Episode 139: bell hooks on Racism/Sexism

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some folks who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 139 is something like, what's the relationship between sexism and racism? Or maybe how can we mitigate the effects in our psyches of historical racism and sexism? And we read some works by bell hooks, Ain't I a woman from 1981, and a little bit of Black Looks: Race and Representation from 1992. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer relinquishing my role in the patriarchy in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:51 Myesha: This is Myesha Cherry in Chicago, Illinois.

0:54 Mark: Welcome guest Myesha, Welcome. Whom folks might have heard on her podcast, Unmute.

0:59 Myesha: Yes, the Unmute podcast.

1:01 Mark: Tell us about that for a minute.

1:02 Myesha: Yeah, it's a podcast that seeks to kind of bring philosophy out of the academy and to talk about issues that affect the real world. And so I've had the opportunity to interview lots of junior scholars and a few senior scholars to talk about real life issues.

1:18 Mark: Just like when we talk about Hegel's Logic, it's real, real life issues,

1:23 Dylan: the beginning of that is all about us. But the real life issues, we're not always so good.

1:34 Myesha: Currently, I am a PhD student in the philosophy department at University of Illinois, Chicago. And prior to coming to the University of Illinois, I was adjunct in the New York City area teaching philosophy. Before doing that, I was working in the nonprofit sector. And so I've always kind of been passionate for disenfranchised communities, quote, unquote, the marginalized and the oppressed. And so I felt as I transitioned from the nonprofit world to academia, it wasn't an attempt to kind of turn my back on those particular communities, but to still work with them in a very different way.

So as much as I am very into academia and philosophical research, I'm also very interested in public philosophy. So I've been writing for the Huffington Post for the last five years or so. I've also done a lot of op ed pieces for Salon.com and the LA Times and written a few public pieces for public philosophy books. My philosophical interest is in social and political philosophy. And so the podcast, the focus of the podcast is to kind of talk about those kind of and political issues we've had in the last year and a half or so. We Have a podcast coming out very soon on pornography.

We've talked about slurs, we've talked about propaganda, we talked about ignorance. And so I interview a particular philosopher and we talk about one particular topic throughout the podcast. So I found that it's been a way to bring what they write, which is perhaps very academic, to a public audience. It's been a great companion pieces in classrooms and also for people who've never heard of their work before.

3:00 Mark: Just listen to the one on slurs yesterday. So just so nice. Just so the other people on here know, we white people are not allowed to say the N word. That's what I learned from that slurs piece. Not even lovingly. You can't even quote it.

3:14 Myesha: I'm looking forward what you're going to learn about pornography, which is our next episode.

3:18 Mark: Well, we have a lot to learn.

3:20 Myesha: I'll leave that there.

3:23 Mark: Well, bell hooks has a lot to say about that. Not necessarily in just what we read, although so Ain't I Woman is for the most part, a historical overview. I mean, that's a quote from Sojourner Truth.

3:34 Unknown speaker: Who.

3:35 Mark: What is the exact date that she was famous?

3:37 Dylan: 1852. Does that sound right?

3:39 Mark: Yeah. So there's something about the 19th century black female political awareness that she thinks is more radical than is today within feminism or among black women generally, and wants to focus in this book. She just felt like going and looking. She wrote this as an undergraduate, apparently.

3:56 Seth: Really?

3:56 Mark: Yeah, yeah, she wrote. It was. Wow. The first draft was done when she was 19.

4:02 Myesha: Way to make me feel bad about my work now.

4:04 Mark: It wasn't published until about a decade later. So I'm guessing from all of the quotes and historical sources and stuff that are thrown out in here that she kept working on it, that it wasn't like it was done at that time, but she initiated it. She did a lot of. She felt like as an undergrad, I can just go out and do this.

4:19 Dylan: She was looking for a publisher, apparently shortly after her undergrad.

4:24 Mark: Part of the reason why she wrote this is because she's a voracious reader and was looking in the library like, where are books about black women about the experiences of black women? And she just wasn't finding them. And at least according to the introduction here, her significant other at the time said, well, why don't you just write one? So she set out this. So there are five chapters, and each one goes through a different aspect or historical point. So chapters one and two are on sexism and the black female slave experience, and 2 continued devaluation of black womanhood. Right in the. What is the nice word of being freed?

4:58 Seth: Manumission.

4:59 Mark: Manumission.

5:00 Seth: That's like a high school word.

5:02 Mark: Yes, exactly. That's what I feel like. I learned that at that time and I've not heard it since. So we did not focus on those. Those did not seem. I mean, it's interesting. It's like really good cultural information to know. But in terms of, like, what is there philosophically, what is there controversial. What is there that we're supposed to disagree with? Because she really likes to write books with all these ideas that will blow your mind. And this is because I've seen her talking about her own work in video, that she prides herself that this is part of what she does and what her readers tell her that she does.

So the things that are supposed to kind of hit most home. The official assigned reading here was chapters three through five, which is the imperialism of patriarchy, which is mostly about how sexist those great civil rights folks were. Yes, they were fighting against racial oppression, but when you hear them talking about. When you hear Richard Wright talking about the Negro or something, Negro men. It means black men. And I'm just going to use black in this conversation. Just because bell hooks uses it. I'm not going to say African American. Chapter four, Racism and feminism.

So the same thing. These people that are revered as the old time, not Sojourner Truth, obviously, but Susan B. Anthony and folks like that that were either racist themselves or made political compromises because they wanted to gain the support of white women in the south to their cause, so that they ignored the experience and plight of black women. And then chapter five, Black women in feminism, is the most, like, overtly political. Hey, black women, raise your political consciousness. Get involved in this. You may have dissed the whole movement in the past because they were so racist.

This is their call to action. How did that work as a. As a little summary of that? Any other additions?

6:39 Seth: I think you're making it sound like she was making an attack on these people. I think there's a broader theme. She's trying to make the point that black women's experience during slavery and then post slavery was completely overlooked. That there's an assumption that feminists were fighting for the rights for all women and they weren't, and that people who were working towards emancipation were not necessarily considering black women's experience. It's a broader theme that she was saying they're victims of both sexism and racism, and each one of those worked against the other.

That if they stood up to fight against sexism, they were told, no, you need to focus on racism. And if you start to fight against racism, it sort of erased the whole notion that they were being oppressed, oppressed as women. So it's a broader theme that she uses those as examples, pointing out, for example, the suffragettes were all white women and that black women were not included in those caucuses and were not welcome and that sort of thing.

7:35 Mark: Yeah. So part of this, I guess an overall purpose. Why should we be aware of this history? Why is she presenting it like this? It's part of this raising of historical consciousness. We're all enlightened in the modern age to then figure out how are our minds still messed up from this. So this is kind of where the second work that we read, some of this Black Race and Representation comes in. That was published in 1992, published a decade later, and I guess written like two decades later. And she gives us a little more the parts that we read of that.

The introduction, which is kind of about her program of media critique of a lot of the problems of this is a hermeneutic issue. It's about the stories we tell ourselves. To have an identity is to be able to tell a story about yourself and your background and your group identifications. And as long as those are messed up, as long as those are infected with what's left over from white supremacy and patriarchy. Capitalism, yes, capitalism is raised a little bit, but I guess that's one interesting thing we can consider.

8:36 Dylan: But that's the triplet.

8:37 Myesha: Yes.

8:38 Mark: And I think that's part of kind of what it comes down to. That even if you were objecting to like that the old time or even right now, people fighting for women's liberation are, she thinks, fighting mostly well, we want to have the good capitalist jobs like the men do. And that that's not going to be the route to self actualization. And since especially black women being pelted on all sides by these historical injustices are in a position where they're already having to critique the whole culture. And in doing so, well, probably you should be critiquing what you want to replace it with critiquing yourself, critiquing the new stuff. So why not reject capitalist imperialism as well? Why not do something that's actually going to be self actualizing.

9:20 Dylan: One of the things I would have liked to hear a little bit more about, but that's clearly in there, is kind of the psychology of how oppressive cultural institutions or just ways like racism and sexism and capitalism affect the way the individuals who are oppressed see themselves and also how they try to actualize themselves out of it. She spends a lot of time in Ain't I a Woman talking about mistaken ways of actualizing oneself that amount to basically assuming the role of an oppressor.

9:55 Mark: Right. Adapting their whole framework. I don't reject the framework. I just reject my position in the framework.

10:01 Dylan: Yeah. And the example to me that stood out was her discussion about the relationships between black women, slaves and white women during slavery times. The white women were oppressed in this patriarchy, but they didn't identify themselves as women in solidarity with black women, but in fact became oppressors. There's a psychology going on there from her perspective about escaping from domination. And the way to do that is not to become part of that. What does she say? I saw this talk that she did that you pointed me to, Mark. She said not to get in the ring. That's not part of our reading. But to not be part of the competition and inevitably become an oppressor. That's what it sounds like. She doesn't develop that in what we read.

10:52 Mark: Well, but I did read that one of her, of the many people that she most idolizes is Erich Fromm that we did an episode on recently. And she's written some books on love. So that kind of gives you the clue that she really keys in on Martin Luther King's view of love as the solution to all these things. So it's self actualization and openness and just trying to get at a place where you can have real dialogue with each other. And that's engaging. And so she's very. Reading this made me understand a lot better. I feel like a lot of the modern, you know, what I read in Salon, but she's very positive.

She's critical, but she's critical in a way that is a part of love. She was talking in that same talk about. People say she hates Spike Lee. No, it's only because he's worth critiquing, because he has so many good qualities about his movies or something that it's worth talking about the way that he portrays. Portrays women or whatever.

11:45 Myesha: I'm gonna say something about that self actualization point. As I was reading Black Looks, one of the things, I mean, it does seem as if she doesn't give, I guess, a prescriptive or how to self actualize. But one of the things she does do is, I hate to say beg, but she kind of asks those who have self actualized themselves to kind of produce narratives.

12:05 Seth: Yeah.

12:06 Myesha: So that people can have an account of how they did that for themselves. And so she even highlights her own life. Right. And I think one of the things that I enjoy about reading Bell Hook's books is that she does indeed write from a first person perspective in which she's telling us about her experiences, what kind of lays out for us how she self actualized or perhaps how we can. Right. And so I think her mentioning of Angela Davis autobiography and even at the time, you know, begging for a feminist like June Jordan to also write these autobiographies to kind of allow black women in particular and other people as well, to see what does that self actualizing entail and what does it look like?

12:41 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, that's her call to action at the end of the revolutionary Black Woman's essay in Black Looks is basically what you just said, write some books,

12:53 Seth: it's that. But she also says it should be backed by two things, theory as well as revolutionary practice. You know, she says she still always has been a Marxist and the idea that if your goal is to self actualize outside of the framework, then you need to somehow overcome or get rid of the framework, which requires revolutionary action, which requires organization. One of the themes that I saw reading the second set of essays from Black Looks and reflecting back on Ain't I a Woman is that she frames the whole narrative, historical narrative of Ain't I a Woman about reactions to the capitalist, but really more colonial framework that was brought over and institutionalized.

So during slavery, it's obvious terrorism and oppression. Following slavery, there's psychological terror, there's the desire to conform. So she's framing everybody in terms of them wanting to play roles that they think they're supposed to assume and that it causes this very conflicted consciousness and self image. And that book never sort of touches on like you say, it just kind of ends with, you know, we've never told these stories, we've never considered this perspective and we don't really have a theoretical framework for even acknowledging black women as subjects.

