bell hooks trailblazing scholar, author, social activist, and feminist, who passed away December 2021 in her home, in Berea, KY, viewed history and knowledge as crucial, but only if clearly connected to accessibility and relevance. hooks, who signed her name in lower case letters as a testimony of the importance of the work and not the individual author, as well as a challenged to the standards of traditional academic writing which traditionally have dismissed the work of scholars of color, particularly, black women and women of color, distanced herself from the type of academic writers who under the guise of “dispassionate and feigned objectivity” did not personally engage with the social topics that they write about. Before the word ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, bell hooks critiqued a narrowed feminism that hailed from the white middle class living room and neither addressed interlocking webs of oppression nor recognized its own race and class privileges – therefore, blindly disregarding the multidimensional plights of non-white, underprivileged women. She is quoted as saying “I began to use the phrase in my work white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchy because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality.” Major respect to her legacy.
enemies too.