Quotes from bell hooks

male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation. John Gray refers tot his as men entering their cave, and posits it as a given that a woman who disturbs her man when he wants isolation will be punished.

Having reached a point where I was successfully completing a number of desired goals, I was experiencing both a "void" and undergoing the kind of critical self-examination that brought about a crisis in meaning. It was a time for me to re-vision my life and chart new and different journeys. I think it's very hard for successful black women (and black men) to turn away from achievements, high-status positions with visibility, that may no longer be meeting our growth needs.

When we see love as the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same.

Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging.

All of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action.

Writing "The Middle-Class Black's Burden" in 1980, McClain shared: I am burdened daily with showing whites that blacks

Every life experiences loss

Women need to know that they can reject the powerful's definition of their reality… Many poor and exploited women, especially non-white women, would have been unable to develop positive self-concepts if they had not exercised their power to reject the powerful's definition of their reality.

Industrial capitalism was not simply changing the nature of black work life, it altered the communal practices that were so central to survival in the agrarian south. And it fundamentally altered black people's relationship to the body.

This book tells us how to return to love.

Within white supremacist capitalist culture in the United States there has been a concentrated effort to bury the history of the black farmer.

White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action.

Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy.

Feminism is not anti- male, Feminism is anti-sexism

Discipline and devotion are necessary to the practice of love, all the more so when relationships are just beginning.

Even though some individuals scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the common sense truth remains; we are all affected by the images we consume and by the state of mind we are in when watching them.

I have found white neighborhoods in all the privileged-class environments I have lived in throughout the United States, including Kentucy, to have as active a presence of racial prejudice as their poor counterparts.

At times women find it difficult to hear what many men have to say when what they tell us does not conform to our fantasies of who they are or who we want them to be.

The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal would that did not want him to claim his true feelings.

To know compassion fully is to engage in a process of forgiveness and recognition that enables us to release all the baggage we carry that serves as a barrier to healing. Compassion opens the way for individuals to feel empathy for others without judgment. Judging others increases our alienation. When we judge we are less able to forgive. The absence of forgiveness keeps us mired in shame.

When we practice forgiveness, we let go of shame. Embedded in our shame is always a sense of being unworthy. It separates. Compassion and forgiveness reconnect us.

Love is as love does, and it is our responsibility to give children love. When we love children we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights—that we respect and uphold their rights. Without justice there can be no love.

in the song of solomon there is this passage that reads: i found him whom my soul loves. i held him and would not let him go. to holding on, to knowing again that moment of rapture, of recognition where we can face one another as we really are, stripped of artifice and pretense, naked and not ashamed.

As long as men dominate women, we cannot have love between us. That love and domination can coexist is one of the most powerful lies patriarchy tells us all.