Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“I learned that far from being self-actualized, the university was seen more as a haven for those who are smart in book knowledge but who might be otherwise unfit for social interaction.”

hooks’s experience in college classrooms as an undergraduate made her realize how unprepared many professors are for teaching. While professors may have strong subject knowledge, their interpersonal and communication skills are often undeveloped, leaving them unprepared for engaging a classroom full of diverse students with diverse needs.

“Remembering this past, I am most struck by our passionate commitment to a vision of social transformation rooted in the fundamental belief in a radically democratic idea of freedom and justice for all.”

As hooks contemplates attending her twentieth high school reunion, the first time her reunion will be racially integrated, she remembers with fondness her friendships with those who were similarly devoted to social justice. This was a difficult time as desegregation revealed raw, racist feelings that easily developed into confrontations and dangerous situations, as hooks experienced when a group of angry white men who almost drove her and her white friend off the road. She realizes that it has been hard to find white people committed to social justice since that time. While many people say they are committed to change, when it comes to actions, they are often unwilling to embrace the sacrifice that true change requires.

“King taught us to understand that if ‘we are to have peace on earth’ that ‘our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.’”

hooks recognizes that a major obstacle to any true revolution is holding on to the tribalisms of the past, clinging to a group identity based on race, class, or nation in a desire to hold on to any power and coercion that membership in such group provides. hooks sees how this need to grasp power leads to a narrowing of vision, as people fear sharing power with the Other. But she says that believing we are “safe” with our group is a myth because often, the ones that are closest to us can have the most power to hurt us, as is clear from the “statistics on domestic violence, homicide, rape, and child abuse” (28).

“When everyone first began to speak about cultural diversity, it was exciting. For those of us on the margins (people of color, folks from working class backgrounds, gays, and lesbians, and so on) who had always felt ambivalent about our presence in institutions where knowledge was shared in ways that re-inscribed colonialism and domination, it was thrilling to think that the vision of justice and democracy that was at the very heart of civil rights movements would be realized in the academy.”

hooks shares the joy she felt when she first thought that a true multicultural revolution in the academy was possible, giving everyone, including those on the “margins” a full voice. Her joy soon gave way to the reality of a backlash, when those who at first seemed to embrace multiculturalism, did not fully commit because they realized that a full commitment would decenter their power and authority and would involve sacrifice, struggle, and having to learn to deal with the inevitable mistakes and chaos that accompany any big cultural changes.

“Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy.”

This captures succinctly the heart of Teaching to Transgress. hooks wants to decentralize power so that it is not solely in the hands of the teacher, but instead, students are given agency and responsibility for collaborating in the work of the classroom. This is not an easy transition for some. Professors have a fear of losing control in the classroom. Students fear losing the familiar classroom dynamic where they are passive consumers. Both can be reluctant to confront their own biases. Ultimately, for education to be the practice of freedom, both professors and students must work through the difficulties to create a new space for learning.

“In so much of Paulo’s work there is a generous spirit a quality of open-mindedness that I feel is often missing from intellectual and academic arenas in U.S. society, and feminist circles have not been an exception. Of course, Paulo seems to grow more open as he ages. I, too, feel myself more strongly committed to a practice of open-mindedness, a willingness to engage critique as I age, and I think the way we experience more profoundly the growing fascism in the world, even in so-called ‘liberal’ circles, reminds us that our lives, our work, must be an example.”

hooks admires the way Freire engages with others, even those critical of his work. The first time hooks met Freire, she critiqued the sexism in his work, and his response deeply moved her. Rather than responding angrily or defensively, Freire listened with openness to what she had to say so they could have a dialogue and not be trapped in their separate monologues. His willingness to hear criticism and his openness to change is inspiring, and hooks wants to develop a similar openness in her own practice of daily life, and more specifically, in her classroom.

