Race, Gender and Resistance - Thoughts on "Teaching to Transgress" by bell hooks

I find myself processing hooks’ (she uses all lower case for her name) book as much from a personal standpoint (how I read it) than from an academic standpoint (what it says). Though I presumably share many of her political views about the nature of oppression, white privilege, capitalism and patriarchy – I feel a strange sense of resistance when reading her story as a female black professor educated in both the segregated and de-segregated South as a child. I can’t pass it off as intellectual disagreement since I ostensibly hold many of the same views. After thinking about where this comes from within me I realized a few things. First, I don’t want to feel bad about myself. I don’t know that this is what she is asking for but I fear that if I were to accept her thesis in toto I would need to feel repentant for things that I had no say over – my maleness, my whiteness, my having been born into the developed Western world during a time of its supremacy. I think many students (and instructors!) who encounter serious discussions of race and gender have this experience/resistance.

I think maybe this a case of “wanting my cake and to eat it too.” I want to be on the right side of progressive thinking about race and gender yet I do not want to feel discomfort with the part I have/do play in the maintenance of the system that supports and promulgates oppression. I felt better when she acknowledged this experience in her book. She shares the story of students who came to her during one of her classes. They said that the class was leading them into a great depression about life. Where they were once comfortable they now saw bias and oppression all around them. She expressed (and since then works into her courses) a discussion of the personal experience of pain and discomfort that often happens when students begin to confront systems and ways of being that had once been comfortable or unexamined.

If anything, I think that this illustrates the power of the dominant culture. Even as someone who has explicitly set out to be a change agent, addressing many of the same issues close to hooks’ heart, I still have been inculcated with dominant culture’s frames and a natural resistance to examine my position in this society. It reminds me of the difference being charitable and being radical. To be charitable is want to make life better for the other without recognizing the need for change in one’s self. To be radical is to join with the needs and sufferings of the other as one’s self. To be radical is to recognize that we cannot be separate, that to help others we must often confront ourselves, that “when one is oppressed none are free.”