And then in Black Looks she sort of puts a little more theoretical focus in that, but it doesn't sound like she has a prescription, because I don't think there is a prescription like go do this and you will become a self actualized person. Not in response to capitalist imperialism, but rather, I think she thinks there needs to be a movement of expression which will find its way as people do the things that they feel they need to do and push against the boundaries, but also simultaneously organize and collect in a way that's productive so, Myesha, I

14:42 Mark: know you'd read a lot of stuff related to this. Just some background. So it was actually Law Ware that prompted this episode and he was supposed to be on here, our guest from our first episode on Race a while ago now, but he's been on a couple episodes since then about religion. He ended up not being able to make it tonight, but I'd been looking for an opportunity. I love having other podcasters on and I know Myesha knew a lot about this. Had you read much bell hooks before diving in this time?

15:10 Myesha: I think every black woman has read bell hooks, but that's going to be a generalization.

15:14 Mark: She's got 30 books, so there's a lot of damn levels there.

15:18 Myesha: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. At different points of my life, I read different kinds of books by bell hooks of when I'm trying to get my teaching together and trying to reimagine myself as an instructor in the classroom. I read her series of pedagogical books and then I was doing some research on masculinity, which I'm very, very interested in. And we've read echoes of that in the reading that we read. But her book on black masculinity is just brilliant. Also very interested in political emotions, anger to be more particular. And she also have a book on rage. And so at different points of my life as a black woman, but also my research interests, I turned to hooks, Dylan or Seth.

15:59 Dylan: I had never read her before and just found it super interesting. First of all, she's a really good writer.

16:07 Seth: Yes.

16:07 Dylan: And just from that perspective, it just was really interesting to read. And then maybe this is just a consequence of the kind of typical historical education I have. But in Ain't I a Woman, it's clear that she just read all kinds of books that were like deep, deep in the library or deep, deep in like a library, but not in every library. And looked in particular for a lot of personal individual accounts. So it's a kind of history, a kind of genealogy, and also just a kind of reporting, like a reporting back, a reporting in the future of the past. And in that way, I found it just utterly engrossing to have someone distill these first person accounts along with the analysis that went along with them to bring it together. It made me want to read more of her books.

16:59 Myesha: I think it goes to show, I mean, she kind of mentions this in her critique of white feminism about upper and middle class women only doing the theorizing or only presenting their experiences. And in a way, when we think about the feminist canon. You do have lots of work by white women. And I think what black feminists today is trying to recover, like white feminists were not the first feminists. Right. And they were not the only feminists in the 19th and 20th cent. And I'm still trying to catch up because I wasn't taught a lot of this stuff in high school and undergrad.

And so I feel like as I rebell hooks and a lot of contemporary feminists, that I'm also digging kind of through the archives. It's unfortunate that we have to dig. Right. But a lot of it has to do with these feminists not giving them much uptake. But they are, they're there. And I'm glad she's bringing it to the forefront now.

17:46 Mark: One of the things I was just listening to some of our first episode on Race with Law. Does this stuff count as philosophy? Is it philosophical? She doesn't call herself a philosopher. She's professor of, I think English and she's in like women's studies departments and other stuff like that. She clearly reads just really widely. And in some ways, I don't know if she has an essay on this in particular, I think would just find the whole is it your philosophy like that that's part of the problem that these kind of hierarchical. Just the rejection of unless you have qualifications or you have a certain label, then we're not going to.

To listen. Like that just seems entirely counter to what she would care about. But I think we can also see. So we've just done one on Adorno and then on Bourdieu on these social theorists talking about class and stuff that's descended from Marxism and bell hooks fits very much into that category too, with some twists.

18:42 Seth: Dylan kind of pointed out earlier sort of the difference and you mentioned that chronological difference between Ain't I a Woman and the essays we read. And Ain't I a Woman reads a lot more like an undergraduate version of Foucault.

18:55 Myesha: Yeah.

18:56 Dylan: Did you thought of Foucault when you read it?

18:58 Seth: Totally, I did, yeah.

18:59 Mark: Yes, she quotes him at some point. I don't remember in what she mentions

19:03 Seth: him later on in the theater. My point being that I wish I wrote that well when I was 19. But she's telling a story about a hidden and forgotten narrative. And one of the things that she does really, really well in that essay is point out how language is used to reinforce ideology and dominant paradigm without being obvious about it. It's a brilliant job of saying, here you see how they use the word men or they use the word woman, but what they really mean is white women, black men, that sort of thing. And it. You read the quotes and then she makes that point and you go back and reread the quote she's referencing and you're like, oh, my God, yeah. Whereas in the later essays, 20 years later, it's clear she's been in a critical theory department. She uses the term deconstruction. There's a lot of language that skirts, but without being obnoxiously so. My opinion, well, mostly in quotes.

19:55 Mark: All the really obnoxious stuff is like she's quoting somebody else. If it really has that critical theory heavy vocabulary.

20:01 Seth: Yeah, she sort of hints and skirts around the vocabulary without turning the whole thing into just a jargon laden thing. So it's. There's an evolution there that I thought was really interesting.

20:11 Mark: I think different books are aimed at different audiences, but for the most part, and certainly both the books that we read are supposed to be accessible as widely as possible. That she would never want to, you know, say that this can be read by somebody with the appropriate graduate degree or something like that. It's not gonna. So she's gonna have a style that follows that. It's supposed to be consciousness raising for regular people.

20:33 Dylan: So, Myesha, have you taught bell hooks classes or used her in any of your classes that you've put together?

20:38 Myesha: You know what, now that I think about it, I have never used hooks before. That's pretty selfish of me. Now I feel bad.

20:47 Dylan: But it sounds like if not using actual her essays, you've used her thinking about the role of, I guess, teaching to transgress, which I ordered, but I have not read yet.

20:58 Myesha: Oh, man. Yeah, I think there's about three books in that series.

21:01 Dylan: Okay.

21:01 Myesha: Yeah. So I've benefited from her work in that I'm calling the book series. I don't even know if she referred to it as such, but I've learned a lot from that book series. And like I said, her work on masculinity and black rage is something that I've incorporated in my research, but I have never taught it, which is going to make me rethink some things when I teach a class this summer. But also, I must say that I've also never taught a feminism class. And for sure, if I was teaching that, I almost definitely include bell hooks in that.

21:26 Mark: But yeah, so the way that we stumbled on the Black Looks book was actually so in our last episode on Bourdieu, Tim Quirk mentioned that he was given that Bourdieu book. And also this White Privilege, which is a collection, and that actually has one of the essays from here in it, Representations of Whiteness in Black imagination. That's chapter 11, which got me then looking at the rest of this book and seeing like, oh, okay, this is the hardcore. And I feel like this is a great way into a discourse that's very common now, but not as well done in the popular culture.

Kind of like what you would expect, that this is sort of how I always think about religion. That you could really read the core religious texts or the great scholars within the tradition, and, like, those will make sense. And you'll say, okay, I get where you're coming from. But then you'll just hear regular people. I don't know what that means. Like, people that are not the genius writers talking about them. And it'll just sound like absolute garbage. But then when you sort of go back to see what they're bastardizing, then like, oh, okay, I see where that's coming from.

And so, in particular, the focus of Black Looks is just about media portrayal. And this is one of the kind of things that's very commonly discussed and I think often causes a lot of eye rolling. Am I wrong about this? Which. Even the way she does it, the thing that I had sent you, which I'll share the description of, I was actually listening to in the car with my daughter, and it happened to get on the part where it was talking about the movie Frozen. So she was giving a critique of how little girls like the Elsa character, who's more white, who has white hair, who displays classical themes of domination in the way she ignores the pleas of her sister for attention than Anna, who has darker hair and sort of represents this feminist spirit and sort of is somebody that they should more admire.

But. But nonetheless, the little kids, they flocked to the Elsa doll. And so my daughter was just confused by that. She's a big fan of Frozen. And then I tried to describe this to my wife, and she just, like, I didn't portray it very well. And she just was very. Just like, this is why people stop listening to this stuff. Because if you're doing that kind of critique of that kind of movie in that way, like, what really. What are you trying to say? But I don't know. The way. The context that she was giving, as we see in the introduction to Black Looks here, made the whole thing make sense to me, that if a lot of the issues, the persistent historical issues are these stories we tell about ourselves is our aesthetics, then yeah.

According to her claim, the prime way, maybe her symptom of this and maybe the main way of addressing it is to have more control over images, to be able to have more control over the way different groups are depicted in the media. And that every time that there's something that is a stereotype or whatever, it's not just a matter of, oh, this quirky character in this sitcom, it's like just another reinforcement of the imperialist patriarchy. It's a sign that whether it was made by white people or by, according to her self loathing, black people that have internalized this.

What did y' all think of that?

24:31 Myesha: Yeah, I mean, I believe that representation matters and people who believe that it doesn't in some ways, either I think they're just blind or, or they've been privy to seeing images that represent them till it's kind of like just a norm. Right. Prior to our telephone conversation, I was listening to a geek podcast that I listened to that I'm not going to say, and it's a movie coming out and I forgot the movie. I think it's based on a Japanese anime character and there's a movie coming out and a. I'm not really good with actress name, but a mainstream white actress is going to play the role.

And the whole question of the podcast segment is this whitewashing, you know, the movie and is it anything problematic with that? And one person said, yes, it was. The other person says, well, this is going to sell movies, right. Without this actress, this white actress being part of the movie, that's what she's going to sell. And I think we've seen that. I mean, there's been several roles that's, there's Nina Simone. So the movie even with Nina Simone, yes, being played by a black actress, but a black actress who doesn't really look like Nina Simone.

Right. And people are up and arms about that. And particularly for Nina Simone, representation mattered to her, Right? Just black and gritty. Right. I mean, we've seen studies of young black kids having negative perspectives about other black kids through the Doll project. Right. And you got to ask yourself, well, why do they feel like that? Why do they think that the black doll is ugly? Well, because they've seen media kind of portray that black people are ugly, black people are thieves, black people are violent. So kind of this self hatred. And that has all come through representation.

So I think representation does indeed matter. And even as I was reading this essay, I mean, I couldn't help but think about today, it's still an issue, right. This notion of. I don't know how many of you have heard the term of colorism and bell hooks talk about this situation when she goes to another island and she's talking to her friend's daughter, and her friend's daughter kind of basically hates her. Her skin and wants to become lighter, right? You have in other parts of the world in which people do believe that lighter skin. And so people are even bleaching their black skin to become lighter.

Right. And this all has to do kind of with the images and this myth that whiteness is beautiful and whiteness is the best thing that one ought to be. And so one ought to try to be like that.

26:39 Dylan: There's the practical issue that you're talking about, like the particular instances, and then there's this issue of the effects of media. And she says at the end of the introduction of black looks, she says many audiences in the United States resist the idea that images have ideological content. So there's that question of what it means, why people would either claim and push and emphasize that images and media have ideological content that affects things, and why would they resist it? And the context. I've usually heard that in popular culture would be with music or books.

And it's typically liberals who will say, look what you say. And the effect of the media is not what's at issue, that you need to be able to say whatever. There's like a freedom of saying things because it's assumed that you can be independent of that in your culture. It makes me think of Socrates in the Republic saying, we ought to regulate what the poets say because it's bad for people to be taught the wrong things because it corrupts their souls. And there's something in common with that idea that what the media says matters, because when you're a student, you would resist this idea that there should be any kind of censorship.

But there's other ways of talking about. Without talking about censorship, but talking about just the effect of the way we speak and of media and images and poetry, on how we think of ourselves and the way in which that's used both as a purposeful force, but also when you're steeped in it, that it also has an effect on you.

