Killing Rage: Ending Racism

“Those of us black people who have the opportunity to further our economic status willingly surrender our rage.”

Throughout the book, hooks advocates for rage that is productive and that brings her positive revolutionary vision to life. She uses the plural pronouns “us” and “our” to indicate that her audience is primarily Black people. When she points out the flaws of Black capitalists, she is critiquing her own community.

“We need to talk seriously about ending racism if we want to see an end to rage.”

hooks argues that systemic white supremacy produces rage. This sentence contains a conditional statement, but uses an inverted if-then structure where the conclusion (ending rage) comes before the hypothesis (ending racism). In other words, she argues that if we end racism, then we will end rage. This sentence structure puts emphasis on the action that needs to occur (ending racism) and implicitly subverts the narrative spread by white-dominated media that rage, not racism, is the primary concern.

“For years, black domestic servants working in white homes, acting as informants, brought knowledge back to segregated communities—details, facts, observations, and psychoanalytic readings of the white Other.”

In this quote, “Other” is capitalized because hooks is using a technical term originating in psychoanalysis. The Other, a concept popularized by Jacques Lacan, is the opposite of the self and usually refers to someone who is marginalized by society and categorized as alien. hooks challenges the dominant construction of Otherness, which is typically ascribed to non-white people, to demonstrate how Black people can conceive of white people as the alien race.

“To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.”

Here, hooks suggests using an aspect of Black separatist nationalism: Black self-determination. She uses this concept to talk about agency and autonomy in improving Black lives. Her application here is different from its historical usage, which refers to Black people establishing a separate nation.

“To expect black men to act as ‘protectors’ and ‘providers’ as a way of earning the status of patriarch seems ludicrous given the economy.”

hooks published this statement in the 1990s. Income inequality has dramatically increased in the new millennium, which further underscores hooks’s point that the model of a man as the sole financial provider for a family is often impossible to obtain. This demonstrates hooks’s point about the interconnectedness of racism, sexism, and class: Classism, which privileges those of greater financial means, bolsters sexism by reinforcing the patriarchal notion of the man as the economic provider.

“Working to critically interrogate and challenge racist/sexist representations, revolutionary feminist black women have offered to all black people, and everyone else, a progressive anti-racist, anti-sexist standpoint that fundamentally alters old ways of thinking about black female reality.”

The structure of this sentence places “all black people” before “everyone else.” This syntax highlights how hooks is not only writing to a primarily Black audience, but also prioritizing Black people in her discussions about overcoming both racism and sexism. hooks thereby subverts a dynamic she argues is characteristic of white feminism, which claims to represent all women but actually centers on white women and marginalizes the ideas, experiences, and needs of Black women.

“We need to hear from those black males who are not sadomasochistically seduced by images of black females ‘at the mercy of black men.’”

hooks uses anaphora, or repetition of the first part of a sentence, in the paragraph that this quote comes from. Several sentences in a row begin with “We need,” which highlights praxis (what can be done) in activism against white supremacy and sexism.

“For example, many of the radical white women who struggled to establish women’s studies in colleges and universities throughout the United States did not have doctoral degrees and were soon let go as patriarchal academic legitimation became more important than sisterhood and solidarity.”

Like hooks’s earlier quote about the cost of living in the 1990s, academia has also gotten worse in the new millennium. Colleges are not just getting rid of female faculty, they are getting rid of women’s studies programs altogether. Historical women’s colleges, like Mills College in Oakland, have abandoned their mission and started admitting male students.

“These films, and others like them, demonstrate that film and mass media in general can challenge neo-colonial representations that reinscribe racist stereotypes and perpetuate white supremacy.”

This quote comes from hooks’s discussion of the films Mystery Train by Jim Jarmusch and Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash. Harkening back to the first quote in this section, which outlines the positive vision for the book, hooks points out pieces of media dedicated to Overcoming Systemic White Supremacy. hooks includes not only negative critiques of the media but also positive examples.

“Revolutionary struggle for black self-determination must become a real political movement in our lives if we want to counter conservative thinking and offer life-affirming practices to masses of black folks who are daily wounded by white supremacist assaults. Those wounds will not heal if left unattended.”

Some of hooks’s essays end with lines that directly transition into the following essay. This line comes at the end of the “Black Beauty and Black Power” chapter and links it to the following essay, “Healing Our Wounds.” These transitional sentences are a way to move smoothly from one topic to another, despite the nature of the text as a collection of essays.

“Currently, conventional mental health care professionals who attend to the needs of black folks often reject any analysis that takes into account a political understanding of our personal pain.”

hooks condemns the refusal to see how the pain and trauma Black people experience intersect with their political subjectivity. When hooks was writing in the 1990s, police officers were shooting young Black boys wearing hoodies. Patricia Smith writes about this in her 1993 poetry collection Close to Death, which features the image of a teen in a hoodie on the cover. hooks condemns mental health professionals for denying that forms of systemic white supremacy, such as police brutality, affect the mental health of Black individuals.

