Black Quotes by Bell Hooks

. . . no Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.

— Bell Hooks

White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or ... and oppression of others.

— Bell Hooks

I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.

— Bell Hooks

Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.

— Bell Hooks

Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.

— bell hooks

The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily.

— bell hooks

I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.

— Bell Hooks

Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now ... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions…

— Bell Hooks

I'm tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our…

— Bell Hooks

Since anti-racist individuals did not control mass media, the media became the primary tool that would be used and is still used…

— Bell Hooks

I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you…

— bell hooks

. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions,…

— Bell Hooks

While it has become “cool” for white folks to hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture, most white…

— Bell Hooks

I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they…

— Bell Hooks

I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.

— Bell Hooks

I think this is what people misunderstand about Martin Luther King saying to love your enemies. They think he was just using…

— Bell Hooks

In order for me to engage in a revolutionary struggle for collective Black self-determination, I have to engage feminism because that becomes…

— Bell Hooks

... the outcome of the Clarence Thomas hearings and his subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court shows how misguided, narrow notions of…

— Bell Hooks

I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he…

— Bell Hooks

A very hurting thing for Black Americans - to feel that we can't love our enemies. People forget what a great tradition…

— Bell Hooks

In our young minds houses belonged to women were their special domain, not as property, but as places where all that truly…

— Bell Hooks

Hip-Hop is diverse. But the white, capitalist producers and distributors of Hip-Hop are most interested in the Hip-Hip that is misogynist, that…

— Bell Hooks

Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women . . . . they ignore the reality that to be strong…

— Bell Hooks

I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to…

— Bell Hooks

I think the invitation offered the non-black reader is to join us in this expression of our familiarity and via that joining,…

— Bell Hooks

When I think about the auto-industry and how it was one of the industries that brought all of these black men from…

— Bell Hooks

…“white supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies…

— Bell Hooks

It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your…

— Bell Hooks

The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women's studies…

— Bell Hooks

In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and…

— bell hooks

In this culture, the phrase 'black woman' is not synonymous with 'tender,' or 'gentle.' It's as if those words couldn't possibly speak…

— bell hooks

Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women…

— Bell Hooks

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever…

— Bell Hooks

Sexism has always been a political stance mediating social domination, enabling white men and black men to share a common sensibility about…

— Bell Hooks

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the…

— Bell Hooks

Fluidity means that our black identities are constantly changing as we respond to circumstances in our families and communities of origin, and…

— Bell Hooks

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

— Bell Hooks

It is crucial for the future of the Black liberation struggle that we remain ever mindful that ours is a shared struggle,…

— Bell Hooks

When we concentrate on photography, we make it possible to see the walls of photographs in black homes as a critical intervention,…

— Bell Hooks

Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

— Bell Hooks