28:18 Mark: And I guess the source of resistance with all of this is that people don't like to consider themselves as being manipulated and subject to things. So if you ask explicitly the question of anybody that's reasonable. Do you think whiteness is more beautiful than blackness or is better morally or something? No. I mean, in the 21st century, if you're educated at all, you're not going to say that. And this is why people say, oh, racism doesn't exist anymore. The way that bell hooks puts it. Well, she's talking about feminism mostly, but that it's at a point of crisis that because certain advances have been made, I mean, whether it's women got the right to vote and now women are in positions of power and minorities are in positions of power and minorities are present on.

Every time there's advances, then there are a number of people that say, okay, either we've achieved or they've achieved. The goal has been achieved. And so people like bell hooks. They want us to engage in consciousness raising to realize that, no, no, the problem is still deeper than that, that you are more messed up than you realize. Whatever you may logically assent to. I guess, you know, one could see this as just part and parcel with Socrates, command to examine yourself. Can you at least be open to the idea that whatever your position is, no matter how liberal you may think you are, even if you are, are yourself a civil rights leader, there might be still something that is not properly decolonized.

29:43 Myesha: Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about Marx here, and Marx didn't say this, but if I could. Ideology is a hell of a drug. In some ways, believing it gives us a sense of comfort and in other ways, and believing it, I mean, it totally is a danger to your own self actualization. And so of course Marx doesn't highlight ways in which we can get over it. But you know, it's a hell of a drug. And the question is, what do we do with it? I think that's the ethical question. What do we do with it? Do we resist it? Do we decolonize it? Decolonize our own thinking? Or do we continue to allow it to have its way? I think that's a challenge for us.

30:15 Mark: So can we talk about that term that I just threw around and you repeated that because she just kind of brings it up as well. Does that come from Frantz Fanon and people like that, that it's not decolonized? Yes. The way that bell hooks puts it somewhere in here is most people think that racism is a matter of race hatred and they think, oh, I don't have any explicit race hatred, so therefore that's fine. Or if you are a black person, no, of course I don't have any hatred toward black people. So what, what is the problem? Get off my back. No, no, no, because you're still. There's a colonial Mindset here. What exactly goes into that? I'm not really familiar with the literature that is behind that. I guess this is directed toward Maisha. Unless somebody else knows.

30:53 Myesha: Oh, it's directed toward me. Okay.

30:54 Mark: Everything is directed toward everyone.

30:56 Dylan: I can't answer that question.

30:59 Myesha: I'm an analytic philosopher. I can't answer that question.

31:03 Mark: Dylan's a physics guy. He can't answer anything.

31:06 Dylan: Ouch.

31:07 Mark: I'm kidding.

31:08 Myesha: Decolonizing is several parts to it, right? In one way, it's exposing. Exposing the truth of the narrative. And so, for example, you know, in our textbooks, we learned that the Europeans came over and had a wonderful feast with the Native Americans and everything was peachy cream, right? And the decolonizing process exposes the truth of that encounter, right? So it exposes the messiness of imperialism, the messiness of sexism and racism. And then in other ways, decolonizing is, you know, trying to do surgery on ourselves. I mean, you know, you think about when imperialists come over or the colonizer comes over, colonize a particular land, they give the natives a different kind of education, right?

A different way of living and being that totally takes away their true identity. And so when the colonizer leaves, you still have the problem of that mindset and that education. You know, how do you set yourself free? How do you become yourself again? How do you begin to think like yourself again without thinking with the lens of whiteness? Yeah, that's colonization. And I think it's much more than that. But that's.

32:04 Mark: Well, I guess that's what I thought, that it's based on the metaphor of colonization. But especially when she talks about it as part of sexism. Like, really, men colonize. Like there's obviously no historical event by which men colonized women. But there's still exactly what you're saying, that the dominant narrative was constructed by men with their own opportunistic self interest in mind. That's a favorite phrase of bell hooks is here, opportunistic self interest that jumps in no matter how well intentioned. You know, you're trying to just tell a story, you're trying to, but you end up lionizing your own group, whatever that might be. And so decolonizing would be removing the effects of that. And that would be an issue even if you are among the group that is a colonizer group. Or is that right?

32:46 Dylan: Yeah, I think it is. But it seems complicated in that the decolonization would not be just recovering oneself, would not be just going backwards because you couldn't get rid of the effects of the colonization. So decolonization would have to be rather than a kind of surgical removal. It's a different kind of freeing that has to in some ways go through a colonized thinking of having been colonized, let's say, in your mind or in your soul. Decolonizing isn't removing that, it's getting beyond it. So that the effects of that colonization aren't guiding your soul anymore. And it would be true for both the oppressed and the oppressor as well. She talks about that some in the book. I mean, for obvious reasons, it does seem a little bit weird to talk about how bad the oppressor feels. And gosh, they have some work to do too, to free themselves.

33:48 Seth: She rejects that.

33:49 Myesha: Well, she does say that being an oppressor is being a victim.

33:52 Dylan: Yes.

33:52 Myesha: And she, you know, fair enough. Then she goes back to doing what she was doing.

33:57 Dylan: She doesn't completely reject it. Seth?

33:59 Seth: Yeah, I think my opinion. You're talking about that section where she says if you take that tack, That's a strategy. That is that chapter 11.

34:06 Dylan: Well, it comes up in a couple different places.

34:08 Seth: Anyway, she talks about the strategy of people who groups that try to recognize that everybody is victimized by the structure and use that as a strategy to say, hey, do you realize even though as a white male, you benefit from everything that's happening and you really have no incentive to alter the power structure, you're actually being harmed by this. She says that that's a terrible. She didn't say terrible. She says that's not what she wants to do and that's not what she thinks is an effective strategy for getting around that.

34:35 Mark: And is it a tactical matter that you shouldn't be doing that? Because that's not sort of the right reason to change, changing out of self interest. I know. She says that as a ready way that groups that have power will then deflect attention from the real problem by saying, well, we have problems too.

34:51 Dylan: Yes.

34:52 Mark: So she talks about this in Ain't I a Woman at length, that when women, by which it meant white women in the women's movement, would compare their situation to blacks, by which it meant black men, that's sort of the problem. She's pointing out throughout the book as these sort of implicit references that leave black women not identified at all invisible. But in any case, by making that comparison, it's really no white women who just aren't allowed to have as good jobs as your husbands and aren't allowed to have money. Your situation, even though there are certainly problems with it, is nowhere near as horrible as anything that people went through in slavery. And so you making that comparison, There's a nice quote she attributes to Ortega y Gasset, another guy that Bourdieu quoted as well. It seems we need to move and read some of him soon.

35:37 Dylan: Where is it?

35:38 Seth: Yeah, I have a quote. Yeah, this is page 13. Loving blackness as political resistance.

35:45 Mark: Is this a quote from bell hooks or from Ortega y Gasset?

35:49 Seth: This is bell hooks. Many unlearning racism workshops focus on helping white individuals to see that they too are wounded by racism and as a consequence have something to gain from participating in anti racist struggle. While in some ways true, a construction of political solidarity that is rooted in a narrative of shared victimization not only acts to recenter whites, it risks obscuring the particular ways racist domination impacts on the lives of marginalized groups. Implicit in the assumption that even those who are privileged via racist hierarchy suffer is the notion that it is only when those in power get in touch with how they too are victimized that they will rebel against structures of domination. The truth is that many folks benefit greatly from dominating others and are not suffering a wound that is in any way similar to the condition of the exploited and oppressed.

36:36 Mark: Well, let me add to that the quote by Ortega Gasset, which is at the bottom of page one 141 of Ain't I a Woman, which is talking about again the comparison of women's issues with black issues, at least at the time before either of these groups could vote. A strange thing indeed, the existence in many of this mental activity which substitutes one thing for another from an urge not so much to get at the first as to get rid of the second. The metaphor disposes of an object by having it masquerade as something else. Such a procedure would make no sense if we did not discern beneath it an instinctive avoidance of certain realities. So you might think that you're highlighting the struggle of women by saying they're treated like black people were treated. But no, what that really does is just make you forget about how horrible black people were treated according to bell hooks here.

37:20 Myesha: Well, the passage that I was referring to is outside of the comparison context and I don't want to say it's a minor point, but it's just a point that she makes. And this is on 114, the imperialism of patriarchy chapter. And she just simply explains. She says this is the second sentence of the first full paragraph. Unfortunately, our over emphasis on the male as oppressor often obscures the fact that men are victimized to be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti human in nature as it is to be a victim. Patriarchy forces fathers to act as monsters, encourages husbands and lovers to be rapists in disguise.

It teaches our blood brothers to feel ashamed that they care for us and denies all men the emotional life that would act as a humanizing, self affirming force in their lives. And then she continues a couple of more paragraphs. So she's just highlighting, I mean she continues to make her point, but she just highlights, takes that aside to say, let's not forget, and this is outside the comparison context, let us not forget that the oppressor and oppressing us is also a victim because in doing that he or she dehumanizes their own selves. And it's just a separate point.

38:21 Seth: Yeah, no, that's totally valid and it's consistent with the idea that the system itself victimizes everybody. But the reality is, you know, like it says in Animal Farm, right, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Yeah, people are victimized in different ways. And there are people that benefit from the structure. I mean, everybody's victimized, but some people benefit. I think that's kind of the point is that it's a theoretical move to say, hey, everybody's a victim. But in practice we have to acknowledge the fact that some people stand to gain and they have no incentive to overthrow the system that benefits them when the way they are victimized is really not that painful or not acknowledged or not painful enough to be acknowledged.

If you piece all of her points together from the essays that we read, Ain't I a Woman, that her thesis is that decolonization may take place at an individual level. First in terms of an awareness, like for example, I'm not a racist, but I benefit from, from the colonial capitalist racist structure that exists. Okay, that's one level of awareness. But to be fully decolonized, particularly as somebody who's oppressed by the system, the system itself is going to have to be overthrown. I can't imagine, and I didn't see any examples of her describing or even suggesting you could be fully decolonized and self actualized and still function within the system.

This ties back to our previous discussions around the culture industry and thinking about all those lessons of if you're outside the system, you have to get appropriated inside the system and the quirky outsider, and that there's very few narratives of people who successfully resist the system and end up living happily ever after. And that's because ideology expresses itself through those Forms of culture. And they're telling us that story like Brazil as a movie. And that's an old reference, I know, but it's the only one I've got on my hand besides Paul Newman in hud.

So I'm going to maintain throughout the rest of this evening, unless you convince me otherwise, that decolonization requires a revolutionary action that overthrows colonial capitalism, such as it is right now.

40:29 Myesha: Hmm.

40:30 Dylan: Well, it certainly requires political action on her part. Are you saying something different than decolonization isn't a psychological stance where you can internally free yourself but go on your merry way? It inevitably and deeply involves outward action in your community, specifically political action and activism. It seems like for her, the activism and the political action that she promotes is not like her duty, like, you should go out and do this because it will help people. It's part of being the act of decolonizing oneself. It's not for decolonizing your community. It may be for. Partly for that, but it's also part of decolonizing yourself.

41:12 Seth: My reading of this is that she's saying you can't self emancipate. It's not a religious or an intellectual exercise. It includes those. It includes at least intellectual elements. And by the way, the complete absence of discussion of religion in these works, I thought was striking, particularly given our conversations around race in America and other contexts.

41:33 Dylan: And also the role of religion in sexism.

41:37 Seth: Yes. And imperialism.

41:39 Dylan: Oh, and racism, too.

