Throughout her versatile career as a committed essayist, bell hooks has worked hard to reflect on racism and patriarchy in America, particularly on psychological trauma among African-Americans. With this third essay published in 1995, but only now available in French, the Afrofeminist writer and activist, who died on December 15, 2021 at the age of 69, looks at major questions linked to “race”, ” gender” and “social class”. These three concepts are not distinct, but on the contrary are part of a single set of domination of which racialized women in the United States are the first victims, explains the essayist.
The one who was previously called Gloria Jean Watkins decided in 1978 to sign bell hooks (without capitals) her first collection of poetry, And there we cried (And There We Wept). A pseudonym coined in homage to his grandmother. She then became known in the 1980s for her work on feminism and the publication of Am I not a woman?, a major book in which she points the finger at both white feminisms and black liberation movements. As an extension of this founding text, this great figure of contemporary thought supports the idea that the eradication of racism and that of sexism go hand in hand.
In this new essay, Murderous rage. End racism, hooks develops reflections that are certainly complex, but quite accessible thanks to tangible writing drawing on several levels of language which range from anecdote to memory, including philosophical rhetoric and social thought. The originality of his argument is based on personal reflection and individual responsibility with a view to social change centered on self-love. “We can resist racism […] in this act of resistance, we can find ourselves and renew ourselves,” says the woman who grew up in the segregationist South, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.
The author of Everyone can be a feminist also highlights the absence of female voices in the discourse on racial policies. This is why she encourages women to no longer submit to sexist and racist constraints by sharing their knowledge and resources. Published almost 30 years ago, well before the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, the essay is cruelly relevant today.
It remains that the work, written over more than twenty years, is written from the point of view of a black feminist who criticizes racism, but who remains optimistic about a future where the rejection of difference does not no longer exists. She calls for the creation of a “loving community”, a notion dear to Martin Luther King, who imagined a world where “race can be overcome, forgotten, where no one would see the color of skin”.