Professors discuss the life, legacy of feminist bell hooks

The passing of bell hooks — the Black feminist thinker, scholar, activist and prolific writer who centered the lives and experiences of Black women in her work — on Dec. 15 was a shocking loss that felt particularly personal for myself and many other Black women I know, despite the fact that we didn’t know her personally. But she knew us. She saw us, and loved us, and gave many of us language for the feelings we weren’t yet able to articulate about navigating the world as Black women.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, she took on the pen name of bell hooks from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, insisting on keeping the pseudonym lowercase to draw focus to her ideas instead of herself. It was her ideas in her first book from the early 1980s, “Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism,” that analyzed feminist theory by tracing the connections between Black history, women’s history, race, gender and class. Her work and influence as an author, cultural critic, educator and public intellectual was part of the foundation to our current understandings of concepts that make connections between how people simultaneously experience oppression through the intersections of race and sexuality, or class and gender identity.

Channon Miller is an assistant professor of history at the University of San Diego who specializes in African American history and whose research focuses on Black women’s history and applying Black feminist frameworks to understanding Black women’s historical experiences. Kimala Price is a scholar-activist, and associate professor and chair of women’s studies at San Diego State University. She’s also the author of the forthcoming book, “Reproductive Politics in the United States.” Miller and Price took the time to celebrate hooks’ life and work, and to lend insight to how her writings have beaten a path toward greater progress for Black women, and the world around us. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-lisa-deaderickstaff.html.)

How were you first introduced to bell hooks and her work?

Miller: I was first introduced to the work of bell hooks in college, and I took several courses that dealt with race and the Black experience because I knew, early on, that that was my area of interest, understanding and being able to study and write about the Black American

experience. I was able to really delve into bell hooks and get to know her work for myself in graduate school and it allowed more room for me to shape myself into the scholar I wanted to become. It was clear to me that bell hooks was necessary for that, for any scholar who wants to delve into and understand Black folks, Black women, bell hooks is the entryway, the foundation, the gateway.

Price: I was an undergraduate student when I was first introduced to her, at Tulane University in the late 1980s and early ’90s. That was a time when you started to see an explosion of Black feminist thinking happening, and bell hooks was part of that. I discovered her and other Black feminists because of the frustration I was feeling in some of my classes. There was one women’s studies course that I took, taught by a White woman professor who had no women of color on her syllabus. I asked if she could put some women of color on the syllabus, and she said that she couldn’t, for a variety of reasons. We went back and forth until we finally came to a compromise: instead of doing the final project she’d assigned for the class, I could fashion my own final project, which was on Black feminist thought. I incorporated people like bell hooks, Alice Walker and Patricia Hill Collins and came up with this paper. That was my education. At the time, bell hooks’ “Ain’t I a

Woman” and “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” were the exciting texts that were out at the time. I remember reading and thinking, “Oh my God, where have you been all my life?” That helped form me in terms of how I think of myself as a Black woman, as a Black feminist, as a feminist.

What did that introduction do for you? What did it help you see?

Miller: For me, it clarified this concept of feminism, in particular, Black feminism. It clarified the ways in which Black women have authored liberation, understandings of liberation and freedom, that have always included grappling with anti-blackness. Also, the ways in which anti-blackness shows up in Black women’s lives, and that there was a language for that. She taught me that there was a language for those particular conditions, but that there’s always been an interest in cultivating ideas and movements and knowledge to help respond to all of that, too. Traditionally, feminism is typically seen as something authored by White women in America or the western world. That it’s a White woman thing, but bell hooks made clear that it’s not the property of White women — that they’re not the architects of these ideas around women’s liberation — but that Black women have always thought about these things and thought about them in broad ways. That was initially why her work emerged as important for me when trying to articulate Black women’s place in the world, and in U.S. history, in particular.

Price: It helped me get to the place where I am right now. I’m actually chair of the women’s studies department. My research is about reproductive politics, but it is very intersectional. Without bell hooks and all of those other Black feminist thinkers pushing us to have an intersectional viewpoint, I don’t know where we would be right now. We credit Kimberlé Crenshaw with the term (“intersectionality”), and she did come up with the term, but there were people who were talking about this before she came along, and bell hooks was one of those pieces of the foundation. For me to look at reproductive justice issues, and all of the activists and scholars who’ve been talking about reproductive justice, we were all influenced by her and other folks in terms of not just looking at gender, but also looking at race and class and sexuality and everything else that makes us who we are as people. How they interact, how we are affected differently based on that combination of our identities, and the experiences of oppression and privilege that we all are encompassed in.