Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

This chapter discusses the obstacles that stand in the way of solidarity between black women and white women. hooks points to the history of slavery as creating a domestic space that set black female slaves and white female masters into a bitter dynamic, in which white women needed to affirm their status and dominance, especially when they saw some white male partners taking black slaves as sexual partners, often through rape. hooks points to narratives of the time that indicate the jealousy of white women, who often took out their anger against these slaves. hooks states that, despite the potential for empathy that could occur between black women and white women, due to, in some cases, similar cases of abuse or similar feelings of motherhood, instead there was bitterness on both sides.

After slavery, these bitter feelings continued. White women are particularly concerned, now that slavery is over, with maintaining racial stereotypes about black women to maintain their dominance. Segregation due to Jim Crow results in little interaction between blacks and whites so that there are few opportunities to create a new dynamic in their relationships. There is little opportunity for friendships.

After examining such a traumatic history, hooks then surveys the current relationships between black and white women. She is particularly concerned about how white female scholars have characterized these relationships, feeling that they have focused too much on the positive and minimized the reality of their antagonistic history. While some white scholars have pointed to the positive things that black domestic workers during the Jim Crow era said about their employment, hooks points out that most likely, the black women spoke positively because they didn’t want to jeopardize their employment. When black women were amongst themselves, they could speak honestly about their feelings of anger about how white women treated them, and they could speak honestly about how they felt white women were lazy, incompetent, and selfish. hooks points to the experiences of her mother, who worked as a maid in white homes. People like her mother had a unique insider point of view from which to observe the truth of the segregated South.

She views with suspicion some of the calls for solidarity made by white women because she feels that they do not make these calls for sisterhood in good faith. She acknowledges that there are legacies of hostility and distrust that have been handed down, generation to generation, for both black and white women: “Many of us who have never been white women’s servants have inherited ideas about them from relatives and kin, ideas which shape our expectations and interactions (99). This legacy of suspicion and distrust is hard to unlearn, but she points to an essay by the white poet and feminist Adrienne Rich, “‘Disloyal to Civilization’: Feminism, Racism, and Gynephobia” as being groundbreaking for its willingness to confront the relationships between white and black women honestly. Still, for the most part, many black feminists have been worn down in the struggle and have little desire to engage.

hooks calls on both sides to recommit to honest dialogue. She demands an honest confrontation of the past and a willingness to do the work of commitment. She says that too many white feminists have reconstructed a “servant paradigm” in which they call on black feminists to do the work which they can then appropriate in their work: “Now black women are placed in the position of serving white female desire to know more about race and racism, to ‘master’ the subject” (103). She wants the white scholars to do the work of exploring their whiteness and the privileges it entails rather than claiming to be able to understand and write about blackness. She wants them to acknowledge their complicity in racism. Only a collective effort by both sides will bring about honest solidarity.

hooks reflects on her 10 years of experience teaching women studies/ feminist classes. She has seen several shifts in the classroom. She began teaching women’s studies classes in the Black Studies department because “at the time, women’s studies programs were not ready to accept a focus on race and gender” (110). The majority of her students in these classes were black and skeptical of the value of feminism. hooks wants to prove to students that feminism is not just for white women. She sees the need to change the feminist movement so that it truly embraces diversity. She critiques the insular nature of some women’s studies classes that can make a student new to women’s studies feel alienated in the classroom and emphasizes that teachers need to be ready to address diverse classrooms that have a wide variety of experience and knowledge.

She also discusses her experience teaching black male students. She discusses how many of the black men are used to “thinking of themselves in terms of racism, being exploited and oppressed. […] It is also understandable that is difficult for them to ‘own up to’ sexism, to be accountable” (116). But many black men also express a willingness to commit to living a non-sexist life.

Other concerns some black women expressed in her classroom was a concern that being involved in feminist struggle would alienate them from some members of the black community, many of whom are still suspicious of feminism, but these women continue with the struggle for women’s rights because they see the overall value for black women and men. hooks and her students realize the need to “develop important strategies for survival and resistance that need to be shared within black communities” (118). Only then can they find true liberation.

hooks reflects on the more than 20 years that have passed since she wrote Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. She explains that she wrote that book due to the lack of scholarship that existed about the experiences of black women. She reflects on her childhood, in which she observed that black men had “patriarchal authority, exercising forms of male power, supporting institutionalized sexism” (120). She sees that, even though black men’s power did not equal the power of white men, it still was a daily part of hooks’s life in the home, the school, the church. This power structure was ignored by many feminist scholars who assumed that, because many black women worked outside the home, they did not deal with sexism.

