On bell hooks: Black, female, working class and "semirural"

Gloria Jean Watkins, whose pen name was bell hooks, died this morning.  She was a prolific scholar known for her poetry, as well as her work on race, gender, class, capitalism and place.  

hooks ended her career at Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky, and while I thought of her as a Kentuckian, I didn't necessarily think of her as rural.  Still, this line from a bell hooks tribute in the New York Times caught my eye:

bell hooks was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, who was born on Sept. 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Ky., a small city in the southwestern part of the state not far from the Tennessee border.

Though her childhood in the semirural South exposed her to vicious examples of white supremacy, her tight-knit Black community in Hopkinsville showed her the possibility of resistance from the margins, of finding community among the oppressed and drawing power from those connections — a theme to which she would return frequently in her work.

Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a postal worker, and her mother, Rosa Bell (Oldham) Watkins, was a homemaker.

I've long found it interesting that hooks/Watkins chose to live out the final years of her career at Berea College, also in nonmetro Kentucky.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  I think it shows an attachment to place, not a lack of ambition.  

I've also always found hooks' thoughts on class interesting, in particular her compassion for poor whites.  Here's an excerpt from her book Where We Stand:  Class Matters (2000):   

Most folks who comment on class acknowledge that poverty is seen as having a black face, but they rarely point to the fact that this representation has been created and sustained by the mass media ... The hidden face[s] of poverty in the United States are  the untold stories of millions of poor white people.  Undue media focus on poor nonwhites deflects attention away from the reality of white poverty. (p. 116-17)

A relatively recent bell hooks interview that proved controversial--at least with my students at UC Davis School of Law--is here.  What I see as the most provocative quote follows: 

For so many years in the feminist movement, women were saying that gender is the only aspect of identity that really matters, that domination only came into the world because of rape. Then we had so many race-oriented folks who were saying, “Race is the most important thing. We don’t even need to be talking about class or gender.” So for me, that phrase always reminds me of a global context, of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism and of patriarchy. Those things are all linked — an interlocking system.

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.