41:40 Seth: Imperialism, yes. Everything. Yeah. In one of the essays, she mentions how there's this need to create narratives so that black women can see stories about a variety of different black female experiences so that they can begin to have role models and have examples and opportunities, recognize that expression is okay. There's a lot of functions that happen there already. The fact that she's saying that we need this narrative structure, which is really about, you know, learning and growth, is suggesting that emancipation, if you will, or decolonization is not strictly a theoretical act that takes place in the individual. It's a social act because you have to see that played out in other people's lives. And then you emulate it to some degree or another, and then you share that with others. It's a process that involves other people. It's active. It's a practice.

42:34 Mark: Well, she thinks that no matter how sort of enlightened and free you think you are, unless you connect your struggle to a historical tradition of liberation, then you're missing something. You're at least reinventing the wheel, etc. You're going to fall into A lot of these traps. She says that a few times. That's kind of one of the points of the essay. Three in Black looks revolutionary. Black women making ourselves subject. So I picked that out of that whole volume as giving a little more of the positive picture. You know, the goal is black female subjectivity.

What does that mean? Well, it means that if you are colonized and you are in a minority group, then you see yourself as the other. It's some weird form of psychological dissociation. The perspective that you're trying to come from that has invaded your mind is not something that actually lines up with your own interests. Much like anyone who's poor voting for the Republican Party. Oh, no, I can't make a comparison that will obscure the thing that I'm talking about. Sorry. So what did you think about this subjectivity as the goal? So that requires, like you were saying, something that is social.

Which I guess follows straight up from Hegel. Nobody remembers that far back what that

43:46 Seth: Hegel talked about subjectivity. I remember that much.

43:49 Mark: And that requires an intersubjective communique. In fact, his model is of the master slave. And it's only the slave that attains true understanding of him or herself that attains true selfhood because the master never gets that sort of outside perspective on himself. It's the slave that, because of having this domination attempt, then gains self reflection because he already has the view of the other making him other. So you can say that these. And again, we'll do Franz Fanon, we'll do a black existentialist who will fill in these details here.

But I'm trying to do it myself because bell hooks doesn't use this kind of language. But that being in that position and then having to wrench yourself out of that gives you. Well, that doesn't fill in the story of bell hooks as saying you need someone else for you to liberate. That's almost just saying you need an oppressor, an other in the first place in order to gain selfhood. Which doesn't seem right according to bell hooks. Did I just make a confusing mess of things? Is that all I did there?

44:54 Dylan: You made a little bit of a confusing mess, but the last thing you said started making sense because one of the themes that came out to me was this refusal in that triplet of patriarchy, imperialism and capitalism. And I guess you would include other ones in there, other isms in there. Is the whole role of domination in all of those cases where the motive, action in each of them was one group in One way or another ruling would be the nice term, Right. Oppressing another for their advantage and often convincing them that it was for their good. And her rejecting, in the big picture, just wanting to reject that way of doing things at all.

I mean, that's in some ways the more radical part of what she's saying is that replacing it. I mean, this is where the question of we get a tiny bit of it in this essay, Loving Blackness. But then, Myesha, you referred to other books that she's written about the answer being love. And that would run counter to this notion of competition or winning or establishing structures in which to regulate competition so that it could be fair. I mean, even the whole idea of liberal democracy being. Being structured in such a way that you would just try to make it so people kill each other less.

But still, it's a structure of trying to mitigate some of the effects of domination. But it just takes for granted that that's the whole structure of activity is one of interactions oriented towards domination. And she, I think, wants to just reject that outright in a deeper way. She thinks that's the mistake being made.

46:34 Mark: Love is the answer. Here you go.

46:37 Myesha: Yeah. I wonder what people have to say about her use of Angela Davis in the Black Women and Feminism chapter. And it seems as if she was saying, or at least her narrative of the Angela Davis situation was that Angela Davis didn't have the kind of group that she's encouraging we all should have. And I mean, this goes back to the kind of the love thing. So when a woman decides to be radical, it's very important that they have this group. And she also suggests that the feminist Michele Wallace also didn't have this sense of care. And not having that care can lead people when they get older, to not be as radical as they once were.

I don't know if you all had that same reading, but I was just trying to see. In some ways, I kind of disagreed with her account of Angela Davis, but I wonder if her main point was to show that loving, even if one becomes radical, having a group that could support you and love you is important in the struggle. I'm not too sure if that's a correct reading or not.

47:35 Mark: She brings it up in both places, right. In the Making Ourselves Revolutionary Black Women chapter. And then you're saying she's in the Black Women and Feminism chapter as well, of Ain't I a Woman, I believe.

47:45 Myesha: Yeah, the fifth chapter. Yeah.

47:47 Mark: Right. I'm not totally remembering the details of the reference in Ain't I a Woman. I know in the other one she's very explicit about. Yeah, I mean, that positive chapter, the revolutionary black women thing. She does say that it's all too easy. She's critical of women, whether in stories or real life, who they escape some struggle, maybe there's a particular instance of domination. You know, they're in an abusive relationship and they escape that, but then they end up pursuing something more traditional than bell hooks would like, that they have not tied the struggle to an overall historical liberation experience.

And so it doesn't have the follow through. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about. This having a community that supports actually self actualization and not just having everyone trying to bat you back into the same hole that you escaped from or, you know, at least a similar one. Or having internalized these limitations, that these are all things that having a social group to help you out would be good.

48:47 Myesha: Yeah, I guess the part that I, in some ways I was disagreeing with was kind of like, well, how did bell hooks know that she doesn't have a social group in which she can support? Right.

48:57 Seth: So I thought the point she was trying to make about Angela Davis was that even though what happened is after Davis achieved a certain amount of recognition and success, she was put in this role of being exceptional. So in other words, it was like the system came down to frame her as somebody who didn't have peers and couldn't be active in a group in the way that you're talking about. And so even though she may not have put herself in that role, where she was trying to separate herself from other people, that the media or some, you know, the forces of ideology put her in that role.

So that it's a way of continually marginalizing, even when somebody's successful and achieves a level of subjectivity, you know, her own subjectivity against the dominant paradigm. It's a way to continue the marginalization. That's how I read that. So it wasn't so much a critique of her critique of Angela Davis, but more a recognition of what happened to her.

49:53 Mark: Can I read the quote? It's a page 183 in Ain't I a Woman. Although Angela Davis became a female heroine of the 60s movement, she was admired not for her political commitment to the Communist Party, not for any of her brilliant analyses of capitalism and racial imperialism, but for her beauty, for her devotion to black men. The American public was not willing to see the political Angela Davis. Instead, they made of her a poster pinup. In general, black people did not approve of her communism and refused to take it seriously.

50:19 Seth: She says it a little differently. On page 55 in black looks, the Davis autobiography was written. She was 30 years old. Her most militant expression of subjectivity erupted in her 20s, made into a cultural icon, a gesture that was not in line with her insistence on the importance of collectivity and fellowship. She came to be represented in mass media as an exceptional black woman. That's in quotes. Her experience was not seen as a model young black women could learn from. Most parents pointed to the prison sentence she served as reason enough for black women not to follow in her footsteps. She was isolated. She was projected as an isolated figure. She did not have the galvanizing impact on black females that she could have had. I read that not as a criticism of Davis and her actions, but as the way she was portrayed. Unless she's criticizing her for not somehow overcoming that.

51:09 Mark: Okay, but I think there's other things in that section of Black Looks that are exactly what you were talking about, Myesha.

51:14 Myesha: Okay. I couldn't find the exact space in which I felt, you know, kind of a unease.

51:21 Seth: What is your unease? I'm sorry.

51:22 Myesha: It was just this assumption, it seemed that Angela Davis lacked community or the love that we were referring to, that

51:29 Dylan: she wasn't loved herself or that she.

51:31 Myesha: No, I wouldn't say that. Just lacked community. And I just. Yeah. To provide that care and that love

51:38 Mark: you had asked that about. Well, can't you turn that on? Bell hooks herself. And I think just in seeing her speak, some of the things she has to say in Black Looks in particular, you had mentioned her autobiographical. You know, how this is a recurring thing in her book. And so she talks in a few of these places about the consciousness raising sessions that she went to and really just how being in a community of women who are trying to figure this stuff out was very essential for making her what she was and I guess and for keeping the fire going. The way she talks about it, that, like, when somebody. That writing is just a solitary activity, and when somebody comes up to her and says, you writing changed my life, that is the community that you're talking about.

52:17 Myesha: I think for me, what's important is it may not be the case that these historical figures that she mentioned, such as, I mean, they're not historical because they're still alive. Michele Wallace and Angela Davis, even if they. They weren't part of a particular group or a particular famous feminist group, I don't know, doesn't necessarily mean that they lacked that kind of community. And I think that was just kind of What I felt after reading it. So of course it was known that Angela was part of the Communist party, but that's not even mentioned as a group in which she could provide a sense of care.

Maybe she decided not to mention this group because what she was really going for was a feminist kind of group or a group of women. And so I was just trying to figure out what group is important or needed to help a black woman self actualize. And if the communist group is excluded, then it makes me all the more interested in what kind of group she thinks is needed.

53:03 Mark: Well, it seemed to be your view that you don't really need a group at all. Right.

53:07 Myesha: I don't think you need a particular group. So it could be the case that as opposed to having a consciousness raising group of 30 black feminist women, I could have, I mean, just to use the case of Angela's, I can have a communist group that consists of black women and also black men perhaps who are aware of patriarchy and all that other stuff. I mean, perhaps that group can also provide for me of what I need. And even if I don't have these strictly theoretical groups to help me, perhaps, you know, family. So it's more the type of group that I was more concerned with than anything.

53:39 Dylan: What's the function for bell hooks of this kind of connection? Is it that it acts as a kind of sounding board? I mean, I don't want to sound glib about it, but is part of it effectively therapeutic that you are able to go through and work through this activity of self actualization, decolonization by participating in it with people? Maybe to first order that you can have group with? Or is it something that's really a question of support and intellectual and emotional, but having a home, because thinking doing this kind of work is just lonely. Like being a writer and by yourself is just lonely. Those seem like two different kinds of things.

54:24 Mark: I think it seems like the group connection again stressed the having a connection to the historical movement of liberation. That doesn't sound like a group. Yeah, again, a group of people who are alive. Just thinking about the stoic that we read recently that, you know, I like the fellowship of one of these dead philosophers better than any of these boring people that I run into.

54:44 Dylan: And that makes it sound like a musician who says you need to know the classics and really sit down and learn all the old stuff in order to be a musician kind of thing. Is that what that means?

54:55 Mark: Well, not the classics, because the classics would be the hegemonic something from a foreign culture. But you need to have models of enlightenment, whether or not these people were fully enlightened. You need to learn from their insights and their mistakes, perhaps, and their observations on each other. You need to be part of that historical dialogue. So hopefully that involves being in the room with other people or on the Internet with other people, having some actual real, live dialogue. But it's got to be supplemented by the other stuff, too, the historical connection.

I mean, she talks about in this revolutionary black women section, really, how the monolithic paradigm of female black experience, this black feminist essentialism that she's seen in these groups. So she talks about a group that she attends, which is being very therapeutic for many of its members because the different women are getting up and they're telling their personal stories about being messed up by being in unsupportive environments. And so she says, hey, you know, actually, I was raised in a pretty supportive environment in terms of it was segregated.

And the black community that she was in, in the south, they were pretty supportive of each other. Not that they were without problems. She talks about her father and stuff in different places, but she's not sharing this experience that is being voiced. And the fact that that was a different narrative than what was being expressed at this meeting. Then she was scolded for this. She was kind of shouted down, like, as if she was trying to erase another black woman's pain, is what she says, by bringing up a different experience, this competing narrative, one that was seen as trying to divert attention from the true telling of black female experience.