Feminist scholarship gradually expanded beyond the experiences of white women to also include black women. “The writings of black women like Celestine Ware, Toni Cade Bambara, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Angela Davis, to name a few, were all works that sought to articulate […] the erasure of black female presence” (121). Unfortunately, many white women and black people were suspicious of these early feminist efforts. Many black people, in particular, viewed the feminist movement as focused solely on white women and any participation by black scholars in the feminist movement was seen as a betrayal. In addition, many white feminists felt threatened by the work of black feminists, which questioned the paradigms they had created. These fears threatened to destroy the broadening of the feminist movement to include the experiences of black women.

Recently, hooks has witnessed a change in the academic environment which has been more open to discussing gender in more complex ways. hooks also points to the valuable fictional works by black women “which exposed forms of gender exploitation and oppression in black life,” such as Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange (125). These works generated literary criticism by black scholars whom the academic community has welcomed. hook still notes that scholarly attention on these works is welcomed if they “focused attention on issues of gender without specifically placing their work with a feminist contest” (126). hooks points out that, while it is valuable to focus on the experiences of black females, the lack of placing such experience in a feminist construct is problematic. Her essay ends with a call for education to address the need for critical consciousness.

This essay features another interview, this time between bell hooks and Ron Scapp, “a white male philosopher, comrade, and friend” who worked at Queens College in the philosophy department and served as the director of the College Preparatory Program in the School of Education (131). She feels it is important to engage in dialogue with other professors who have different experiences of privilege and power, not only in terms of race and gender but also in terms of professional work environments. hooks primarily taught in private colleges and universities, while Scapp taught in state universities. hooks and Scapp also have different childhood experiences, Scapp having grown up in the city and hooks having grown up in the rural South. Their understandings of the other’s backgrounds has “been a necessary framework for the building of professional and political solidarity between us, as well as for creating a space of emotional trust where intimacy and regard for one another can be nourished” (132). It is from this understanding and trust that they engage in an honest, reflective dialogue about their teaching experiences and philosophies.

hooks and Scapp discuss how they can put into practice the idea of education as “liberatory practice” (134). While many professors become caught up in their identity as a professor and become trapped in a mind/ body duality, viewing themselves as living a life of the mind and denying the body, hooks and Scapp insist on the body, and they see their bodily presence in the classroom as important to their relationship to students. They don’t want to hide their bodies behind a podium but instead they move physically closer to their students. Scapp says, “what I have to say is not coming from behind this invisible line, this wall of demarcation that implies anything that from this side of the desk is gold, is truth” (138). The body also signifies race, class, and gender, so returning to the body allows a discussion of how power belongs to some and not to others.

They discuss issues of the canon, saying that it is not enough to teach radical texts, but they must also use radical pedagogical strategies. Difficulty arises from a professor’s reluctance to let go of some of their authority in the classroom, and from students’ reluctance to claim responsibility in the classroom. Students, like professors, are accustomed to the passive banking model of education, where the professor stands behind the podium doling out bits of knowledge for students to take in and memorize.

One strategy to incorporate more progressive pedagogy is to incorporate a sharing of personal narrative, since “focusing on experience allows students to claim a knowledge base from which they can speak” (Scapp 148). Students need to realize that they have valuable things to say about their own experiences and other subjects. The teacher must encourage everyone to listen to each other to create a collaborative environment. hooks recognizes that her students and what they have said in the classroom has influenced much of her learning and her writing. 

They also discuss the need for professors to teach in different types of locations. Diverse work settings would allow professors the opportunity to work with different types of students, so they could expand their ideas of how to teach in multicultural classrooms. Professors should also have opportunities beyond the classroom to interact with students, such as by creating student support groups or independent studies. And finally, they discuss the need for “time away from teaching,” maybe through “job-sharing and job-switching” in order to avoid burn-out (165).