“Like Paule Marshall’s character Avey, once our denial falls away we can work to heal ourselves through awareness.”

In this quote, hooks discusses a character from Marshall’s novel. This allusion is in addition to the framing of her class’s discussion of another novel, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). These allusions highlight how fiction can teach readers about real-life issues, such as racism and internalized racism. 

“Ice-T does not talk about sharing resources, buying land away from utterly economically depressed communities and building housing.”

hooks analyzes not only films and books in her essays, but also music. She wants wealthy Black rappers to invest in helping Black communities. For example, community work like that of rap artist Killer Mike, who filmed a TV episode where he tried to only spend money at Black-owned businesses, exemplifies the kind of socially conscious media that hooks is endorsing here.

“Why does so much contemporary African-American literature highlight the circumstances and conditions of underclass black life in the South and urban cities when it is usually written by folks whose experiences are just the opposite? The point of raising this question is not to censor but rather urge critical thought about a cultural market place wherein blackness is commodified in such a way that fictive accounts of underclass black life, in whatever setting, may be more lauded, more marketable than other visions because mainstream conservative white audiences desire these images.”

Here, hooks uses a figure of speech called hypophora, which is asking a question and immediately providing the answer. The question is not rhetorical because she offers a concrete answer about how Black authors market Blackness to white audiences.

“It is the very small but highly visible liberal movement away from the perpetuation of overtly racist discrimination, exploitation, and oppression of black people which often masks how all-pervasive white supremacy is in this society, both as ideology and as behavior.”

This point develops the theme of Overcoming Systemic White Supremacy. After the civil rights movement and desegregation, hooks argues that white supremacy became subtler—subtle enough for some people to claim that it no longer existed. She links this shift to neoliberalism.

“The role Eurocentric Christianity has played in teaching non-white folks Western metaphysical dualism, the ideology that undergirds binary notions of superior/inferior, good/bad, white/black cannot be ignored.”

In this quote, hooks references the philosophical concept of dualism. Dualists like René Descartes argue that there is a division between mind and body. According to dualists, mind and body cannot be assimilated into their opposites—they are completely separate. 

“What is the context in which black people can be critical of Zionist policies that condone the colonization and exploitation of Palestinians?”

Unlike hypophora, hooks poses a series of difficult questions and doesn’t answer them in the paragraph that the above quote is taken from. With these questions, hooks broaches the controversial issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict; in keeping with her belief in the interconnectedness of different issues and different forms of oppression, she sees this issue as relevant to the discussion of white supremacy in her book. 

“The taping of the program stopped and it was not aired.”

This follows hooks’s description of being a guest on a talk show. That her appearance did not air exemplifies hooks’s claim about the white-supremacist dimensions of the mainstream media. By discussing this event in her essay, hooks thwarts the attempt to silence her, which is an example of the praxis she repeatedly suggests—raising your voice and sharing knowledge.

“Until more black women, and our allies in struggle, publicly challenge these biases and omissions, discussions of the role black intellectuals can assume in black liberation struggle will always be overdetermined by the actions of men.”

This is another example of how hooks prioritizes the needs of Black people to challenge white supremacy. The pronoun “our” indicates that the primary audience for her book is Black people, while also calling on people who are not Black to take concrete action as allies in the struggle for Black liberation. 

“The inability of black nationalist thinkers to conceive of any paradigm for nation and family life that is not patriarchal reveals the depths of black male longing to assert hierarchical control and power.”

In this quote, hooks argues against Black Sexism and Misogyny. Many Black separatist nationalists focus solely on racial equality and do not consider gender equality. hooks offers an intersectional perspective, arguing people truly dedicated to liberation must consider both, along with other factors such as class.

“Like many of their white academic counterparts, they often regard folks like me, who continue to speak simply and/or integrate vernacular styles into our writing and speaking, as lacking intellectual sophistication.”

This quote is somewhat ironic given the complex philosophical ideas hooks often uses, such as phallogocentrism (a technical term from the field of critical theory that refers to understanding or interpreting phenomena in a way that privileges the masculine). Despite her use of technical terms, hooks advocates for accessible ways of talking about important issues and she attempts to define many of the concepts in the book for a more general audience.

“Committing ourselves to living simply does not mean the absence of material privilege or luxury; it means that we are not hedonistically addicted to forms of consumerism, and hoarding of wealth, that require the exploitation of others.”

In this passage, hooks defines living simply as the opposite of excessive consumerism, not the opposite of pleasure and comfort. She argues that people committed to challenging the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy should have goals outside of the accumulation of wealth, but that this is not the same thing as forgoing all luxury or indulgence. 

“We would have workers for freedom who would go door to door and evaluate the needs of individual households and communities.”

Here, hooks offers a pragmatic solution that is similar to campaigns conducted by the Nation of Islam. Not only did the members of the Nation of Islam spread their religious message door-to-door, but they also sold goods, like fish, at low prices to Black people at their homes. Hooks expands this idea to include teaching media literacy and other skills door-to-door.