Experience. That's page 44. So in that sense, I would think that kind of thing would be endemic to just a group, that groups are sort of inherently try to develop these norms that get imposed on one another. So you'd have to have a very specific, enlightened group of very enlightened people for it to fulfill the vision that she has for a group here, one that perhaps does not exist.

56:52 Seth: I thought that that was really an extension of this idea that there has to be a single narrative for the group in order for there to be some kind of progress or narrative. That when you're oppressed, it's almost as though you have to agree to a single narrative. Because if you're allowed to have a view that there are complexities and variances in people's experiences, it might open the door to people saying, oh, well, you know, not everybody's like that. And there were devalues. I got the impression she was saying that the other black women were afraid that somebody who didn't Share their narrative would. Would devalue their own narrative. And does that make sense?

57:25 Mark: How does devalue cash out?

57:27 Seth: It cashes out in that if you say a class of people all has the same experience, then you can use that to anchor some kind of. Both individuals can use that to anchor their identity, but also you can use it for political action. But if you have a class of people, at least in our ideology driven society where we say, oh, well, half of them have had terrible experiences and half of them haven't, then that's a justification for blaming the half who have had the bad experience. Like, well, why didn't you, you know, these other people didn't have a problem.

Why do you have a problem? Or it takes the teeth out of political action if the narrative isn't consistent. And one of the things she's trying to argue for is that there has to be diversity and there has to be your ability to express your authentic voice in a safe place where there can be this free exchange and acknowledgement of individual variants and while at the same time recognizing each individual's and authenticating each individual's experience, whether it's good or bad.

58:27 Myesha: Yeah. And you know, her issue with what she calls black feminist essentialism, and then the very next statement of that, she says it would not allow for difference. And it seems this notion of difference seems to be kind of a theme in black feminism, particularly early black feminism. I mean, when I think about the work of Audre Lorde, which she takes some time out to cite often, but I don't think she referenced Audre Lorde's thinking about difference. Audre Lorde was a huge believer in, you know, difference. Right. That black women and white women come together and that she doesn't use bell hook's language of trying to get rid of the monolithic framework.

But she wants to suggest that the fact that we have different experiences, that adds to the movement as opposed to taking away from it. And it seems as if bell hooks seems to be in a line with that. That difference shouldn't be a divider, but it adds or contributes to the movement as opposed to taking away from it.

59:16 Seth: Yeah.

59:16 Dylan: And bell hooks is pretty critical of the notion that you would sort of internally politically regulate a difference within the movement based upon sort of political ends. That seemed to be her reading of why you would dismiss certain kinds of feminists as not being the right kind of feminist or bringing up the wrong kind of topics or having differences is that it would dull the edge of the activism to have diversity of opinion within the group. And, well, she's just opposed to it in general. She disagrees that it makes it weaker.

59:49 Mark: A recurrent theme I see here is the difference between what you might describe as just philosophical theorizing in a public setting and political speech. So we had the earlier example of, is it okay to say, I know I'm a white guy, but I'm oppressed by the situation too? Well, so we said bell hooks both thinks that that's true, but thinks that any given instance of somebody saying that is probably serving their opportunistic self interest to divert attention away from people who. Their problems are much worse. And so it's kind of the same thing is going on here.

1:00:28 Dylan: Well, not just that their problems are much worse, Mark, Isn't it that it's a way of negating the criticism? I mean, wouldn't it really be an act, implicit act of oppression?

1:00:37 Mark: Right, right. So that's exactly what was going on here. That in this meeting, she was just saying something about, hey, you know, I actually don't share that problem that you had. And the people in this group were saying, by just expressing that now that's an aggressive act, you're negating what I just said. I just find this very difficult to make this division. And that's what makes me. Again, coming back to this, if we see the practical upshot of a lot of what bell hooks is advising us is that we have to be very careful about messaging, then what we're saying is that you can't just say the truth as you feel like you need to say it at any given time.

You need to be engaging in political action. Whenever you speak publicly, you need to be addressing the things that most need addressing. So whether or not what you're saying is true for your experience or not, if it's not conveying the right message. Right. The way she puts it is this is just. Again, in one of the things that I saw her talking on YouTube about, I think was people criticize political correctness, but what political correctness is, is just being aware of. Of who is listening when you're talking. It's actually thinking before you speak, thinking about who your audience is.

But if you're engaging in personal psychoanalysis, which I think is partly what you do whenever you're thinking deeply. If you're engaging in a discussion with other people, say, on a podcast, and trying to think through issues that are difficult to think about, then you have your own agenda in doing it. You're trying to figure out something so that you can yourself become more Enlightened, psychologically, improve yourself, whatever. So that requires the exact kind of safe space that I don't think is really compatible with speaking to all possible audiences.

In other words, you say something because you feel like you need to say it, because that's kind of where you're at at the time. But at least according to this thing that sometimes I think bell hooks is arguing against, and sometimes I think she's supporting. If that's not addressing the group narrative appropriately, then you can't do that. That's not being properly respectful of who might be listening. Am I being too vague here?

1:02:48 Myesha: No.

1:02:49 Dylan: It sounds like you're saying that she views all our relations as deeply political, that we're deeply political animals.

1:02:54 Mark: Yes. And yet can't seem to see in this particular circumstance how these women that were objecting to her voicing what she was doing at the time, why they would object to it. And I think they're objecting it for the same reason that we've outlined elsewhere. Whenever you're saying something that sort of has a kind of messaging that's unhelpful. I don't know, maybe this is just a leap in comparison here.

1:03:17 Myesha: Yeah. I'm trying to think of a different situation and compare it to the one that Hoax is specifically referring to in this example. So one of the criticisms that she brings about with the early 20th century white women's movement and only making their agenda be that of issues of white women. Right. Which I think is totally different. Like, so in that way, it's like we're excluding a group of people and their concerns, and we're focusing very selfishly on our own kind of promotion at the expense of black women. But in this particular situation, what is problematic for her?

And I'm just. I'm just going to read it. She says my story was reduced to a competing narrative, one that was seen as trying to divert attention from the quote, unquote, true telling of black female experience. So these are all black women in this gathering. Black female identity was made synonymous again and again with victimization. The black female voice that was deemed, quote unquote, authentic was the voice in pain. Only the sound of hurting could be heard. No narrative resistance was voiced and respected in this setting. I came away wondering why was these black women could only feel bonded to each other if our narratives echoed, only if they would tell the same story of shared pain and victimization.

So I wonder, in this way, it's speaking of a different kind of difference that Audre Lorde is referring to in the first Case of as far as black women and white women, but these are black women trying to, I guess, in some way bond. And it seems like that bonding is being cut off because one does not share a similar kind of experience or identity with the other women. And I wonder if this is a way of her kind of criticizing, going back to the monolithic kind of notion of what happens when you get among groups of one same race and gender. What kind of some of the problems that can rise as a result of that.

And it seems to be sensitivity to telling one particular story and one tells an opposing story. What unfortunately comes about as a result

1:05:15 Mark: of that something that bell hooks refers to, I can't remember where. I think it's toward the beginning of Ini, a woman, when she's talking about these consciousness raising groups. She says at first they had a doctrine where nobody could criticize anything else anybody said because we're trying to deal with a system where our voices have been silenced for so long. Just let me say what I need to say and don't give any crap about it. But they found that that kind of precluded progress, that precluded actual discussion.

1:05:42 Dylan: Well, that isn't a discussion. Right. Because the discussion would involve critique in the way that she's using it. I mean, that's.

1:05:48 Mark: Yeah, right. So she sees why somebody would want to do what this group she's criticizing is why they'd want to be sort of monolithic in. I know that it's not exactly the same situation, but it's a similar motivation. It's how can we best. This is an actual problem here is if the historical issue and the personal psychological issue of a lot of the people involved is we're trying to find as individuals our voice and it's been stamped out. I've never sort of been allowed to think radically before. And so now I'm in a group. I finally hear somebody echoing the pain of my experience that I've never really been able to voice before.

How best to facilitate the healing that brings about. Bell hooks thinks that we are strong enough that you can still get that kind of healing and yet acknowledge difference. And in fact, that's what love is. Not healthy. Having read her books on love, but knowing that she liked Erich Fromm and we read him recently. So I can say that it's, you know, letting others be what they are, be themselves. And that is perfectly in line with just everything she has to say about self actualization. And so yes, of course you should treat other people listen with respect to their stories about themselves, and you don't have to agree with them or have shared the same thing in order for that to be a supportive social group.

1:07:01 Myesha: I also wonder at what point did bell hooks raise her narrative? So if it came immediately after someone kind of expressed their pain, their childhood pain, and then she says, well, I didn't have that experience. My background was so supportive. I mean, so if it was that way, I can see how someone respond. Right? So I think even in recognizing difference, there is still a way in which one. There's rules to this. Right? There's a way in which one expressed that difference different in that kind of setting.

1:07:32 Seth: It's also a function of when there's group pressure to have a dominant narrative that that's, again, reflective of absorbing and internalizing and functioning inside of the suppressive system, because the system functions by assigning characteristics and opportunities to groups of people for the purpose of marginalizing or empowering them. And I think she feels like that dynamic, overcoming that dynamic is part of the process of this decolonization. Recognizing that you can have open discussion and simultaneously maintain the integrity of a. You know, the fear of differing narratives is a fear that is put into us by the system that is sort of corruptive.

1:08:14 Mark: Yeah, that's a good point. So we're sort of looping back to Ain't I a Woman. Here's this whole history that's laid out of actual abuse, psychological and physical, and how it was much worse for black women, historically, under slavery even, than black men. Right. They were constantly raped. They were. Had even sort of a lower social status. They were given the heavy work that the black men laborers were given, as well as work that the black men would consider too demeaning. They were sort of subject to everything. And that a lot of this continued.

And she goes through the history of kind of how they were treated during. At various points in terms of their admittance to the workforce and under what conditions. And at the same time, she gives these myths, and some of these myths I wasn't even really aware of. But like the myth of black women don't need liberation. It's the white women. They were the ones who were sort of coddled, and they couldn't be let out in the workforce, and they wanted to go out in the workforce. But black women have always been forced out in the workforce, so they don't need that sort of liberation.

Black men haven't put them on a pedestal and said, oh, you harmless little thing, I'll care for you and do every little thing for you, and Give you no political power. They've in fact led families, you know, been the primary breadwinner as a majority position for a good chunk of American history. This is the kind of myth that the patriarchy, the racist patriarchy is putting upon, you know, and consequently she spends a lot of time talking about how this myth of the matriarchy is really what that is that, yeah, black women were the heads of their household and black men in fact felt emasculated from that.

And that's why they desert their wives in such numbers, because the wives are all shrewish or something. You know, so there's all these horrible stereotypes that then the solution is to not only sort of go do this historical deconstruction that she's doing, but to develop a counter narrative. And so how do you develop a counter narrative? Well, it sounds like you should have a common shared experience. Like what I was just saying that black women were screwed over uniformly throughout here history. So that's the counter narrative. And so you could say, okay, so the black feminist groups at least can share this counter narrative and they can use that to empower themselves, empower each other and become independent.

But I think that she wants to say that more than that, that would only be half of self actualization having the support of a group like that. But of course becoming a whole person is becoming an individual is not being part of a group is to grow in that unique way that every single one of us grows and love each other and our difference and all that. So I think those things are not incompatible. It's just a matter of sort of seeing they're both necessary components of self actualization as she sees it.

