Killing Rage: Ending Racism by bell hooks

Killing Rage: Ending Racism Reviews

• 
  J.G. Keely

  Ultimately misguided, hyperbolic, self-serving, and blinded by bitterness. What's most telling about this author is that she has made it impossible to discuss her without addressing her pretension (for those not in the know, she insists her name be spelled all lower-case). According to her, this is meant to be a sign of her humility, a sign that the author's identity is unimportant--of course it achieves the opposite effect, placing intense importance on her, taking something that is normally taken for granted and turning it into a drama that cannot be ignored. It's typical of her whole approach: a misguided gesture that hypocritically undermines the very thing she claimed to be doing, but which succeeds admirably at garnering attention and provoking further discussion--and unfortunately, not discussion about the matter at hand, about arguments or words, but about her as a public figure.
  
  The introduction is a long lamentation that no one will listen, or take her seriously, that she faces constant criticism--woe is the Stanford-educated bestselling author. I couldn't help but compare her to
  Angela Carter, who, instead of whining about how no one listens, instead boldly and precisely spoke her mind. She never apologizes or laments being a woman. She does not insist that we pity her or restore her--but instead restores herself, whether we like it or not.
  
  Then again, isn't one of the easiest methods of self-promotion for a public figure to first preach the controversy, and then cry shame on anyone else who responds to it? It's the academic version of a clickbait article with a crazed comment section.
  
  Our author then goes onto describe what seems to be a fairly normal day at the airport: the person at the ticket counter is a dismissive jerk, the businessmen behind you sneer impatiently, there's a ticket mixup and her friend is forced by the rigidly-smiling attendant to switch seats. The author chooses to interpret this all as purely racially-motivated, despite the fact that it's pretty much the universal airline experience. She ends up sitting next to the young white dude who had a ticket for the same seat as her friend, and wishing she had a gun so she could shoot him.
  
  Airlines are classist: they profit from businessmen flying last minute in first class with upgrades. Everyone else is just bodies to offset fuel costs. The fact that attendants and ticket agents will treat you poorly if you don't look like one of those prime customers is not racial, it's universal. Throw a white guy with tattoos and sweatpants or a teen goth chick in there and they're going to get booted and ignored, too. It's why I've learned to dress and act a certain way when I fly, because otherwise they treat you about as well as the luggage.
  
  So it strikes me as odd that she would choose this specific example as her big lead-in--there are so many moments she could have used to perfectly illustrate the struggle of microaggressions and hidden racism, yet she shows us something that could have happened to anyone. Certainly, that the preferred customer is white businessmen is the result of systematic and historical racial and sexual discrimination, but the author doesn't attack that. She doesn't go after the source of the problem.
  
  Of course, black women in America aren’t allowed to express anger, and in the media are transformed into empty cliches of snippy ignorance--all despite the fact that they have countless things to justifiably be angry about. After all, anger isn't necessarily an irrational response: there are plenty of things out there that should make us angry, especially when it comes to racial, sexual, and class politics. So yes, get angry, and use that anger--but it's not enough to just be angry, you have to aim your anger in the right direction.
  
  It's like all the folks who were incensed at the McDonalds wage increase, who spent their vitriol on the fast food workers who were suddenly a little closer to a living wage, as if they had any power or influence--while at the same time
  completely ignoring the shareholders making more in a year than any server makes in a lifetime. Get angry at the source, not the errant symptom that happens to pass you in the street.
  
  When the population splits off into different warring sects, each blaming the other for their plight, it benefits those in power. That's why
  whiteness and blackness were created as American cultural signifiers in the first place: to keep the poor distracted, fighting each other over scraps while the robber barons gutted the economy. As philosopher Rick Roderick points out, if you find yourself committing to a behavior that just so happens to support the power structure, and which tends to shut down dissent, that's a habit you should instantly distrust.
  
  But it's so much easier (and more satisfying) to rage about personal anecdotes than it is to actually deconstruct the thorny problems that face us. Really, it’s no more than I expect from the sort of author who deliberately chooses not to give us the sources of her points and arguments, who obfuscates, doesn't provide a bibliography, and just generally ignores the wider context in which she is ensconced.
  
  It's one thing to feel anger over a particular injustice, or a pattern of injustice, but quite another to incite anger and conflict for its own sake. As
  studies of 'primal scream therapy' showed, the more you indulge in rage, the more angry and reactionary you become. It's like when your dog is barking at the door, and you start yelling at him--which to him just sounds like more barking, which only increases his excitement.
  
  The book's title immediately evokes Grier and Cobb's seminal Black Rage (which the author then tries to distance herself from, in another example of conflict between her choices and her intentions) . That text theorized that when a person is systematically subjugated and persecuted, they will react with irrational violence--which of course is a far cry from actually advocating irrational violence, which is more the bent in this book. Certainly, the answer isn't to shut up and take it, to repress the self and deny feelings of anger, but to find productive outlets for those feelings, to express them in ways that helps to address and fight the problem, instead of just escalating things.
  
  It's the same issue I've increasingly had with Richard Dawkins: while his early work summarizes basic arguments, and is useful in its way, the longer his career has gone on, the more it has become reactionary, bitter, and slighting. He spends his time arguing with the least competent people--and of course that's never going to end up a productive discussion. Plus, the more you do it, the more you just train yourself to yell at people who don't know what they are talking about, and to feel utter contempt for anyone who thinks differently.
  
