Examples Of Gender Inequality In Bone Black By Bell Hooks

“If my generation was too naïve, the generations that have followed may be too practical. We knew too little, and now girls know too much.” (Sandberg. Pg. 646) In the past, the call for women’s rights was heated as much as it was alive; many women today believe that they no longer need feminism in their lives. The misconception that feminist ideals are outdated has lead modern women to fall short in their desire to accomplish more. Sheryl Sandberg refuels feminist goals in the article “Lean In: What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid.” She addresses lack of females in the work force, as well as, the way society prompts boys compared to girls. Bell Hook, in contrast, provides a deeper understanding of feminist ideals, along with, an in depth analysis of Sandberg’s work. The articles written by Bell Hook and Sheryl Sandberg express each woman’s perspective on modern feminism; although they both call for action, Sandberg focuses on the inequality between the sexes, while Hook broadens the overall argument to include topics such as race, sexuality and class equality.

She emphasizes that the life of a slave woman is incomparable to the life of a slave man, in the sense that a woman’s sufferings are not only physical but also extremely mental and emotional. Whether or not a slave woman is beaten, starved to death, or made to work in unbearable circumstances on the fields, she suffers from and endures horrible mental torments. Unlike slave men, these women have to deal with sexual harassment from white men, most often their slave owners, as well as the loss of their children in some cases. Men often dwell on their sufferings of bodily pain and physical endurance as slaves, where as women not only deal with that but also the mental and emotional aspect of it. Men claim that their manhood and masculinity are stripped from them, but women deal with their loss of dignity and morality. Females deal with the emotional agony as mothers who lose their children or have to watch them get beaten, as well as being sexually victimized by white men who may or may not be the father of their children. For these women, their experiences seem unimaginable and are just as difficult as any physical punishment, if not more so.

Whiteness and racism comes from the oppression, colonization and systems of dominance over black people and their feelings. In this case, an intersectional feminist analysis matters because women who are able bodied, cis-gendered, privileged and white are only being considered whereas bell hooks argue that men, women and trans people who oppressed should be fought for. And Peggy McIntosh adds onto this but a white woman who addresses and recognizes her privilege to help other white individuals understand what they have and blacks do not.

In her book Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks describes how she helps her students find their voice within her classroom.She discusses her use of authority to enable her students.For her, teacher authority is a necessary part of helping her students find their voices:

Slavery was common in the eighteenth century. Slaves were seen as property, as they were taken from their native land and forced into long hours of labor. The experience was traumatic for both black men and black women. They were physically and mentally abused by slave owners, dehumanized by the system, and ultimately denied their fundamental rights to a favorable American life. Although African men and women were both subjected to the same enslavement, men and women had different experiences in slavery based on their gender. A male perspective can be seen in, My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass. A female perspective is shared in Harriet Jacobs’ narrative titled, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Upon reading both of the viewpoints provided, along with outside research, one can infer that women had it worse.

While the majority of black women accounts are lost to history due to anti-literacy laws, we do have a good idea of what their lives were, through slave narratives and other records. The life of a female slave in pre-civil war America was characterized by sexual assault, physical and mental abuse along with harsh treatment both in the fields and inside the master’s house. Female slaves were treated as property with no regards to their

bell hooks Plantation Paratricay can be describes as a black feminist narrative that interrogates the ideas of colonialism, gender, race, class and the effects of socialized behaviors on the black community. The article continuously problematizes the black women's experience in relation to the black man, herself and white society. Though her views can be interpreted as a deconstruction of the black family structure and the black man, she has continuously brought the focus of her concepts back to the black women and her experience. Which in turn, takes her article from being viewed as just a black feminist piece to a womenist piece because its roots are constantly being drawn back to the sexual and general oppression of the black women.

