Building Community across Race and Gender Lines:
A Review of bell hooks' Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

Katie Wester Neal

In each of her essays in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks addresses just what her title suggests: the yearning within us and how it interacts with race and gender in our society. Hooks is specifically concerned with three topics: black women's lack of visibility; the loss of the black solidarity movement in a white-dominated society; and what must be done about these problems. Referencing pop culture, her own upbringing and experience, and quoting influential educators like Paulo Freire, hooks advocates speaking out and writing as a form postmodern cultural critique in her essays.
Hooks does not specifically speak to educators in her critique. Her writing and speaking, however, are clearly meant to inform the way teachers conduct themselves, create community, and influence students' actions through modeling. She focuses on black people's yearning for equity by first analyzing their situation in American society and then outlining a plan for changing the structures of oppression present in our culture. In doing so, hooks creates an outline for anyone who has yearned for a better life and has attempted to address this longing.

Hooks asserts that black people, especially black women, have been pushed into the lowest position in American culture. Despite gains made through the feminist movement, black women are only able to show their support for others, especially in the case of other black people. Negative comments from black women, hooks says, often engender resistance from both the white and black communities; the criticism is either seen as bucking the status quo too rigorously or showing a lack of black solidarity. As hooks states, "Everywhere [black women] go, there is pressure to silence our [dissenting] voices, to co-opt and undermine them" (p. 148).

Hooks also raises issues surrounding the multiplicity inherent in women's identities -especially black women - to describe how they are pigeonholed. Although "sexism delegates to females the task of creating and maintaining a home environment" (p.42), women, most notably those of color, are not simply passive homemakers. Hooks discusses "females" generally, but she focuses her examples on black women, leaving out specific references to white women's roles in the home. To make progress in subverting a white male-dominated society, black women must be seen anew as powerful creators of safe havens for their families as well as intelligent people committed to advancing themselves as such.

To elevate the status of black women and fight this marginalization, hooks wants to call "attention to the skills and resources of black women who may have begun to feel that they have no meaningful contribution to make, women who may or may not be formally educated but who have essential wisdom to share" (p. 48). Hooks also wants the black community to go back to affirming the "value of homeplace, of having access to private space where [they] do not encounter white aggression" (p.47), which will give more authority to black women's roles.

Unlike when black people worked together in the civil rights movement, hooks says that many black people have now bought into the values of the materialistic, addiction-driven, white-dominated society. This new paradigm cost black people the ability to bond together to combat their own oppression. In recent years, black people have gained access to the middle class, and certain black people have become prominent figures in the white-dominated society. Hooks believes these, and other, societal factors have caused black people to feel that their fight has been won, influencing a shift away from the black power movement. Black people, hooks cautions, must still work together to defeat racism and create more authority positions for themselves.

Black people, hooks says, must recognize their commonalities and work together to fight racial and gender imperialism, despite multiple identities that create differences among them. Hooks proposes a revitalization of "the factors that gave [black] life meaning in the midst of deprivation, hardship, and despair" (p. 39). She advocates numerous solutions, such as sharing personal narratives; showing respect for other black people through actions and speech; and building a new image for black liberation. Hooks believes that a renewed sense of community will return black people's focus to their own liberation struggle as well as the larger fight against cultural domination of all kinds.

Katie Wester Neal is currently working toward a Master of Science degree in Education at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include feminism in education and using ethnography in the classroom. She can be reached at kwester@dolphin.upenn.edu.