s talk about some political events and recent events. First is the Million Man March. What do you think?

The Million Man March was something that I deeply and profoundly opposed. I opposed it because you cannot separate messages from the messengers. While the idea of black male solidarity and unity is fine – I mean, who could not be moved by the images of all of those men – underlying those images is a political ideology, a way of thinking about family.

I’m not saying discipline isn’t essential because discipline is crucial to any true love, with boundaries we set. So, I think part of what’s happened to us as a nation is we have confused discipline with a kind of blind obedience to authority, whether it’s children to parents or us to a government or a nation acting in an autocratic and wrong way.

So, the book doesn’t just try to look at our relationship to love but also what’s happening to us as a nation as we move away from the kind of ethic of love that many of us felt underpinned all the great social movements for social justice in our society.

You say that we, as a nation and as a society, have forgotten what it is to love, to find true love and that it’s evident in our music.

We used to croon about the moon in June, and now we come up with lyrics from Tina Turner and others asking, “What’s love got to make? What’s love got to do with it?”

That’s right; the culture itself has hardened, especially the youth culture. I mean, one of the things that’s so disturbing about gangster rap—and let me say that I’m not attacking all hip-hop; there are many forms of hip-hop—but in its most brutal forms, it’s anti-erotic, anti-female, and promotes a cult of death. One of the passages that I often quote in this book is from the Bible, from the book of John, which says that anyone who does not know love is still in death.

And we’re at risk of being a culture that cultivates this sort of worship of death. It is fascinating that when I think about the defining movement for social justice in our culture, it was the civil rights movement. The fact is there could be no end to apartheid in South Africa today if there had not been a civil rights movement in the United States. Whether we’re talking about Aborigines in Australia or many people worldwide, they look to the civil rights and freedom struggle in the United States as emblematic of justice. But the heart of that movement was the ethics of love. When I began writing this book, I returned to Martin Luther King’s “Strength to Love,” a marvelous book. He was one of the first leaders in our society to talk about love, not as a sentimental emotion…

You know, many of my bell hooks readers who are used to the hard-hitting social commentary have said to me, “Why talk about love?” You know, people sometimes hope we will keep that biting intervention. I said I wanted to talk about love and the relationship between love and ending domination, whether we’re talking about racism, homophobia, or class elitism.

Because much of the book discusses greed and how greed has made us less loving as a nation, why do we think welfare is wrong? We should celebrate as a nation that we have the resources to provide for people with love.

You say there that we now embrace welfare reform, not because there was a need for compassion. We use welfare abuse as an excuse to cover up the fact that we’ve lost our compassion for those who have not, exactly.

I have been so disturbed by seeing so many people of my generation who came out of radical thinking and moved into a mindset that says we can’t give to others; they should only appreciate what they work for. There’s a lack of compassion, a hardening of the heart.

Marianne Williamson began to talk about that in her book “The Healing of America.” It’s this sense that the love ethic (and people have to hear those two words in combination – love ethic, which means it’s about values) underlies a love ethic and respect. I ask people, “What does love have to do with respect?” When we look at children, particularly the violence of children against children in our nation right now, part of what we’re seeing is a lack of caring, a lack of respect, a lack of understanding.

Envy is a crucial emotion connected to greed. You want to destroy what you envy. When a ten-year-old kid wants to destroy another kid because that kid is more popular, that’s something profound; it’s a profound lovelessness. We can’t just talk about what parents are doing. We have to talk about it in terms of what we, as a nation, value.

You know, I knew that you had written previously on both feminist and racial themes. So, it didn’t surprise me to find in “All About Love” that you

examine the historical, social, and psychological forces that have created these situations.

Absolutely. And one of the things I wanted to do in “All About Love” was to have a dialogue between feminism and love. We’ve tended to talk about love only in individual and personal terms. We tend to make it an individual issue. I always tell people that you can’t talk about love if you can’t talk about politics. If you can’t talk about justice, you can’t talk about love because love is about justice.

Thank you for sharing your perspective on these critical issues.

That is what patriarchy says to us, and what we know is that a lot of men provide and protect, yet they still have difficulties with self-esteem. In your judgment, black women endorsed feminism and responded to it well. In “Killing Rage,” I try to talk about the fact that black women have questioned feminism because of our recognition that race is always a factor. So, there’s been an attention-calling to racism within the women’s movement, particularly the racism of privileged class women who were saying, “We’re victimized because of certain issues,” that black women did not see as an occasion for victimization. Did it put black women against white women? Then, yes, I think the reformist-based feminist movement very much pitted black women against white women by leaving out the discourses of women of color and black women. For example, early on, a central thesis of feminism was that women needed to get out into the workforce. Well, masses of black women were already in the workforce and weren’t liberated. Many poor women were already working, and that kind of work wasn’t liberating for them. There was a fundamental distinction between those women Betty Friedan was described as sitting at home, many of whom were well-educated and had been educated in the Ivy League, and those masses of women who were in factories, cleaning people’s homes, who did not see work as central to liberation and who were fantasizing about the days of their lives when they wouldn’t have to work. There’s a chapter in “Killing Rage” about black and white female relations where I say until our relationships improve until black women and white women understand each other better, there will not be an end to racism in this society.

O.J. Simpson, what do you think? I mean, not so much about him, but beyond that, are you surprised by the reaction to it?

I was shocked and troubled by the reaction to it because I felt like I was one of the people who religiously tried not to watch the case precisely because I felt it was rooted in domestic violence. I, here again, don’t think that people can pretend that somehow domestic violence doesn’t matter. This tragedy would not have happened if male violence against women was not so acceptable in our culture because there is a line leading up to the tragedy. Whether we know who murdered this woman or not, we do know that a whole life structured around the acceptance of violence was a part of how this couple related to one another. That made me feel like once this becomes entertainment, once the cameras focus on O.J. Simpson, people will forget that at the heart of this is both male violence and male violence against women. Because we’ve not heard anybody speculate that a group of women were outside that house chopping up anybody. So clearly, we cannot get away from the dilemma of male violence in our culture and male violence against women. I try to hold that as a way of not deflecting attention away from the fact that this was not an issue of race. I mean, the case itself was not an issue of race. How we interpreted it, how we witnessed it as a culture, it was racialized. But the heart of it still, for me, remains male violence against women.

But what about those, including Johnnie Cochran, who would say, “No, no, it was about race because it was about race, and it’s because of the attitude of the LAPD?”

I think even before we knew anything about the attitude of the LAPD, we knew that whenever sexuality is involved. Gender in our culture, people often prefer to talk about race. Race makes it easier for people to racialize something because if we make it a case of gender, we have to see a man like O.J. Simpson as very empowered by class and patriarchy. If we make it a case of race, we can see him as always and only a victim. So, of course, it was essential for men in general, and Cochran in particular, himself, who, according to his ex-wife, is no stranger to domestic violence, to act as though the only issue here is one of racial injustice.

This is “bell hooks: Killing Rage – Ending Racism.” It’s a collection of essays about various subjects dealing with men and women, gender, violence, rage, and other topics. My friend Cornel West says, “Unlike most black intellectuals, she writes with a sense of urgency about the existential and psycho-cultural dimensions of African-American life, especially those spiritual and intimate issues of love, hurt, pain, envy, and desire, usually probed by artists. Her books help us decolonize our minds, souls, and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives. It is difficult to read a bell hooks essay without enacting some form of self-examination or self-inventory, which is exactly what she would like you to do.”

Thank you for joining us. See you next time.