1:10:54 Seth: So I don't know that she says this explicitly, but I think something that's undergirding her point of view is that you have to have a wide open field of opportunities for self actualization. If you don't know what it means, if nobody tells you what being a mathematician is, you know, you never have the opportunity to explore that aspect of yourself again. I'm going to go back to this, that, you know, white men, or if you want to include Mediterranean style, basically European males who have benefited from ideology, you know, for the last several hundred or thousand, couple thousand years and who benefit from colonialism and all that.

Being able to say go want to be an artist or choose to study philosophy as opposed to mathematics or physics or, or whatever, is a luxury of the empowered, the rich, the ones who don't stand to lose much by making that choice. But oppressed groups. And again, instead of generalizing, I'll specifically say here she's talking about black women have not had the opportunity to explore all the different things that they might. And so there's just this barrier to self actualization in the sense of you have to have the opportunity, you have to have the world open up to you.

And that's why I think, yes, there's this self overcoming, there's this self reflection realization. There's an acknowledgement of the role that we're all assigned inside of this paradigm and that we understand that we are in the paradigm, but you don't overcome it simply through an act of will. I feel like there's got to be more to it than that. Now, maybe that self recognition is sufficient for you to go push to take opportunities that wouldn't otherwise have been given to you. But I don't know. I'm not tying the threads together very well here, but it just seems like out of every essay I read, there's this notion of if we're not working collectively to overcome and overthrow the imperialist, colonial, capitalist paradigm that restricts all of us, some more than others, then we're not really creating the space for people to truly self actualize.

1:12:54 Myesha: As I'm listening, I'm still trying to work out what I do indeed think that Hooks is saying and what was just said, that sounds right to me. I'm still trying to put the pieces together. I mean, she doesn't really say, hey, I'm gonna give an account of self actual, and I'm still pulling the pieces together.

1:13:08 Mark: Right. We just need to read another five books of hers and maybe we'll have.

1:13:12 Myesha: Or she may come out with a book next week on self actualization.

1:13:16 Mark: After she hears this, she'll. She'll definitely.

1:13:18 Dylan: She's gonna listen to this.

1:13:22 Seth: Let me throw another twist out here. You know, when people are trying to tell narratives about groups and you can tell the stories of the people who stood up, who rebelled, who were knocked down, who took a stance, who argued in favor, who advocated. Right. Those are people who are reacting against the paradigm. And they're sort of your revolutionary heroes, if you will. Right. They're the controversial ones, the ones that your parents may not want you to idolize. Like she mentions about Angela Davis. Then there's a whole host of stories about.

I mean, there must be many black women who got degrees, worked in jobs, they were mathematicians, they were scientists, they were business women. You know, people who don't have a revolutionary story to tell, but tell a story about, hey, they went, they decided they wanted to do something, they did it. They became a choreographer or a playwright or whatever. And one of the things that bell hooks doesn't do in any of the readings that we've done, and you know, there's possible she does it elsewhere or whatever. She's not talking about that type of person who can be a hero to a young girl or a young boy.

You know, we all had people like that in our lives where we met and we met friends of our parents or somebody who came into our school is like, oh, and this is my job, I do this, or I launch rockets for NASA or whatever. And you're like, wow, that's really cool, right? She's definitely playing on the extremes of the narrative structure. And it's an important point because it's difficult to reconcile her discussion about self actualization, all that when the examples she's using are women who are reacting strongly against the paradigm and being punished.

Punished for it. As all the examples that she uses are women who struggled mightily against oppressive regime and in many cases suffered for it.

1:15:05 Dylan: Okay, so I'm a little confused right now. Are you contrasting the struggling against racism or sexism, but then suffering against it within her own peer group? Going back to the story that bell hooks tells of uncomfortableness with diversity and having been given the cold shoulder at a black feminist conference for having. Having brought up something that disagreed with another participant. That's the suffering.

1:15:31 Seth: No, no, no. So I'm talking about, she's talking about Angela Davis. And the other example she brings up are all exceptional women whose the cause that they took up was to fight against the oppression. But there may very well have been a number of women who self actualized in very normal, boring professions who suffered sexism and racism in their jobs and. But who weren't necessarily figureheads that then were marginalized because of their taking a stance against oppression. And so my question is, because that's not an example of self actualization that she gives. I don't know whether that counts or doesn't count in her framework and how that contributes to that overall revolutionary theme that I mentioned earlier.

1:16:15 Mark: There's one of the essays that's a little later in the Black Looks book that's about the Anita Hill Clarence Thomas hearing.

1:16:22 Myesha: Oh, really?

1:16:22 Dylan: Why didn't we read that one?

1:16:24 Myesha: We should have read that.

1:16:27 Dylan: You didn't even bring it up, man.

1:16:29 Myesha: Yeah, the movie. The movie was last week, Confirmation on hbo.

1:16:32 Mark: Oh, I wasn't aware of that.

1:16:34 Seth: Hey, was there a con Kerry Washington too, right? Kerry Washington.

1:16:37 Myesha: Yes. Yes.

1:16:38 Seth: Was there any controversy about her playing Anita Hill?

1:16:42 Myesha: Nope.

1:16:42 Seth: Her skin tone and looks or anything. But it was about Zoe Saldana playing Nina Simone.

1:16:47 Dylan: Nina Simone.

1:16:47 Myesha: But Zoe's totally the opposite of the spectrum when it comes to Nina Simone.

1:16:52 Dylan: Yeah, she doesn't. She looks very different than Nina Simone does.

1:16:55 Seth: I know, but. Okay,

1:16:58 Mark: so the thing with the. Anita Hill was talking about how dispiriting it was for people that were trying to think we could do something about sexual harassment and how Clarence Thomas kind of played the.

1:17:10 Seth: You.

1:17:10 Mark: You're all setting out on a lynching on. So, like pulling that card out to then negate the feminist. So this is sort of. This is related to what we're talking about it just in that she thinks that sometimes the racism thing sort of overwhelms the feminism thing, that it obscures the feminism thing, that feminism is a legitimate struggle that people should be enlightened to. And yet too many black women feel like they need to be in solidarity with black men, no matter how dickish the black men overbearing the black men are being. Sort of as a postscript, she says about Anita Hill, look, this is an example of a professional black woman who's in, you know, these.

But she was a Republican. She was not engaged in any kind of. Her struggle was not connected to any kind of liberation movement. And she uses this as a point for criticizing Anita Hill, that, no, she does not count as one of the feminist heroes just because she played the masculine game, the game of the establishment, to the degree that she did, that she succeeded professionally. So I'm sure she'd have the same thing to say about Condoleezza Rice or any other, at least black women Republicans.

1:18:17 Myesha: I wonder if she's updated that essay since. Because history, I mean. I mean, I was very young when the case happened, right. So my consciousness wasn't that great. But what I hear is that it was pretty. You know, most women were for Clarence and. But there were lots of women who were for Anita. And now that I'm older and I saw a documentary of her that was released a couple of years ago, it was made clear to me that she had lots of support by black feminists. I mean, Barbara Ransby, who teaches in the History and Women's Studies department at University of Illinois, Chicago, was the one responsible for taking out an advertisement in New York Times supporting her.

And I've talked to older, you know, black feminists who basically said they used to wear T shirts, as we believe Anita. But I also wonder. I mean, there's times in which when we write about contemporary moments, our views are sometimes shaken up by the time and the climate of the time, and it's probably not well thought of. And I just, I think that people who were against Anita, I think their consciousness have grown to the point. I mean, they probably was also ensnared by the lynching language of Clarence Thomas. And it seems also her criticism in the article seems to go against a.

A lot of what she writes in Ain't I a Woman about taking. The struggle of black men becomes a struggle for all, you know, for all people. And so we tend to side and fight for the rights of black men at the expense of black women.

1:19:38 Mark: Yeah, that's exactly what she's saying. What happened here?

1:19:40 Myesha: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even her notion of Anita not being that kind of icon, I just. Historically, I think, you know, the icon that Anita Hill is, has just risen in the last years, few 10 years or so. That's quite different from the way that it was in 90s, in the early 90s. So that's why I said, would she change that? I think Anita is viewed quite differently than the way that Hooks is describing her in the 90s.

1:20:03 Mark: Well, I also just think that this reflects Hooks type of criticism, that it could be that you just, wow, she's like an Adorno. She's just gonna spit on everything. There's just always something wrong, never do it right. But I think it's just a matter of, again, the criticism supposedly coming from a place of love and respect such that, yeah, of course she was in favor of Anita Hill against her harasser, but she just thought the whole thing was just still everybody involved was Republicans and all the senators that were judging were white men. And so there was people playing a black man and a black woman playing within this system that had fundamentally bought into a corrupt system.

So nobody's the good guy in there, but there are worse villains than others in there. And certainly Anita was the best of them. That's how the criticism would go. She also, just to give them the modern one, since she brought up Kerry Washington, was in that YouTube thing. She mentions Shonda Rhimes, who declares herself a feminist. She's the one that produces Scandal and these other TV shows, How to Get

1:21:12 Myesha: Away with Murder and Grey's Anatomy.

1:21:14 Mark: Yeah, exactly. How to Get Away with Murder. So these are things that like, wow, you put Viola Davis on tv, this kind of strong black woman hero. Like, shouldn't this be exactly the kind of thing that bell hooks would be radically in favor of? But no, she thinks that yes, maybe you have. Sure. That's good. That you have that kind of person as a lead and that she does things in the show. I've watched this with my wife where she takes off her wig and sort of shows her natural side and just is giving a model that definitely has not been out there before. But at the same time, bell hooks just thinks, just sort of in a blanket way says that all those shows that she's involved with, Shonda Rhimes is involved with are just spewing out this horribly sexist stuff. I don't want to get into the particulars, but I think there's a case that could be made for that. Definitely.

1:22:03 Dylan: So she basically. She accuses Shonda Rhimes of being a bandwagon feminist.

1:22:08 Mark: Exactly. Yeah. That people declare that it's now kind of trendy to declare yourself a feminist, but you're not being the right kind of feminist.

1:22:17 Myesha: But I think this also goes against what we've read from her. Right. As far as difference is concerned, that not all women have the same narratives. And women were out their self actualization in very different ways. And to see, for example, those two characters work out their self actualization two different ways is informative. And I think it helps us to see that black women are not monolithic.

1:22:40 Dylan: I watched the same thing that Mark did, and she does. It does not even apply. She basically, she's clear that not all self actualization is equivalently authentic, which I agree, seems to be at odds with what we read in Ain't I a Woman? And the examples she gives are. Not everything that you do can be just because you say, I'm choosing to do it means that you are acting out your self actualization, that you are really acting freely.

1:23:11 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

1:23:12 Dylan: You're not acting freely just because you're acting. You're not acting freely. And there's a lot more to say about that. But that's basically her critique that not every action is a free action.

1:23:23 Myesha: And then my response would be, well, how do you judge the authentic ones from the inauthentic ones?

1:23:28 Dylan: That's a good question.

1:23:30 Myesha: Should we be in the business of doing that? I don't know.

1:23:32 Dylan: She didn't give this example. She gave examples of being in popular culture and being very, very sexually provocative and stuff like that. But a good contemporary example would be women who insist on their right to wear a burqa. You know, the criticism of that is that they're participating in their own oppression and they've been oppressed so much that they're willing to side with their oppressors in this way or the women who participate in genital mutilation, stuff like that. So, well, these women are doing that. How can it possibly be that they're

1:24:04 Mark: oppressed or being sex positive, dressing really provocatively? Because it's for me, because I want to. No, she's going to say you've internalized oppressor norms. That's not a free choice.