“Another great teacher of mine (even though we have not met) is the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. And he says in The Raft is Not the Shore that ‘great humans bring with them something like a hallowed atmosphere, and when we seek them out, then we feel peace, we feel love, we feel courage.’ His words appropriately define what it was like for me to be in the presence of Paulo.”

hooks wants the multicultural classroom to be a “hallowed atmosphere” led by a teacher that allows us to “feel love” (56). Freire, Thich Nhat Hanh, and hooks all embody this kind of teaching, despite their many differences. They embody a sense of peace and love, even when discussing topics that are charged with emotion, criticism, and conflict.

“You see, I was coming from a rural southern black experience, into the university, and I had lived through the struggle for racial desegregation and was in resistance without having a political language to articulate that process.”

hooks’ experience of desegregation was a disempowering experience, as she felt her experience and identity, which had been affirmed with her black teachers at her black schools, was marginalized in white schools. She felt alienated by this experience until she discovered Frere’s work and found a way to connect her experience with the experience of others. Even though Freire’s work focused on the struggles of peasants in Brazil and Guinea-Bissau, she could relate to their feelings of being alienated and oppressed. She was excited to have a way to connect to the larger global struggle for freedom, while also envisioning a new way of creating a classroom culture, one that affirmed the value of everyone in the classroom.

“Imagine what a change has come about within feminist movements when students, most of whom are female, come to Women’s Studies classes and read what they are told is feminist theory only to feel that what they are reading has no meaning, cannot be understood, or when understood in no way connects to ‘lived’ realities beyond the classroom. As feminist activists we might ask ourselves, of what use is feminist theory that assaults the fragile psyches of women struggling to throw off patriarchy’s oppressive yoke?”

hooks criticizes the co-opting of feminist theory into a rarefied academic world that makes use of technical jargon and is impenetrable to the uninitiated. She imagines the undergraduate student, interestingly describing the student as “fragile,” who enters a Women’s Studies class with a real sense of optimism and hope, only to be defeated by the types of material that the classroom relies on.

“Within revolutionary feminist movements, within revolutionary black liberation struggles, we must continually claim theory as necessary practice within a holistic framework of liberatory activism. We must do more than call attention to ways theory is misused. We must do more than critique the conservative and at times reactionary uses some academic women make of feminist theory. We must actively work to call attention to the importance of creating a theory that can advance renewed feminist movements, particularly highlighting that theory which seeks to further feminist opposition to sexism, and sexist oppression. Doing this, we necessarily celebrate and value theory that can be and is shared in oral as well as written narrative.”

While hooks is critical of how theory has been coopted by the academy, narrowed, and made accessible to only a few, hooks sees the value of making sure that theory remains an important part of daily life and practice. She says that the feminist struggle depends on people being committed to both theory and practice. That includes being open to all forms of theory, not just written theory in the scholarly journals, but also theory openly debated in prisons, restaurants, and other non-traditional settings to create a movement of like-minded individuals committed to the struggle of ending sexism.

“According to Fuss, issues of ‘essence, identity, and experience’ erupt in the classroom primarily because of the critical input from marginalized groups. Throughout her chapter, whenever she offers an example of individuals who use essentialist standpoints to dominate discussion, to silence others via their invocation of the ‘authority of experience,’ they are members of groups who historically have been and are oppressed and exploited in this society. Fuss does not address how systems of dominations already at work in the academy and the classroom silence the voices of individuals from marginalized groups and give space only when on the basis of experience it is demanded.”

In hooks’ critique of Diana Fuss’s book Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, hooks points out how Fuss criticizes when marginalized groups use their experience to claim certain types of knowledge. hooks point out that Fuss fails to recognize the way dominant groups have traditionally relied on their own experience to claim an “insider” status in the classroom. Rather than creating a hierarchy that values some experience over others, hooks calls for the inclusion of all experience to be valued in the classroom. She says that, depending on the subject, certain experiences may yield more knowledge. For example, if a progressive black professor and a progressive white professor were teaching African American critical thought, she would take the class from the black professor because they would have an additional experiential knowledge that would inform their understanding of the topic.

