We All Have Stories About Our Names, bell hooks (1952 - 2021)

belle hooks

The Origin Story

In 1981, the year bell hooks's "Ain't I Woman: Black Women and Feminism" was unleashed into the world, Ronald Reagan had just started the first term of his presidency. The civil rights movement had gained enough traction in the collective American consciousness to neutralize what might otherwise have seemed a radical claim: that Black women needed a feminist discourse of our own. The legacy of the American woman's suffragist movement, which helped secure voting rights and open unprecedented doors for American women -- could not support the unique condition of being both Black and female.

There's so much to celebrate about hooks's contribution to global conversations on race, sex, power, personhood, starting on American soil. The fact that she built upon the work of Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved abolitionist. The title of Truth's famous speech at an 1851 Women's Convention inspired the work hooks' published 131 years later. Ain't I a Woman? Truth declared on the Ohio Convention stage. Gaunt, fueled by memories of her own enslavement, she delivered her speech without preparation. A feat as impressive, in modern terms, as walking on to a TED stage without notes or any planning, then giving a talk that gets a billion views.

hooks helped pull the thread of Truth's 19th century victory straight into the 21st century.

"Ain't I a Woman" in the Twenty-First Century

Then Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the most powerful social theorists in recent American history, built upon hooks' work to develop a body of thought leadership on "intersectionality" -- a framework for making sense of how a person's social and political identities merge to create conditions of discrimination and privilege.

My first exposure to "intersectionality" was as an undergrad. I was a sophomore at a small liberal arts college in central New York with close to zero diversity. Even though Crenshaw's description of intersectionality was a modern repackaging of the "Ain't I a Woman" trope, its truth and clarity shook me to my core. As a senior, I wrote my thesis on representations of "love" throughout Toni Morrison's novels. The way fiction like Morrison's took the stories of Black women -- the stories we told of ourselves, not the stories told about us by others -- from the social margins and brought them to the center. Along with the stories of our sisters Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Sexton, Sandra Cisneros, Margaret Atwood and many others, ours had become the subject of serious conversations that encompassed our complexities.

Later, as a graduate student at Columbia, where Crenshaw still teaches as of 2021, I tried unsuccessfully to register for one of her courses at the law school. It turns out that one is required to have been admitted to the law school before signing up for a Crenshaw course (surprise).

More groundbreaking work than we can begin to count emerged alongside hooks' torch-bearing of Sojourner Truth's legacy: Toni Morrison's Sula, the women of Gloria Naylor's Brewster Place, Walker's The Color Purple and her whole cast of female characters. They're exactly the kind of women hooks' devoted her career to telling us about.

One of the most recognizable features of hooks' and her work is the lowercase spelling of her name. She shares that feature with writers like e.e. cummings, who seem to be saying - "forget the author, focus on the work."

Millions of us have focused on the work. Precisely because of the salience of hooks' voice, her improbably loving yet relentless dismantling of sexist, racist power structures, many more of us believe that we can tell our stories. And we are telling them. We can tell our stories, and we can definitely have them heard.