File:Bell hooks - when we love the earth.jpg

bell hooks

December 15, 2021

Berea College is deeply saddened about the death of bell hooks, Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies, prodigious author, public intellectual and one of the country’s foremost feminist scholars. She died at her home in Berea after an extended illness. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Ky., on Sept. 25, 1952, she adopted the pen name “bell hooks” from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

~

"Everywhere I go, people want to feel more connected. They want to feel more connected to their neighbors. They want to feel more connected to the world. And when we learn that through love we can have that connection, we can see the stranger as ourselves. And I think that it would be absolutely fantastic to have that sense of 'Let's return to kind of a utopian focus on love, not unlike the sort of hippie focus on love.' Because I always say to people, you know, the '60s' focus on love had its stupid sentimental dimensions, but then it had these life-transforming dimensions. When I think of the love of justice that led three young people, two Jews and one African American Christian, to go to the South and fight for justice and give their lives — Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner — I think that's a quality of love that's awesome. ... I tell this to young people, you know, that we can love in a deep and profound way that transforms the political world in which we live in." -- bell hooks

• https://www.berea.edu/news/statement-on-the-death-of-bell-hooks/

• https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064509418/bell-hooks-feminist-author-critic-activist-died

○