Bell Hooks Quotes

We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing... then it will be done, but not until then.

As a result, ways out of the crisis are being intensively searched for at all levels - ways, which, however, aim at maintaining the whites' control over the country.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages.

While you are gazed at for your American-manufactured principles, and gazing at the folly and pageantry of animals in the shape of men cringing at the feet of an animal called a king, I shall be secluded from the noise and corruption of the times.

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.

I definitely have fun commenting on the real world and interpreting through the 'Dear White People' lens.

America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent.

Whiteness itself is artifice, is fiction, is a construction, is narrative, is myth. And I seek to deconstruct all of that, to challenge the accretion, the intellectual accretion, the philosophical secretion that generates within the edifice of white supremacy that allows people easy escape, and egress. And I'm saying, "No, you can't leave now. You cannot afford to not know what I'm talking about, because you gotta be held accountable."

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power.

The American government is a rule of the people, by the people, for the bosses.

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer. Women have to make jokes about themselves, laugh about themselves, because they have nothing to lose.

I believe deeply in a common humanity. The black man belongs to the family of man. One part of that family is out of control - like a virus or cancer - and that is the white man. He and his technological society are bent on destroying the world. Everywhere the white man has gone with his empire, he has destroyed people, races, societies, cultures, and in the course of it, has sterilized himself. He is completely the mechanical man: without heart, without soul. He is the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. But I don't believe that all the white people in the world are no good.

If the white man ain't the devil, he's been aiming at the history of the Americans.

When I went south in the 1960s, I knew I could die. If I went down there and did what I did up in Chicago and made all of those hatin' white folks laugh, then I would have been defeated.

We don't hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they're not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo.

All talks about legacies of white supremacy must be tied to empowering the lives of poor and working people as a whole. The black agenda - from Frederick Douglas to A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr, Fannie Lou Hammer to Ella Baker - has always been tied to race talk inseparable from expanding possibilities of democracy, expanding empowerment of everyday people.

Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they're not at all the same. But they're both symptoms inside the white male power structure.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

I remember a time when it was ok to make fun of politicians and powerful people. Now, it's not ok anymore. We've forgotten how to laugh.

I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white hetero- sexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary- vested-interest-power. But then, I have great difficulty examining what men in general could possibly do about all this. In addition to doing the shitwork that women have been doing for generations, possibly not exist? No, I really don't mean that. Yes, I really do.

The black people of America have been victims of violence at the hands of the white men for four hundred years, and following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.

You can be addicted to White Supremacy and all of the benefits, you can be addicted to male privilege and all of the benefits that comes from it. It's like someone pointing at you and you have a stain on your shirt and you don't even know it.

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.