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hooks, b. (1995). Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.
Reading bell hooks is always challenging for me. Her writing appears simplistic and almost conversational, yet is deceptively complex. I feel like I create an internal dialogue in response to the ideas that she is sharing. And that may be one of the aspects I like best about her work-she shares her ideas in a way that is personal and demands that in turn. When I read hooks, the experience is re-affirming at times, extremely disquieting and uncomfortable at others; ultimately however, her books always leave me with a sense of responsibility to at least consider ideas that may push my comfort zones around the way I perceive the world and my place in it.
bell hooks is a Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York. Born Gloria Watkins, she took the pen name "bell hooks" as a way to do the writing that she felt compelled to express without placing her professional advancement within academe in jeopardy. She is the author of many books written over the past 12 years and is often described as a writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual. She is termed a radical by some, full of passion and politics who dares to raise the critical questions. She spent her grade school days in segregated schools of the South where she dreamed of being a writer and teacher. Within these black schools, she first experienced learning as political and revolutionary since most education focused on the antiracist struggle. When schools became integrated, her perception of education changed dramatically as evidenced in this passage from Teaching to Trans;gr-ess (1994):
School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us... we left a world where teachers...