1:24:16 Dylan: Yes, that's exactly what she'll say. It's not a free choice. You are not self actualized in doing that. In fact, you are actually acting as a slave. That's what she would say.

1:24:25 Myesha: And then I ask, sure, well, how are we able to decipher which one is the authentic one from the one that's inauthentic?

1:24:34 Mark: I think it would just be only through sustained engagement, looking at yourself and being able to talk openly and have that safe communication space. And so that is where you would need the. Not just a supportive social group, but sort of spiritual leaders who are far. Who are ahead of you on the path, assuming you can figure out who such a person is.

1:24:59 Myesha: Yeah, but it seems like cultural critic wouldn't have that insight. I mean, I'm just saying that in light of her criticism, if indeed she's judging something to be, I don't know if she was directly judging or at least giving us our attention to something that may be inauthentic, what is the criteria or the necessary and sufficient condition for that to be inauthentic and who has the power or at least the, I guess the access to figuring out which is which.

1:25:27 Dylan: It makes me want to listen to your pornography episode on your podcast because I'm sure you talk about this kind of question, which is people being a woman participating in pornography. Is she engaging in that in a free way or is it simply part of being patriarchal, oppressed culture? That's one version of the question. Another one was the burqa. You can pick any number of these questions where on the one hand it seems very difficult to talk about how are you to judge whether it's a self actualization or not. But in a lot of the cases it seems hard not to say. At the very least, it's really dicey.

1:26:07 Seth: First off, yeah, we're talking about it from a position of judgment, like, okay, well what right do we have to make any kind of judgment anyway? Particularly we're talking about her making judgments after she felt judged by other people,

1:26:21 Myesha: or if we judge, what is the criteria for that judgment.

1:26:23 Seth: Right, but then the second thing is Anytime you hear anybody talking, saying the word authenticity.

1:26:29 Dylan: Yes.

1:26:30 Seth: Make sure you got a good, strong grip on your wallet.

1:26:35 Mark: And I noticed I didn't see that in bell hooks anywhere.

1:26:38 Dylan: She's not holding her wallet authenticity.

1:26:42 Seth: And she doesn't talk about authenticity per se, but we've kind of brought that up. But yes, it's very dangerous when somebody starts saying. Trying to talk about other people's authenticity or lack thereof.

1:26:56 Dylan: Well, isn't that self actualization?

1:26:57 Seth: Take it from a guy who wrote a master's thesis on Heidegger.

1:27:01 Dylan: Okay, I'm all in favor of holding onto my wallet in that respect, but doesn't self actualization have, like, run in the same lane as authenticity?

1:27:11 Mark: Does she even use that term, or did I inject that here too?

1:27:16 Dylan: I thought that she at least uses truth.

1:27:19 Mark: She says people like hearing truth. This is her describing her own work. She sees her criticisms, whether, you know, media critiques or historical critiques or whatever, as speaking truth. And people can hear that. So it's not merely her opinion, but

1:27:35 Dylan: what's the phrase that she uses to describe raising one's own consciousness? I thought it was self actualization, but maybe it was you, Mark.

1:27:42 Mark: You know, I don't feel like we have sufficiently, at least critically brought up her main point in Ain't I a Woman, which is that you shouldn't talk about racism and sexism as sort of being different kinds of oppression. That in a strong way, it's just a singular. At least for a black woman, it's a singular experience of being oppressed. And just to focus on one of those sort of necessarily excludes paying proper attention to the other. And so this needs sort of a special treatment that we've had a whole black liberation movement and we've had a women's liberation movement, but because black women have both of those, they're actually not fully covered by each of those movements.

And so we need at least a black woman consciousness raising. But then in keeping with what Seth was saying, also like an actual liberation movement, to make concrete political changes, not merely raise the consciousness of the individual individuals involved.

1:28:40 Myesha: Yeah, when I was reading the. The essays, I was putting intersectionality into the margins. And I don't think this term probably. When did hooks write Ain't I a Woman

1:28:51 Mark: came out in 82.

1:28:52 Myesha: Yeah, that's. That's too early. Yeah. So that's kind of before the term itself, intersectionality came into being.

1:28:58 Mark: Tell us what that really means.

1:29:00 Myesha: So it's kind of like the intersection. So kind of by multiple identities, they all have effect in the way in which we're treated. And so I can be a black man and experience a kind of oppression, but I can be a black woman and experience a different kind of oppression. Right? It's because the identities of my womanness and my African Americanness has intersected. And so I think this was one of the criticism of the white, white feminist movement is that, hey, all women are the same. You go back to this notion of difference. We experience the same thing, right?

Because we're just women. And black women were saying, yeah, we experience the same quote, unquote, as women, but our experience as women take on kind of a different feature than your experiences as women. And it's not necessarily Oppression Olympics that I experienced worse than you, but it's getting people to see the kinds of oppression that can occur when one's identities kind of intersect. And it was interesting to see the historical thing that she was giving us from Anna Julia Cooper. I mean, these feminists in the 19th century knew that they faced different, you know, multitude of oppressions based on their identities.

And historically, how bell hooks lays it out, it seems that black men were totally oblivious, and it seemed that white women was totally oblivious. And I agree with you. What bell hooks is trying to get us to see that there's a difference. First of all, stop excluding black women from getting liberation, but also taking consideration that they experience oppression, but also a different kind of oppression than we would like to imagine and that ought to be given uptake.

1:30:34 Mark: And so this is very clear in the historical examples that she gives of fighting for the vote, say, or fighting for getting into certain job areas. Is this still relevant? Obviously, the intersectionality is talked about a lot. So how does this fit into this? Again, the crisis of feminism or the crisis of race liberation movements or whatever that I was referring to earlier that she talks about that, you know, once you get to a certain we've achieved something, so therefore the problem is solved.

1:31:01 Myesha: No, there's problem isn't solved. As I was reading the essays, I couldn't help but think about Black Lives Matter. And one of the criticism of Black although it was started by two black lesbian women, the narrative of police brutality against blacks was constructed around this narrative that blacks really meant black boys and black men and women were being excluded from the conversation. And it wasn't until, you know, you have your Sandra Blands and you have your Rekia Boyd's. But it's black feminists who, you know, hence the hashtag sayhername is trying to bring these black women into the conversation.

And that's an ongoing effort. But the very beginning of Black Lives Matter, even with still some people today, black women were being erased from the narrative that they, too, you know, have been oppressed by the police and very different ways, but also in very similar ways. So I see that still going on in black liberation today. And, you know, like I said before, ideology is a hell of a drug, but also patriarchy is also a hell of a drug. And this notion that black still means men, black men, is very problematic. And it just shows that there's so much work to do to decolonize us all.

1:32:08 Mark: Well, and you can imagine if she was writing a few years later or that then adding the sexual orientation thing to the layer, you know, you were just saying that it was two black lesbians started the movement. Is that what you just said?

1:32:20 Myesha: Yes. Yeah.

1:32:21 Mark: Okay. So more intersectionality.

1:32:23 Myesha: Yeah. Which makes it strange that two black women, you know, create the movement but are not discussed at all. And the killings that are taking place, you know, it's all black men, which is just ironic. And for a lot of people, it was deja vu. It's kind of like if you were conscious at all, you were able to see through it. And there's a story that was told to me by black feminists who, when the Trayvon Martin thing happened, I think they was at a protest of some sorts. And it was the brother of a young lady who had gotten killed before by the police.

He was encouraged at this particular rally to only talk about Trayvon Martin, to not bring up his sister. I mean, how can you tell a young man not to bring up his sister? And it just goes to show that the rhetoric that they felt that needed to be articulated in that moment was to talk about the death of black men, as if discussing black women would distract from the aims of the movement, which is, I think, exactly what bell hooks is trying to get us to see, that it's not a distraction. There's more than one narrative, and that adds to what we're doing for liberation.

1:33:24 Dylan: Well, I just wanted to confirm. So there was a speaker for this, and he was encouraged by the organizers of the event not to talk about his sister who had been killed by police.

1:33:36 Unknown speaker: Please.

1:33:36 Dylan: Just seems so weird. But it's, of course, exactly in coordination with bell hooks. Wrote 30 years ago.

1:33:44 Mark: Bell hooks has blown your mind. That's exactly what she wanted to do. I just looked up the phrase oppression Olympics. It was coined by feminist author and activist Elizabeth Betita Martinez in 1993 to challenge the idea of the hierarchy of oppressions when addressing inequalities faced by minorities. So there you go.

1:34:04 Dylan: Well, if you go to the Black Lives Matter website and you go to the about page, one of the tabs in the about page is her story to talk about the founders of it.

1:34:14 Mark: Well, there you go. I want to talk a little bit more about how important is it to have unified messaging. I think that one of the things that bell hooks is trying to accomplish is to say self actualization, whether she uses that word or not. The thing that we're all pushing forward, not just individually, but as a society should allow for, as you were saying, Myesha, multiple narratives. And yes, there's a lot to say about sort of which ones deserve to be turned into a political movement, to have political actions based on them, which ones are the most pressing, which ones reflect the most injustice.

But still, still you could be able to say all those things. The fact that we live in sort of a soundbite world and this is a main target of. If we want to connect Bell Hook's criticism of the media back to Adorno's criticism of the media or other Marxist kind of criticisms of the media is of course any criticisms in the media. It's all about oversimplifying and making things bite sized. And that goes very much in line with. No, no, there has to be one consistent narrative. So I think the thing that, that might bug me about, as I was describing at the beginning, the kind of the lesser writers that were influenced by bell hooks and are maybe trying to challenge bell hooks but are not doing anywhere near as good a job is because they are violating this thing that she is pointing out of.

No, you don't have to stay on message every second you can tell multiple narratives. You don't have to have every story be addressing the most pressing social issue so long as all the stories that are told do not serve to just obscure or block out other narratives. I think it's maybe just a matter of probably saying it that way does not address the practical problems that come up in a given circumstance. If you're at a particular rally and you're trying to get people to pass the Trayvon Martin law.

1:36:06 Dylan: I think her criticism is more sharp edged than that. I think that she was. That there ought to be a big tent, but that the staying on message rhetoric to suppress other opinions is really the activity of a sexist, oppressive society. Yeah, it's an oppressive action masquerading as a tactical decision.

1:36:31 Mark: Yeah, no, I like that. That it's just, it's buying into the thing that they're supposed to be rebelling against.

1:36:36 Dylan: Yeah, it goes. So it goes right to the heart of her equating the kind of activity that's happening in racism and sexism. And it becomes clear when you have patriarchal activity among black men and you have racist activity among white women. That's why they have a. They're both talking about being oppressed, but they're also both oppressing, even in their rhetoric and even in their organization.

1:37:03 Mark: Any other main points from the books that we haven't hit that people want to throw out there before we move toward completion?

1:37:11 Seth: The only thing we didn't really get into, and I don't know how much energy I have for it right now, but was we didn't talk so much about the representations of whiteness chapter, chapter 11. And the gist being that this kind of is in line with the loving blackness, that there's a way in which white is represented as good and black is represented as bad, and that whiteness with respect to white people is associated with positive images and blackness as negative images. And I can't say that I took anything strong away from that chapter in the book other than again, and I know I'm sounding like a broken record tonight, but that it's not a theoretical thing to uncover and recognize how language and metaphors and all that work against.

