Bell Hooks

“Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.” (CITE) As a firm believer in love, as well as a hopeless romantic, I am deeply intrigued by Bells Hooks writing. Bell Hooks born Gloria Jean Watkins was born September 25, 1952 in a black neighborhood in Hopkinsville a small, segregated town in rural Kentucky. With her father who worked as a janitor, and her mother, Rosa Bell Oldham Watkins, who worked as a maid in the homes of white families, Hooks used her experience of rural living, poverty, racial segregation, and resistance struggle in her works.
Hooks wrote in an essay “Keeping Close to Home” from Black Looks and described her father as “an impressive example of diligence and hard work.” She also paid tribute to her mother in “Homeland” in which she stated "Politically, our young mother, Rosa Bell, did not allow the white supremacist culture of domination to completely shape and control her psyche and her familial relationships." She then went on to describe how this role applied to mothers in black communities in general stating "Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world." (CITE)
In the neighborhood where Hooks grew up provided her with the affirmation that fostered her resistance to racism, it also however provided her with negative and positive experiences that would shape her feminism. She described those experiences in her essay "Ain't I a Woman: Looking Back." She explained remembered hearing the word feminist when she was a child, but not understanding exactly what it meant. She did say that when she