Salvation Black People and Love
Author bell hooks (she always spells her name without capitalletters) is a writer, teacher, and speaker who expounds on cultural issues,feminist theory, and related matters. She was formerly a professor in theEnglish Department at Yale University and Oberlin College. She is now aDistinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Centerof the City University of New York. She has written about love before, andthis book can be considered a continuation and expansion of that work. In this book, hooks considers the power of love in the lives ofAfrican-Americans, beginning from a personal perspective. She recalls herown learning about love relationships in her community and through herparents and grandparents. She then looks to history and notes how African-Americans were viewed not as human beings but as property during the slaveera as whites assumed that blacks did not have the same range of emotionsas civilized people. The author recalls visiting
It is during the highschool years, after all, that ideas of love and its meaning are firstlearned, and solidifying those lessons is an important part of a strongeducation. The author considers the political aspect of love and how the blackcommunity has gained a political structure. What is needed is to create an environment"permeated by a love ethic" (70). What hooks says about the waylove has developed in the black community helps explain many of theproblems facing that community and also points to solutions, which is whatshe often says the existing literature fails to do. The lessons could be effective at a pre-college level if carefully taughtand related to an understanding of the community. This book raises a number of important questions for the blackcommunity and points to issues that should be considered by members of thatcommunity and by educated people everywhere. She alsoconsiders the power of both heterosexual love and homosexual love and whythe community must embrace gayness as one more manifestation of love. She talks about "mamalove" in the black community and how it has developed, as well as problemswith loving the black male and with love for the black male. She notes how blacks in slave narratives wear a mask and hide theiremotions. The disintegration of the blackfamily has been one result and the cause of further resistance to love. The book could be auseful part of the curriculum and was clearly intended to be just that. Blacks were religious, but they did not always respond to theadmonition to love God and one another. The author considers the literature that exists today, a literaturethat often fails to offer a full critique or any alternatives for blackpeople, as she develops her own thesis about love. She also notes how a colorcaste system developed so that lighter-skinned people were seen as good andarker skinned people as bad.
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