To reinforce this ideology. And this is kind of like your frozen example that as I was reading this, I was thinking, how would I go about erasing what I assume? I'm going to assume that when she says, for example, that you can be, you know, not prejudiced, but still be perpetuating the dominant ideology. Right. I'm a good white liberal. Like, I try not to be racist, I try not to be sexist, but I'm sure that I think and do things that perpetuate those things. So if I was going to try to erase this, it's not simply a theoretical exercise where I'd be like, you know what I'm going to examine what are the adjectives and things that I associate with whiteness and blackness?

I think I would literally have to go out in my life and try to actively flip the tables and any assumptions, try to recognize what assumptions I have when I meet somebody for the first time based on how they look, their gender, their race, what I find out about their sexual orientation and flip everything on its head and try to actively erase those, not simply through an act of cognition, but in practice. So I thought that was a tremendous challenge. Now, in this chapter, she's talking about how white people don't know that black people have this really negative idea about whiteness and that what we think of, we're just like, oh, you know, dodo do, do.

But in the meantime, through their own experience, that black people have a very different recognition, even if they don't realize

1:39:40 Mark: it is part of what that even if the particular black person says, I'm not afraid of white people or whatever, she still thinks this is sort of part of a possible false consciousness, to name that whiteness in the black imagination is often a representation of terror, terrorism.

1:39:54 Seth: Right. And again, this is not something that I can overcome by myself. That my feeling is that the call to action in this was to actively cultivate and meet and interact with people with black men and women. And that's the only way that. That I will have the opportunity to see a different perspective and to have the opportunity to maybe eventually erase that default ideology from my brain. And I take that very seriously. You know, one of the things that I think about and I talk about with people here in Austin quite a bit is that, you know what diversity I have with respect to race and in my sphere of friends here in Austin is pretty limited.

Like, most of the black people I know, I know, like through the Internet, right? And most of them seem to be philosophy teachers and professors or of various sorts. And it strikes me that I've got a paucity. My takeaway from all this is that I have a real poverty of experience based on who I know and who I spend time with, and that it's impoverished not only my view of the world and other people's experiences, but also potentially made me more of an agent to perpetuate harmful ideology, and that I need to do something to rectify that.

1:41:13 Myesha: Yeah, it seems that. And I'm just going to quote a line from her in the end of that essay, she says, as critical intervention, it allows for the recognition that progressive white people who are anti racist might be able to understand the way in which their cultural practice reinscribes white supremacy without promoting paralyzing guilt or denial. And of course, she talks about empathy before that. So, you know, I'm thinking that if I was a white person, what can I now do? I mean, I can empathize and imagine if I was in the shoes of a black person, what would they think of me?

But it seems as if hoax is also suggesting that we can at least change cultural practice. Now, exactly what cultural practices is, don't quite know. But changing whatever we may think cultural practice to be can be done not only directly, but Indirectly. And so I just wonder in our interactions with other people, you know, in which ways can our cultural practice not perpetuate racism? And I don't necessarily think that it has to be done directly towards a black person. I think even in social settings or academic settings, whatever those settings are, our interactions with other people.

Yeah. I think cultural practice as a whole can have an impact, and so we can begin to change those, even if it's not directly directed towards a person of color.

1:42:25 Mark: So I'm guessing that bell hooks would not approve of my current strategy of being an equal opportunity opportunity misanthrope.

1:42:32 Seth: I suspect not.

1:42:36 Mark: Would I cross the street if a black person is there? Yes. But I also would cross the street if a little old white lady is there. I cross the street from everyone. I fear all people.

1:42:47 Dylan: Oh, you just dislike them all.

1:42:50 Mark: Thank you for putting up with or stumbling around through this, Myesha.

1:42:54 Myesha: No, thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it. I appreciate the experience.

1:42:58 Mark: And I hope. I know Law wanted us to do this because he was going to be teaching some bell hooks. And so this was like his way of prepping. And even though he didn't get to be on the episode, he read the stuff. So he was all ready. Things came up. So thanks to him. Thanks to you, Seth and Dylan. Do you guys have any other closing type thoughts? You can keep going, Seth. We like hearing from you. You can pull it out at the end.

1:43:23 Dylan: People subscribe only because of you, Seth.

1:43:25 Seth: Well, yeah, so a couple of things. First off, I'd like to reiterate. So there's a common theme on this podcast that we talk about how bad philosophers can be as writers sometimes. And so we are happy to read good writers and good writing. And she is certainly an excellent writer. And I mean that not just because the prose is clear, but she's the line of thought and the argumentation is very clear and the points just. It's very easy to follow the flow of the point she's trying to make. And she makes them very forcefully without being polemical or anything like that. She's a really, really good writer.

1:44:03 Myesha: She does have a book on writing.

1:44:05 Seth: Does she?

1:44:05 Myesha: Which will blow your mind. You would never look at writing the same.

1:44:10 Seth: So the second aspect that I thought was interesting, like again, I mentioned, was the complete lack of discussion of religion. She talks about in Ain't I a Woman, about the Victorian notion of chastity and purity of woman versus the base, aggressive, sexual nature of man, but that that was only applied to white women. You know, there's a lot of complexities to her analysis. But that notion of woman as ideal and as pure is something that definitely comes out of Western, specifically Judeo, Christian, Islamic as well, I'm not sure, but. And so I'm surprised that that didn't figure more in her analysis.

And I know if law were here, you know, that would have been a much greater topic of conversation, not just because of his profession and advocation, but because when we've talked about civil rights and black liberation movements, when we read MLK and W.E.B. du Bois and all that, was that the interconnectedness, the critical role that Christianity and the church played in 20th century Black emancipation movement and the civil rights movement. And so it's interesting and it made me think, when I was reading her, we were reading one of the essays and she mentioned about teaching at Yale, I think.

And it made me think of Cornel west, who we've also read for this podcast. In fact, what was the name of the book we read? Do you remember Mark and Dylan?

1:45:37 Myesha: Race Matters, Democracy Matters.

1:45:40 Seth: We read parts of Race Matters, but we also read it. There's an essay where he talks about, oh, Prophesied, Deliverance.

1:45:46 Myesha: Okay.

1:45:46 Seth: And it's for him obviously, too. It's critical. So that's an interesting disparity. And I wonder if bell hooks has ever had a recorded debate or whether in print or in audio or video with Cornel West. So I'd be very interested in pursuing that.

1:46:02 Myesha: I think there is a conversation between the two. It should be on YouTube, I think. I hope I'm not mixing bell hooks up with Toni Morrison, but I think they are.

1:46:09 Dylan: Yeah, there is.

1:46:10 Myesha: Yeah.

1:46:11 Dylan: I haven't watched it, but I saw

1:46:12 Seth: that there is, so I'm going to check that out. Anyway, we always end these things, and I always try to give a recommendation whether I think anybody should read this stuff or not. And this definitely gets my endorsement. And I. In fact, I was thinking about going and actually ordering a copy of the Black Looks book just to get a physical copy so I could read the other essays that are in it. And I'll definitely be following up with her. So I really appreciated the topic and appreciate you coming on Myesha to chat with us.

1:46:40 Myesha: Well, thank you. And the book is called Remembered Rapture.

1:46:44 Dylan: Okay.

1:46:45 Myesha: Doesn't sound like a book on writing, but it is, and it would totally change your perspective about writing.

1:46:51 Dylan: Thank you.

1:46:52 Seth: Cool.

1:46:52 Mark: Well, I enjoyed all of her writing, but I think the Ain't I a Woman was the least pleasant of the things that I read by her, just because it was so much of the Same thing for so long. And maybe it was because you guys didn't read the first two chapters, but she just. Like. I was just going on trying to find, like, what are the. Oh, okay. So everybody read the entire book?

1:47:12 Seth: Yeah, the first two chapters were really good.

1:47:14 Myesha: I think also, Ain't I a Woman, it's interesting that you gave us the history of it. The chapters were kind of long for Bell Hook's chapters. And I was wondering. This is different. This is odd. You said this was her first book and this was something that she. Yeah, I think it's an outlier case of how her chapters usually go. So I was surprised by it.

1:47:34 Mark: But a seemingly deep well of interesting stuff. Even if you don't agree with her take on Madonna or she weighs in on a lot of stuff. She has an essay on Tina T. Turner right after the ones we read in Black Looks. So you can dig into that. She's not happy with Tina Turner trying to put a positive spin in our biography on being abused and taking control of her sexuality. And by adopting the Persona that she did, the vamp Persona that she did, she was internalizing. She was being the wrong kind of feminist.

1:48:08 Dylan: I want to read that Diversity of opinion.

1:48:13 Mark: Well, but I guess this is the kind of thing that it could. Like, if I just read an article like that criticizing Tina Turner in Salon, I would probably be annoyed, but because I like her writing, then I not annoyed. I just thought it was an enjoyable read.

1:48:27 Seth: So, yeah, I have a special kind of difficulty listening to academic criticisms of artists because I think the act of creation, especially the act of artistic creation and performance, is itself revolutionary in some way. And also it's a social act. It's a revolutionary act. It's an act of defiance against social norms in some respects. And it bothers me, you know, like, you can't criticize Tina Turner.

1:48:59 Dylan: She is a critic, right? That's part of the gig.

1:49:04 Seth: Yeah. I don't know.

1:49:06 Mark: Well, next time we're gonna do some Simone de Beauvoir. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book. So pick that up. And you might want to check out the blog partialexaminedlife.com maybe people will have some discussion about this episode. Maybe on our Facebook group, we'll have some discussion about this episode. If you become a subscriber and are able to get behind the scenes, you could have a not school group on this episode. On other bell hooks books, other things that you think, why didn't you read that? If you're going to talk about bell hooks, you should talk about this other author that is definitely better than bell hooks talking about the same thing. Why didn't you read that you could propose that as a not school group and you could have a discussion in that voice that I just did.

1:49:47 Unknown speaker: Hi all, Brian Wilson here with an update on our not school program. We had two great kickoff seminars for you German philosophy lovers this past weekend. Justin Madra kicked off part one of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra discussing the ideas of a new morality and the Ubermensch as an ideal of self mastery. Also this Sunday, Preston Price kicked off Hegel's Science of Logic. Be on the lookout for follow up seminars from Preston and Justin at our Not School forums. Coming up May 15, your humble narrator is leading a seminar on Descartes meditations on first philosophy.

We'll be digging into Descartes thoughts on the concept of doubt, the mind, body, relationship and the existence of God. So basically a rehash of season four of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, but still good stuff in there. Two more seminars that are still in the works are Mary Ricci's Proposal, looking at the 2016 US presidential election position papers and Michael Murray's Film as Art, looking at the great works of cinema and how they stand up as works of art. But don't like any of these options. It's not too late to propose your own group.

Just go to the citizens forum and post your idea. To register for any of these seminars or organize your own, you simply have to become a pel citizen. If you have questions, you can reach out to me@brianartiallyexaminelife.com hope to see you at a seminar soon.

1:51:03 Mark: Good night everybody.

1:51:04 Unknown speaker: Good night.

1:51:05 Seth: Good night.

1:51:05 Myesha: Good night.

1:51:26 Unknown speaker: Better drunk than lonely Better burnt than cold Better out of mind than out of time Better young than old Please be warm and merry

1:51:50 Mark: Please don't sit

1:51:51 Unknown speaker: and ride Please reject this lecture Become what you want Live for this moment Live for the next step as well Live and make good stories Tell the mama run. Better dark than falling Better loose and

1:52:39 Mark: tight

1:52:42 Unknown speaker: Better lost than stuck at home Better love than all alone Live for this moment Live for the next as well Live and make great stories

make

them run like hell See the good in others See the world as one See the next endeavor have the courage to start Download. Live for this moment Live for the next as well Live and make great stories that your kids can tell. Sam.