bell hooks on How We Raise Men

Word came on Wednesday that Gloria Jean Watkins, an endlessly versatile and probing social critic who went by the pen name bell hooks, has died at the age of sixty-nine. hooks, who was raised in a segregated town in Kentucky, wrote dozens of books and was best known for her works on feminism, including “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism”; “Yearning: Race Gender, and Cultural Politics,” and “Killing Rage: Ending Racism.” The last time we spoke was in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein affair and the rise of the #MeToo movement, for a segment that first aired on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Our conversation covered masculinity, patriarchy, politics, and parenting, including the dynamics within her own family. hooks was ferocious in her commitments and beliefs, but hardly doctrinaire, with a sensibility and a writing voice that always returned to the healing necessity of love. She told me:

“My father, who was a very violent, very patriarchal man, he was in the all-Black infantry in World War Two. He was a boxer. He was a basketball player. He was all of these things that we associate with masculinity, and in fact really had a lot of disdain for my brother, because actually my brother was a much softer, warmer human being. And my father looked down on that—he felt that was not masculine.” hooks continued, “I still think that, if we really want patriarchy to change, we are in trouble if we turn our backs on men and not really want to examine, Why are men so violent? [The author and educator] John Bradshaw used to say that the primary form of child abuse is really shaming. And I think that if we look at all of these men and their behavior—it’s such shaming behavior.”

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