Gloria Jean Watkins, known internationally as bell hooks, died on December 15th 2021. After a prolonged illness she passed at home, surrounded by friends and family. hooks was born in 1952. She grew up in Hopkinsville, Kentucky – which was segregated at the time of her birth. And these early experiences of anti-Blackness went on to fuel a lifelong commitment to social justice.
hooks was an activist, author, and academic. Her career began in 1976, when she was a Professor in English and Senior Lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. It was during this time she published her first volume of poetry, and adopted her great-grandmother’s name. hooks made a conscious choice to write her name in lowercase – both to distinguish her from her grandmother, and as a way of encouraging readers to focus on the “substance of books, not who I am.”
A prolific writer, hooks penned some forty books in her lifetime. Her work explored themes of gender, race, capitalism, class, sexuality, and children’s rights – all through the lens of intersectional feminism, which she practiced and theorised before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term.
In addition to being one of the great political thinkers of this era, hooks wrote in an accessible style; she chose educating others over performing intellect, which is why her books hold lasting cultural significance.
hooks is best known for Ain’t I a Woman?, a touchstone of Black feminist thought inspired by a Sojourner Truth speech of the same name, and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, a book which critiques the racism of white feminists and lays out a blueprint for interracial solidarity.
With her work, she was constantly imagining feminist futures – ways of living and loving that were rooted in mutual respect, as opposed to domination or control. hooks described her own sexuality as “queer-pas-gay”, and challenged white gay people who conflated their own experiences of homophobia with racism.
“No one can hide, change or mask dark skin color,” she wrote. “White people, gay and straight, could show greater understanding of the impact of racial oppression on people of color by not attempting to make these oppressions synonymous, but rather by showing the ways they are linked and yet differ.”
hooks never hesitated to speak truth to power, no matter how challenging some people may have found her words. And her courage has inspired activists around the world.
Dr. Linda Strong-Leek, a personal friend and colleague, paid the following tribute to hooks:
“She was a giant, no nonsense person who lived by her own rules, and spoke her own truth in a time when Black people, and women especially, did not feel empowered to do that. It was a privilege to know her, and the world is a lesser place today because she is gone. There will never be another bell hooks.”