“My memories and present day awareness (based on conversations with my mother, who works as a maid for white women, and the comments and stories of black women in our communities) indicate that in ‘safe’ settings black women highlight the negative aspects of working as servants for white women. They express intense anger, hostility, bitterness, and envy—and very little affection or care—even when they are speaking positively.”

hooks relies on the testimony from her mother and other women from her community as a rebuttal to the “positive” testimonies that some white feminist scholars refer to as proof of good relationships between white women and their black female domestic workers during the Jim Crow era. While these black women may have reported positive experiences to white women, when they are among themselves, they can more honestly speak about their feelings of exploitation and their feelings of anger toward white women, who they view as selfish and lazy. hooks feels this insider view of domestic households is much more representative of the reality of that domestic workplace.

“White women who have yet to get a critical handle on the meaning of ‘whiteness’ in their lives, the representation of whiteness in their literature, or the white supremacy that shapes their social status are now explicating blackness without critically questioning whether their work emerges from an aware antiracist standpoint. Drawing on the work of black women, work that they once dismissed as irrelevant, they now reproduce the servant-served paradigms in their scholarship.”

While hooks does want to overcome the obstacles that have prevented solidarity between white and black women, she wants it to be an honest coming together of two groups that have been separated throughout generations by the trauma of slavery and segregation. White women need to acknowledge their complicity with the legacy of racism, seeing how they have benefited from it, and they cannot expect black women to serve their research needs, only to appropriate their experiences in their work. Instead, there must be a collective commitment as both sides work to understand how race has impacted their lives. Only then can they work together as meaningful allies as they commit to antiracist work.

“Challenging them to explore what makes the risk worth taking, I head varied responses. Several students talked about witnessing male abuse of women in families and communities and seeing the struggle to end sexism as the only organized way to make changes.”

It is difficult for some of hooks’s black students to join the feminist movement because they associate the movement with white women. They also have had negative experiences in the classroom when they are made to feel like outsiders in the classroom conversation. Here, hooks emphasizes the need to transform the feminist movement to be more inclusive. She sees the urgency of feminism for white and black students, especially those who have witnessed male abuse in the home and what to find a way to transform their homes, their domestic spaces, in addition to society, the wider public space.

“If a black student acknowledges that she is not familiar with the works of Audre Lorde and the rest of the class gasps as though this is unthinkable and reprehensible, that gasp evokes the sense that feminism is really a private cult whose members are usually white.”

Audre Lorde was a poet and feminist. hooks cites her essay “Eye to Eye” as a central text in her classroom, as it discusses the need for “black women to stand in feminist solidarity with one another” (117). Ironically, she also uses Audre Lorde as an example of how a lack of familiarity with the works of Lorde will make a newcomer to feminism feel alienated.

“Since the ruling rhetoric at the time insisted on the complete ‘victimization’ of black men within white supremacist patriarchy, few black folks were willing to engage that dimension of feminist thought that insisted that sexism and institutionalized patriarchy indeed provide black men with forms of power, however relative, that remained intact despite racist oppression.”

hooks emphasizes her childhood experiences, when she experienced the power of black males to have authority over black women, whether in the home, at school, or at church. Even though black men suffered as a result of the racism of the culture, they still had power, even if it was not the same as the power of white men, in certain segregated circles, and black women suffered from these sexist power structures. Many focused on how black men suffered from racism, rather than seeing how, in many ways, they oppressed black women.

“Since black feminist scholarship has always been marginalized in the academy, marginal to the existing academic hegemony as well as to the feminist mainstream, those of us who believe such work is crucial to any unbiased discussion of black experience must intensify our efforts to educate for critical consciousness.”

It has taken a while for hooks to receive recognition for her groundbreaking scholarship about the experiences of black women and their connection to feminism. White feminists have dominated the field and have often felt threatened by the work of black feminists. hooks feels a sense of urgency in educating others to understand why the black experience requires the feminist lens to truly understand how various systems of oppression of race, class, and gender intersect on the lives of black men and women.

“When I began this collection of essays, I was particularly interested in challenging the assumption that there could be no points of connection and camaraderie between white male scholars (often seen, rightly or wrongly, as representing the embodiment of power and privilege or oppressive hierarchy) and marginalized groups (women of all races or ethnicities and men of color). In recent years, many white male scholars have become critically engaged with my writing. It troubles me that this engagement has been viewed suspiciously or seen merely as an act of appropriation meant to enhance opportunistic agendas. If we really want to create a cultural climate where biases can be challenged and changed, all border crossings must be seen as valid and legitimate.”