bell hooks, renowned black feminist and cultural critic criticizes the lack of racial awareness in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination (1992). ‘bell hooks’ is written in lower case to convey that the substance of her work reigns more important than the writer. From a marginalized perspective, hooks argues that sites of dominance, not otherness is problematic and critiques the lack of attention that white scholars pay to the representation of whiteness in the black imagination. Critical feminist scholars Peggy McIntosh and Ruth Frankenberg identify their own whiteness as a dominant discourse, but share a critical departure from hooks with the notion of whiteness as terror. hooks aim is not to reverse racism, but discuss her position to authentically inform readers about how she experiences racism. Furthermore, systems of oppression are manufactured by human thought and thus the site of the Other is always produced as a site of difference. Gender, race, sex, class, disability, and geography are situated differently in social structure, but dominant groups assume they share the same reality though they cannot experience it. In consequence, the Other cannot hold a singularized identity of their own and the binary structure succeeds in containing racialized bodies in place. What happens to those bodies when they cross boundaries of the binary? hooks recounts being routinely disciplined back into place when crossing the border; however, dominant white

Hooks did not fit in with her peers at either undergraduate university she attended. At the all girls school near her home the girls were all wealthier than she was and they lacked her educational ambition. Hooks “lived in the world of books ” while her classmates had “giggles and their obsession to marry” (26, 25). Their separate spheres kept them socially divided, but it didn’t stop the popular girls from going into hooks’ room and destroying and making a mess of all her things. They saw it as a joke, but hooks was not able to “replace broken things, perfume poured out, or talcum powder spread everywhere” (27). They crushed not only her physical items, but also her spirit. The other girls had a sense of entitlement because of class privilege. This blinded them to the feelings of others, and made hooks feel inferior. This sense of inferiority started much earlier in her life, and followed her throughout her academic career.

In her article, bell hooks (1990) argues that the home is a site of resistance for black people. She recalls being raised with the mindset that women, particularly black women, took the lead in running the house. According to hooks, the home was a place that provided warmth, comfort, food, and nurturing. It was a place that taught the young about dignity, integrity, and faith. Black

In the book Bone Black, Bell Hooks gives a vivid look into her childhood. She starts off by talking about a quilt that her mother gave her from her mother. She thinks that this is special because her mother gave it to her and not one of her other sisters. Then she goes into describing how the children in her family never knew that they were poor until they grew up. They liked the dolls that they played with and the food that they ate. They never wondered why they didn’t have the things that their white neighbors did have. You would seldomly hear them complain because they had to walk to school and the white kids rode the school bus. She thought that they had a pretty normal family.

As echoed in Bell Hooks’s We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, the culprit to the Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) movement is masculine patriarchy which, in turn, reinforces racism and oppression. The general public fails to recognize that BLM stemmed from oppression to black males, not the black community as a whole. Furthermore, even though this movement is intended to fight anti-Black racism, it is focusing on the empowerment of black women.

Jacobs autobiography which is known by the name of ‘Incidents in a Life of a Slave Girl’ gave a true account of the treatment that black women faced during that time and also throwing some light on a perception which has been kept in shadows from the society. While writing the story of her life, Jacobs though focused on her defeat due to obstacles like race and gender, gave voice to something which was hidden from society regardless of the presence of patriarchal society of the nineteenth century.

In Hook’s essay titled “Keeping Close to Home” she uses many of her own personal experiences to transition into analyzing society. A few personal experiences of Hook’s that caught my attention were how she discussed the barriers that were created by economic class differences between students. Coming from a working class family , when she attended college she felt a sense of inferiority to the other students. This inferiority made it difficult for her to discuss her financial situations or home life with any of her peers. Hook stated “I talked to no one about the sources of my shame, how it hurts to witness the contempt shown to the brown-skinned Filipina maids who cleaned our rooms, or later my concern about the $100 a month I paid for

Written in 1983, M.F.K. Fisher’s “The Broken Chain” is a narrative that looks back to an incident that occurred sixty-three years earlier, when the author was twelve, that figured prominently in the lives of Fisher’s family and herself. In wondering today about the “chain of violence” (9) that exists today, Fisher is reminded of a time when she received a spanking that helped her understand more about her father, violence, and breaking this “chain of violence.”