Welcome to Litsy!

Wow, just wow! This is so impressive and strong and brutal and true. It sometimes really hurts to read such texts, but they are meant to. Otherwise things wouldn't change. I've wanted to read something by bell hooks for a long time and I'm happy I finally did. Once again I've been showed all the privileges I have. bell hooks shows us the deep roots of slavery and misogyny. Sometimes I was out of words by what I heard and felt so angry and confused

This was a profound read about how the history of America has been impacted by black women and how that same country has impacted them. This book takes us through slavery, Jim crow and after and it exposed how Black women were treated by White Women, Black Men and the wider country. Very insightful and thought provoking.

Such a phenomenal book and a must-read!!!!! This is the 2nd book I‘ve read by bell hooks and I plan to read many more! She did an excellent job at tackling the importance of intersectionality and addressing societal problems head-on. She explored the complexity of issues, such as the limitations of mainstream feminism, thoroughly. She did not take an us vs. them approach or state that only one group is at fault. One of my new fave books!

A breakdown of the convergence of racism and sexism experienced by black women across US history. I‘m blown away by the clarity of the writing. hooks wrote this, her first feminist work, as a student with her uninitiated mom in mind. She‘s so successful in opening her ideas to a wider readership that I think you could‘ve handed this to me as a teen just starting to understand feminism, and I‘d have gotten it. Plain statements of complex ideas.

This got a little dense for me, listening in my car, because I know I would highlight and take notes all over a physical copy. I learned a lot about how racism, sexism, and imperialist colonial ideologies worked together to work against black women, particularly in their treatment and exclusion from the white-women led suffrage and women‘s rights movements.

Low pick, as hooks‘ work is important but not as readable as Audre Lorde‘s, and there‘s quite a bit of overlap. hooks‘ essays (which get pretty repetitive) focus on the racist imperialist patriarchal foundation of America, tracing it through slavery through early feminism to the feminist movement of the ‘70s. She looks at the sexism of black males toward black females and the racism of white women toward black women, and how that continues…

“I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism,‘ to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist‘ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”

This is a good summary of the philosophy of this entire book.

#WeekendReading will be limited, as I‘m off to rehearsal momentarily. Need to finish the tagged, work on Sense and Sensibility and Wuthering Heights, and read this week‘s section of The 1619 Project. If I get all that done it will be a surprise!

To experience the pain of race hatred or to witness that pain is not to understand its origin, evolution, or impact on world history. The inability of American women to understand racism in the context of American politics is not due to any inherent deficiency in woman‘s psyche. It merely reflects the extent of our victimization.

Starting this while kiddo has speech therapy. She was really nervous last week to start, and now it‘s her favorite thing ever. And I get an extra half-hour to read, alone and quietly, twice a week. I see no downside here.

My recent library pickups are an interesting mix. The bottom two are YA history inspired by kiddo‘s history studies (beyond her grade level but they looked good to me), I love the Grinch but don‘t think I‘ve ever read the book; and the tagged is one I‘ve meant to read and was given the push by hooks‘ death this week. It sounds like a win, given some of the recent #SheSaid books I‘ve liked. Now I just need more time…

Finished in time for a great book club meeting! Really readable and written with a lot of heart and historical research. If you're interested in how the intersection of sexism and racism has impacted Black women in the US historically, and especially the ways white women and feminists have excluded Black women, this is an accessible start!

#DoubleSpin #BookSpinBingo #Scarathlon2021 #TeamSlaughter #BirthdayBash @TheAromaofBooks

Happy Birthday, @TheAromaofBooks ! I hope you're able to squeeze a bit of reading in. I'll mostly be reading these 3 today. The left 2 are for seminary and the right is for book club (which is meeting today! I'm almost finished! 😅) #BirthdayBash

This is really good. So much information.

#BookSpinBingo free space
@TheAromaofBooks

A great read that is important for understanding intersectional feminism and how feminist movements and Black rights movements have historically left out Black women (this book is pretty specific to the US). bell hooks explains the default human is male- the default woman is white. Ranging from slavery, to civil rights, through the different feminist waves, hooks explains to be feminist, you must also be anti-racist.

I have really wanted to read hooks for years, and so this #audiobook deal from Chirp (note on Chirp ⬇️) was perfect timing. Being a typical white feminist, I had read embarrassingly little intersectional feminism until 2020, and I‘ve found it incredibly sad in reading hooks & Lorde how little progress we‘ve made since the 1970s.

In this book, hooks looks at the mistreatment of and denial of rights to Black women from the Middle Passage to ⬇️

Another Ky author. I haven‘t gotten to meet bell hooks yet, but hopefully one day I will. This was written in 1981 & addresses the history of black women. Very interesting to think about how black women have to deal with racism and sexism. I already knew the feminist & suffrage movements often left out black women, but hooks explains more about why & how black women reacted to them. I learned a lot. #nfn2020 @rsteve388 @Clwojick

“Racism has always been a divisive force separating black men and white men, and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups.” #nfn2020

Reading the chapter about intersectional feminism before the term was coined.
“To experience the pain of race hatred or to witness that pain is not to understand it‘s origin, evolution, or impact on world history.”

#blm #blackvoices #feminism #intersectional #classics

🚨🚨🚨
“To be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti-human in nature, as it is to be a victim. [...] it teaches our blood brothers to feel ashamed that they care for us, and denies all men the emotional life that would act as a humanizing, self-affirming force in third lives.”

Best description why patriarchy is bad for EVERYONE I think I‘ve read?!

#classics #feminism #intersectional

Throughout American history, the racial imperialism of whites has supported the custom of scholars using the term “women” even if they are referring solely to the experience of white women. Yet such a custom, whether practiced consciously or unconsciously, perpetuates racism in that it denies the existence of non-white women in American.

#feminism #classic #intersectionalfeminism #BLMreading #blackvoices

“Usually, when people talk about the “strength” of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.” #bellhooks

hooks examines the ways that the feminism movement lacked an intersectional viewpoint that would have created change across sex, race and class. This is such a powerful book and I think it‘s a must read. The system is broken and people know it and it‘s up to us to fix it, but we can‘t fix it alone. We need everyone.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Excellent and informative read. This book is about many things regarding racial inequality and feminism but it concentrated on how the feminist movement had a racial bias against African American women. How can feminists call themselves feminists when they are also racists? Put this on your TBR. I wish I owned this copy...I wanted to make so many notes in it.

hooks uses this book to detail the experiences of Black women and feminism. In the fight for equality throughtout history Black women have had to fight both sexism and racism at a time when Black men fought for equality without worrying about the eqality of women, and white women have fought for the equality of women without caring or including the struggle of Black women. That history is detailed and dissected here.

I‘ve got my coffee. I‘m under my favorite blanket. I‘m about to start reading this book by bell hooks. I‘m in a good place. #readblackwomen #celebrateblackwomen

Today marks one hundred years since the passing of the Representation of the People Act, allowing some women the right to vote in general elections. We are still working towards a better feminist future based on #unity but the history of the movement deserves to be remembered.
#Fiercefeb
@Cinfhen @batsy

@TheNextBook is only reading Black women this Black History Month as a form of celebration! Read her essay on what motivated her to focus solely on the works of Black women here https://booksthatshookus.com/2018/01/29/celebrating-black-women/

Saturday Book Mail! I needed more bell hooks in my life!

Not much reading time today because of the march, but I'm okay with that.

Totally scored at the bookstore today! #bellhooks

"While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the American white woman's experience in which that experience is assumed to be THE American women's experience." -bell hooks