In the preface to hooks’s interview with Ron Scapp, she explains why she felt the need to reach out to Scapp to have this conversation on “teaching, writing, ideas, and life” (131). She feels that it is important that professors coming from very different backgrounds such as hooks (black, female, brought up in a rural environment, teaching in private institutions) and Scapp (white, male, brought up in an urban environment, teaching in a public institution) should have the opportunity to come together, despite their differences, for meaningful dialogue. She had mentioned earlier her fruitful collaboration with a white feminist scholar (Mary Childers). She feels it’s important to cross boundaries rather than being trapped in isolation based on race, gender, class, and backgrounds. She recognizes that sometimes people are suspicious of those from different backgrounds, but hooks calls for an openness and willingness to meet and talk honestly about liberatory practice.

“It was my first year of college that I read Adrienne Rich’s poem, “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.’ […] One line of this poem that moved and disturbed something within me: ‘This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.’ I’ve never forgotten it. Perhaps I could not have forgotten it even if I tried to erase it from memory. Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will.”

hooks explores the power of language, specifically Standard English, to dominate and oppress, but she also shows the fluid nature of language, showing how language can be manipulated to create a different paradigm. In particular, she shows how African American slaves took English and made it their own, taking “broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language” (170). She stresses the importance of allowing students to speak their native languages and dialects (with translations) in the classroom in defiance of the idea that only Standard English should be spoken. When some complain they can’t understand what is being said, she encourages them to embrace the confusion they feel as a way of embracing the pain of what the history of English entails. She also wants them to embrace the idea that not everything needs to be “mastered.”

“Loudness, anger, emotional outbursts, and even something as seemingly innocent as unrestrained laughter were deemed unacceptable, vulgar disruptions of classroom social order. These traits were also associated with being a member of the lower classes.”

hooks points out that, while class privilege is rarely addressed in the classroom, it exerts strong power in the classroom. Students must hide behaviors that may betray their less privileged background, erasing their differences if they want to succeed in the elite academic classrooms that reward “bourgeois values” (178). hooks calls for both students and professors to transform this dominant model to create a classroom that recognizes and values all classes and experiences so that students can feel that they have the right to bring in their voices; together they can be part of the creation of knowledge.

“It only took me a short while to understand that class was more than just a question of money, that it shaped values, attitudes, social relations, and the biases that informed the way knowledge would be given and received.”

In hooks’s essay on the impacts of class privilege in the classroom, she discusses her own experience of class when she attended Stanford. She at first thought class simply referred to money, or lack of money. She was able to afford college because of scholarships and loans, but she realized that class was much more than about how much money you have. It’s a larger system of values that dictate the behaviors in the classroom. “Bourgeois values” are rewarded in the classroom, and so students must erase any markers that identify a lower class if they are to succeed. hooks argues that students should not give up their identities, but rather, the classroom must be transformed to include all experiences and backgrounds, so all voices are valued.

“Her comments made me think anew about the place of passion, of erotic recognition in the classroom setting because I believe that the energy she felt in our Women’s Studies classes was there because of the extent to which women professors teaching those courses dared to give fully of ourselves, going beyond the mere transmission of information in lectures.”

While university classrooms are often dominated by a mind/ body split, where the mind is worshiped while the body is erased, feminist classrooms work in a more holistic way, valuing both the mind and the body. hooks discusses a student who had felt passionately about her Women’s Studies classes as an undergraduate, but when she was in graduate school, she struggled because there was a lack of passion and love as she had experienced in the feminist classroom.

“To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.”

hooks write about the value of eros in the classroom, not simply a sexual love, but a broader definition of love that allows professors and students to have passion for each other and for the ideas they are studying. She critiques the traditional classroom, dominated by the emphasis on the mind. She explains how most professors cling to an idea of an objective, neutral classroom where no emotions can interfere with learning. Allowing feelings of love, passion, and deep connection will allow everyone a deeper motivation and learning.