How bell hooks Taught us to Talk Back: A Love Letter

• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Author: Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill,Lauren N. Moton
• DOI: 10.1177/21533687221101207
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

How bell hooks Taught us to

Talk Back: A Love Letter

Lauren N. Moton

and Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill

Dearest Prof. hooks,

Once upon a time, our stories were hushed and hidden, just whispers in the dark.

Too soft to be heroic, too dusky to be pure, too queer and too unnerving, too

shabby and too poor. You told our stories in the light –the stories of women compli-

cating conceptions of Blackness, Black folk complicating conceptions of the feminine,

gay folk, poor folk, rural folk, complication. Interwoven in the great American tale,

you told a story of complexity, of multitudinous hurt, and of multiple resiliencies,

stories of dominance, subjugation, rebellion, and resistance. You told us there were

things we had to say. You taught us to Talk Back.

You helped us transcend the White middle-class feminist gaze and demanded intro-

duction of the Black working-class woman. From margin to center, you said, and the

light bulb f‌lickered in our minds. Finally, acknowledgement of Black feminine deval-

uation put to page; our perspectives foregrounded. Drawing the historical line from the

transatlantic slave trade to present day, your dedication to exploring the ways in which

our various social locations impact our everyday experience was, and has been, imper-

ative to our liberation. You inspired Black women to feel comfortable reclaiming the

term “feminist”after long being intentionally excluded in the movement. Your bold-

ness stimulated so many of us to f‌ind comfort, home, and community within your

writing, and, importantly, you taught us to Talk Back.

Does Lauren come to mind when someone says “scholar”? I was once an under-

graduate college dropout, subsisting as a bartender for the greater part of my twenties.

I have been arrested, twice. I am Black. I am Queer. I am a Woman. These experiences

have profoundly shaped the evolution of my identity as a scholar. I complicate.

In 2016, when I entered my criminal justice master’s program, situated in a rural

Ohio farm town, I soon realized that I was not like my peers or my professors—not

like the cisgender heterosexual White men majority. I knew at this point that I

moved through the world and academia in a way that was dissimilar to that of my col-

leagues. The feeling of being siloed within my institution stimulated my motivation to

f‌ind testimony of lived experience that matched my own. It was a feminist theory class

outside of my department that exposed me to Black feminist thought, with you among

the brilliant scholars I read. Ain’t I a woman? (1981) was my f‌irst introduction to you.

Article

Race and Justice

2022, Vol. 12(3) 618-619

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/21533687221101207

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