bell hooks, or, why am I inside writing when its 80 degrees in Ohio?

Why don’t I like bell hooks? For me, it’s more difficult to explain why one would like her. In some circles, not liking bell hooks is like being down on chocolate and puppies. There is sort of a sucking in of the breath, a wide-eyed stare. “But don’t you find her….transformative? Doesn’t she speak…the TRUTH?” No. I don’t think she does. And when she aligns herself with Paolo Friere, who I find much more accessible, I feel a strain of annoyance. These two are not from the same planet, let alone the same philosophy.
In homage to David Letterman, I will now state the top 10 reasons bell hooks does not impress.

1. Anybody who is that obsessed with the world bourgeois needs to just go have a beer. Seriously. When she talks on p. 178 about silence and obedience in the classroom being a bourgeois value, I wince. I don’t see how creating a classroom which has space for everyone to have an equal chance to participate in a mature, respectful, sensitive way is bourgeois. It necessarily means that when one person is talking, other people are not talking. This also means that we speak to each other like adults, without yelling, being emotional, without anger. hooks criticizes this practice mercilessly. Does this mean that in her class, people get to talk over her? Not listen to her? If she stops to ask them to wait their turn, is she sinking into the bourgeois? How can learning take place in public chaos?

2. She makes sweeping generalizations about class, race and culture with no attempt to quantify them. “From grade school on, we are all encouraged to cross the threshold of the classroom believing we are entering a democratic space . . . “ Really? Are we? Because I have to say, when I entered Sr. Catherine’s sixth grade room at my grade school, there was no mistaking who ran the show. It wasn’t me or any of the other uniformed kids fumbling our way through being eleven while sitting in a tyrant’s classroom. There was no democracy. I don’t know who “all” these people are that hooks knows who enjoyed that kind of thinking, the kind that makes a kid feel important and participatory in the education process, but that wasn’t my experience. And because she writes in narrative, she of course doesn’t bother to cite much of anything as far as other people’s work. I might as well be reading her diary.

3. She defends bad classroom behavior with “those of us from working-class backgrounds may feel that discussion is deeper and richer if it arouses intense responses” (187). Since the classroom is really a microcosm of the larger world, I guess hooks feels the same way about more public encounters as well. Those kids kicking the bleepity bleep out of each other in the playground? Well, they’re just having a deeper, richer discussion about who looked at whose girlfriend or who wore the wrong color to school today. Intense doesn’t have to be aggressive, ugly, threatening, violent. I have been in classes with people who subscribed to hooks’ ideas about “deeper and richer” discussions. These are the people that hold the belief that if they merely talk loudly enough, they win. Unfortunately for them, they’re often saying nothing, just making empty shouting.

4. Her discussion about the benefits of segregated schools for black children—that in segregated schools, black children are encouraged to learn, whereas in desegregated schools, they are encouraged to obey—was probably true in hooks’ personal context as a Southern child. However, she puts forth a very dangerous subtext here, which is that only black teachers can and should teach black children and only in all-black schools, regardless of what our Constitution frames out for us. I’ve met people who believe that and believe it with fervor, anger and open hostility. A certain high school in Cleveland is full of those people. They are doing more damage socially, intellectually and spiritually to their students than they can possibly imagine.

5. “I see many students from ‘undesirable’ class backgrounds become unable to complete their studies because the contradictions between the behavior necessary to ‘make it’ in the academy and those that allowed them to be comfortable at home, with their families and friends, are just too great.” (182). Really? This is her explanation for underperformance by SES students? Not, “they came in with poor study habits and low reading performance because their parents didn’t model for them” or “they lived in a poorly resourced district, so we have to plan ways to creatively and appropriately fill their gaps” or even the highly controversial “they continue to live in neighborhoods where their friends and often own families demonize success.” Here’s the thing. I want kids in risky living and economic situations to school their way to success. I know that they often require a lot of academic and social supports to do so, and I believe it is the university’s job to provide those supports, free of charge. But let’s call it what it is. The university cannot tolerate kids coming to class late, unprepared, wanting 100% accommodation while putting forth 0% effort. That is not support. That’s codependence. If that’s how they “feel comfortable” at home, doing whatever it is they want to do whenever they want to do it, and not adhering to rules and requirements, fine. But don’t complain that they are not hirable and not university material and that it’s everybody else’s fault. In that case, you got what you paid for.

6. Stop, stop, stop using the catchphrase “academy.” It’s irritating and by the time I get through six or seven pages of reading I’m just rolling my eyes.

7. She acts as if heterogeneity in a classroom is somehow a newfangled idea that she is unwilling to trust, sort of like my 74-year old mother with a new TV remote. “If we can trust the demographics, we must assume that the academy (eye roll) will be full of students from diverse classes, and that more of our students than ever will be from poor and working class backgrounds.” Well, yes. That is probably true, even if hooks distrusts the data because it was probably analyzed by some white guy in a polo shirt in some university office somewhere (I know that guy at CSU, his name is David Crumb, and yes, he is polo shirted every day). Every classroom is inherently heterogeneous, even if every kid sitting in every seat is black or if every kid is white. Teachers who overlook that are missing a big part of the picture. hooks acts like she invented this idea. Hmm.

8. “The scholarly field of writing on critical pedagogy and/or feminist pedagogy continues to be primarily a discourse engaged by white women and men.” (9) Again, no citations for this statement, no references. Who knows if this allegation is actually true. The subtext of course is that we should be dismissive of whatever is going on in critical pedagogy right now because it is still being represented by the oppressive class. I’m just glad somebody is still talking about feminism and I don’t care what they look like.

9. “My pedagogical practices have emerged from the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies.” (10). I don’t know what this means. I think she’s just blowing smoke here.

10. “Teaching is a performative act . . . our work is not meant to be a spectacle.” This is true. I am not here for anyone’s entertainment. Teaching is all business for me, although it is immensely enjoyable and I often feel the buzz that actors must get when they know they are working the crowd. This is about the only thing in the hooks readings that doesn’t finagle my spine a little. Why can’t she be more like this and less like that?

That’s my last paper for this class. It’s 80 degrees, my children are outside playing, and I am tired from 15 weeks of serious, productive work. If we had read hooks earlier in the semester, this paper probably would have looked very different….but, knowing me, probably not.