All About Love
Written for the British Sociological Association bell hooks Memorial Event 17.2.23
The first time I encountered bell hooks I thought she was shouting at me. My colleague had given me a copy of Teaching Community and asked me to read it. I didn’t make it past the preface.
What was happening, of course, was that I couldn’t get beyond my own whiteness, but I didn’t have the tools or self-awareness to articulate that back then. I just felt bad and blamed bell, rather than listen to my own surfacing feelings of white guilt.
Since then, we’ve been on quite a journey, bell and I and we’ve still got a long way to go. She was a woman who touched many lives and opened many hearts and minds. It is still devastating to me that she died in a time of deep racial reckoning, without seeing any upturn. Of course, she would have been hopeful - and loving, and angry - to the very end.
I persevered with bell, mainly because I was embarrassed that I didn’t get it. I cringe to think of myself back then, but I’m also glad I can confront my past self, lost in white fragility as I was, because it helps me to understand what happens - and is still happening - in parts of the white ‘Left’. bell wasn’t shouting at me, she was shouting for me. She was shouting for everyone who is racialised, minoritised, bullied and oppressed. And, let’s be right about it, she wasn’t even shouting. That’s another racist, sexist, classist trope. She did everything with love, even anger.
bell is a foundational thinker in my world and she was always generous about the thinkers who inspired her. In Teaching Community, still the most annotated of all my bells, she draws on the work of Parker J Palmer, a white educator and community organiser of her generation. Their conversation at St Norbert College in 2016 is a meeting of minds. Parker says, “Every time I wanted to know if I was on the right track about education, I read your latest book to see if you’d quoted me.” bell seems to find this hilarious. It strikes me that she did not live or think in sections. Her ancestors, her family and non-familial kin, activists, authors, teachers and students were all part of the world she fully lived in and they influenced her as equals. The sense of connection many feel with her around the world comes directly from bell inviting us in.
She lived equality, even as she called out inequity in every line of her work.
This helped me in my own academic teaching. I worked for many years with community education teachers and activists, undergraduate students with big life histories who had not followed a traditional route into higher education. There was a lot to break down for people who had never written an essay for years, if at all. ‘Theory’ was an alien concept, imbued with ableist, capitalist, white supremacist, heteronormative patriarchy, as bell might say. We developed a practice we called ‘Thinkers are our Friends’, which helped everyone get on terms with theorists as equals. We called them by their first names and sought out great reading outside the canon; bell led the way. Her determination not to patronise - anyone - rubbed off on me with them, and them with the students in their care.
bell’s determined and yet grounded individuality enabled me to disentangle myself from the loyalty binds of the organisation, even as it geared up to spit me out. She never fitted anywhere, not in systems and structures for sure. She was radically honest about how much that hurt and I drew strength from her experiences in my darkest times, when I had no classroom, when I could not educate with a pedagogy of hope. In Teaching to Transgress, we are left in no doubt about the pain involved in the struggle for freedom. Yet she never loses hope, and neither have I since she has been in my life.
I was in my 30s before I finally got on terms with bell. Thirty years of seeing things through the dichotomised lens of the white Left, where if you’re not for me, you’re against me. bell was the first thinker I’d ever encountered who was angry and incisive enough to challenge others and humble enough to change - and allow others to change - with grace. I loved her challenge to Paulo Freire - along the lines of, I love you but you’re wrong. Her approach, and the vulnerability with which he responded, was a life lesson for me. It’s a conversation that comes to mind whenever I armour up. So, too, does her self-identification of her sexuality; she described herself queer pas gay: that to be queer is to be “the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” Yes.
Above all, bell’s feminism is something we should all have in our lives. If you visit or revisit just one of bell’s books after today, make it Feminism is for Everybody, because it really is. She speaks to me as the mother of a son as much as she speaks to me as a woman. She’s part of the family with whom I raised my son - a fine young man by the way, who fights patriarchy in his own way. Men are brutalised by agents of the patriarchy from the day they are born and the deep compassion she has for men was a life lesson for me. Resisting hatred is feminism’s work. I wonder what bell would have had to say about the toxic discourse around trans rights which is ripping UK feminism apart right now?
At the heart of bell’s approach for me is her understanding of love and of shame. She wrote with the whole range of human emotions, from playful to outraged. Her conversation with herself, Gloria Watkins, in Teaching to Transgress is delightful and was the first step towards ‘theory’ for many of the students I mentioned before. So much learning in there with no need to be competitive or pompous. But love, and shame, are woven through everything. Shame is handed to us at birth by societies shaped and brutalised to benefit the privileged few. We carry it within us, we live our lives as though it were true and the only antidote is love.
During lockdown I returned again to All About Love, the first volume in bell’s ‘Love Song to the Nation’, published 20 years ago. She went on to write about women and love in Communion and black people and love in Salvation. Men have written about love as long as there has been the written word; anthologies are full of their words. bell loved “my Rumi and my Rilke” but makes the point that men did not always write as they lived. Do great words stand alone or do they sound a little hollow when we know about the authenticity of lives? It’s a debate for another time. But bell lived as she wrote, despite all the challenges of her life, with all the different kinds of love the book describe.
I recognise my work now as (in large part) white work, and that it’s my work to do. Racism is not the only dimension of oppression, of course, as bell herself makes clear. But without her words in my life, I’m not sure I would have ever got there. She cuts sharply through the nonsense of white armour to the shame, fear and vulnerability within. She is the one who taught me not to armour up. I’d learned to be ‘right on’ but I hadn’t done the work on myself to do the work.
bell was an interpreter, of what we know in our hearts to be true (sadly those are not my original words, but I read them once in a review and they stuck with me). We may not still have her, but we still have her words. I hope you - like me - take solace in returning to them again and again.
Thank you so much Lou. I am preparing an input for student teachers and am drawing on All About Love by bell on this, I am also going to ask the participants to read your piece because it is one of the best things I have ever read. I read a lot of Parker J Palmer also but was unaware of the ongoing dialogue between bell and Parker. I did come across a recording of bell in conversation with john a. powell recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sX7fqIU4gQ
I love the comment about Parker Palmer, Lou! As he is one my educational lights, like bell, it's a good story. Reading Wendell Berry's new book, The Need to be Whole, he engaged with bell (as fellow Kentuckians) over her understanding of his book on slavery, The Hidden Wound. This then somehow reauthorises Berry to do his work, which he also acknowledges as white work, and frees him to look at Southern slavery from a different stance. Thanks for this and sorry I couldn't get to the live thing!