Because of my frustration and laughing!
....I am secretly reading Bell Hooks articles at work.
Because really, I can't not adore a theorist as smart and open as her.
For a sample, here's Postmodern Blackness.
This is a great introduction too. If you aren't too fond of academic diction and the like, read this. It still has that, but the writing is also much snappier and I find it personally more engaging.
Here's why she's awesome, from Wiki -
One passage Horowitz and Glazov specifically object to is a discussion in the first chapter of Killing Rage, in which Hooks states that she is "sitting beside an anonymous white male that [she] long[s] to murder".[9] She explains that her impulse was occasioned by a ticket/boarding pass dispute involving her black and female friend. To Hooks, the dispute was symbolic of the role of racism and sexism in American society. Hooks and her companion had used vouchers to upgrade from coach to first class, however Hooks's companion had received an incorrect boarding pass and was assigned to coach instead. She took the seat next to Hooks anyway, and when the man holding the correct boarding pass for that seat arrived, he found Hooks's companion in it and asked her to move. She would not, so he asked a stewardess to get her to move, which she eventually did. "I stare him down with rage, tell him that I do not want to hear his liberal apologies, his repeated insistence that 'it was not his fault.' I am shouting at him that it is not question of blame, that the mistake was understandable, but that the way K was treated was completely unacceptable, that it reflected both racism and sexism." Hooks then wrote the opening chapter of the book while sitting next to him:
It was not a question of your giving up the seat, it was an occasion for you to intervene in the harassment of a young black woman and you chose your own comfort and tried to deflect away from your complicity in that choice by offering an insincere, face saving apology... It was this sequences of racialized incidents involving black women that intensified my rage against the white man sitting next to me. I felt a 'Killing Rage.' I wanted to stab him softly, to shoot him with the gun I wished I had in my purse. And as I watched his pain, I would say to him tenderly 'racism hurts.'
And that is amazing.
Because really, I can't not adore a theorist as smart and open as her.
For a sample, here's Postmodern Blackness.
This is a great introduction too. If you aren't too fond of academic diction and the like, read this. It still has that, but the writing is also much snappier and I find it personally more engaging.
Here's why she's awesome, from Wiki -
One passage Horowitz and Glazov specifically object to is a discussion in the first chapter of Killing Rage, in which Hooks states that she is "sitting beside an anonymous white male that [she] long[s] to murder".[9] She explains that her impulse was occasioned by a ticket/boarding pass dispute involving her black and female friend. To Hooks, the dispute was symbolic of the role of racism and sexism in American society. Hooks and her companion had used vouchers to upgrade from coach to first class, however Hooks's companion had received an incorrect boarding pass and was assigned to coach instead. She took the seat next to Hooks anyway, and when the man holding the correct boarding pass for that seat arrived, he found Hooks's companion in it and asked her to move. She would not, so he asked a stewardess to get her to move, which she eventually did. "I stare him down with rage, tell him that I do not want to hear his liberal apologies, his repeated insistence that 'it was not his fault.' I am shouting at him that it is not question of blame, that the mistake was understandable, but that the way K was treated was completely unacceptable, that it reflected both racism and sexism." Hooks then wrote the opening chapter of the book while sitting next to him:
It was not a question of your giving up the seat, it was an occasion for you to intervene in the harassment of a young black woman and you chose your own comfort and tried to deflect away from your complicity in that choice by offering an insincere, face saving apology... It was this sequences of racialized incidents involving black women that intensified my rage against the white man sitting next to me. I felt a 'Killing Rage.' I wanted to stab him softly, to shoot him with the gun I wished I had in my purse. And as I watched his pain, I would say to him tenderly 'racism hurts.'
And that is amazing.