  Yet looking at the way Dawkins, Bill Mahr, MRAs, and others in the 'New Atheism' camp have started attacking
  Muslims and
  women en masse shows how this sort of rage-filled, self-justifying invective just ends up turning into a blame game, an endless search for a new target to pillory. And then you get the exact same thing from the other side, with Christians developing their own persecution complex, convinced that they are under attack despite being the powerful majority--because, as has been said before, when you're used to living in privilege, living in equality feels like oppression.
  
  After all, there's something very comforting about being on the defensive. Being surrounded by screaming idiots who hate you makes you look good--it happens to me here on GR all the time. But despite the much-loved
  Swift quote, just because you're surrounded by random idiots who hate you, it doesn't mean you are any more right than they are--there are few tasks in the world easier than getting a mob of whackjobs to yell at you over nothing.
  
  And yet, how often do we surround ourselves with these stupid voices purposefully? A large contingent of the people who watch Fox News, or who listen to Limbaugh or radio Evangelists are liberals who get an ego boost every time someone on the opposite side sticks their foot in their mouth. It's half of why The Daily Show became so popular: it's so easy to cherry-pick soundbites from the stupidest people who oppose you. The hard thing is to listen to the idiots on your side, and to recognize the way they make buckets of money feeding the fire of an endlessly uninformed and increasingly polarized debate--much to Bill Kristol's chagrin.
  
  But of course, unlike white suburban Christians or wealthy Republicans, black women actually do face daily persecution. Racism and sexism are pervasive structural problems that operate in ways we can't even consciously recognize. Teachers
  will score female and minority students worse because they simply expect less from them. All their lives, those teachers have been unconsciously taught to see those people differently. It's like how, in the Orientalist movement in Europe, authors would
  assign completely different motivations to a person depending on whether she was French or Algerian.
  
  Likewise, the color processing on film
  was originally based on pictures of smiling white women, which meant that for families of different skin colors, the faces would be muddy and unappealing. It was virtually impossible for a black family to have nice photos of a vacation or graduation without a dark room in the house. This was only finally rectified in 1995, but since then, digital cameras have been programmed based on white faces, meaning
  they can't see black faces, and will ask of an asian face
  'did someone blink?'--the more things change.
  
  The idea of this invisible, pervasive cultural inequality is called 'hegemony' in cultural studies. It's a paranoid conspiracy theory, but of course, when the black helicopters actually are flying over your house, you discover that a paranoid conspiracy can sometimes be true. After all, the official story of the 9/11 attacks, a group of men from the mid-East trained in terrorist cells executing a murder plot is also a conspiracy theory--a literal theory about a conspiracy--but that doesn't mean it can't also be true.
  
  But it's also possible to take this idea too far, to wield it like a hammer, and to see every mishap and coincidence as a nail. During the civil rights movement, the urge to rediscover African history was so strong that it led some groups to inventing it out of whole cloth, producing a vast and secret black history of the world, typified by works like Black Athena. Likewise, if you read about the origins of the Nation of Islam, you'll find it was much more Scientology than Allah--suggesting that the Earth was blown into pieces trillions of years ago, that blacks aren't from this planet, that whites are devils created by scientists, and that the biblical apocalypse will involve a UFO plane showing up and destroying all whites. Indeed, Farrakhan recently folded the Scientology practice of Dianetics into the Nation.
  
  Certainly, it makes sense that a people whose history and culture had been torn away from them would be desperate to rediscover it--and
  there is a vast history of African empires and cultures stretching back to the Romans, that modern archaeology is only now beginning to touch on (a slow-going process due to impassable terrain, civil unrest, and destabilization by resource-hungry multinationals). But there's a huge difference between funding an archaeological dig of
  a world wonder like Benin City and insisting that
  ancient Egyptians invented the airplane.
  
  Just because African history is under-represented does not mean that every attempt to reverse this lamentable condition is sensible, that every claim of African superiority must therefore be good history simply because it is contrarian--there are plenty of quacks and conmen out there happy to feed people a false but flattering identity (it’s why white people love epic fantasy books).
  
  Likewise, just because there is systematic racism, and a good reason to be angry, does not mean every attack from the downtrodden is justified, well-argued, or productive. But it's always profitable to be a loudmothed idiot--and more than that, each idiot requires another such idiot on the other side, yelling just as loudly, to keep the whole thing going. Without a constant influx of new, incendiary soudbites, there is no news cycle (and no academic celebrities).
  
  But it then becomes so easy for the two sides to grow increasingly extreme, devolving into 'an eye for an eye', where it's all rage and calls for blood. Jews (among others) were the victims of state-run racial violence in the middle of the last century, and now they commit state-run racial violence in their own country. After fighting long and hard for their own rights, many black political groups now deny that homosexuality is a civil rights issue, and work to keep gays in their own communities down. Some branches of feminism use their power to ostracize and attack the trans community. The moment any group breaks free and get an ounce of power, some of the abused becomes abusers themselves, finding some less-powerful minority to lord over, like the new kid in school bullying someone to ensure that he doesn't end up on the bottom of the pile.
  
  And that's the kind of reactionary, incensed position that I mistrust in this book--it just ends up feeling too much like and equal and opposite counterpart to folks like Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh: a series of convenient anecdotes strung together with a lot of invective. She reminds me of many of the post-modern critics who misread Derrida, doing with race what they do with literature. You cobble together some controversial half-ideas and emotional appeals and cover them with a lot of jargon terms until you end up with something out of the
  Sokal Affair, or the
  Postmodern Essay Generator--sound and fury, dignifying nothing.
  
  I recall an interview with her discussing Star Wars where she tried to argue that since James Earl Jones is black, but at the end Darth Vader is unmasked as a white actor, then therefore the character was evil because he was black--which is such a goofy nonsense argument. Lucas wanted Orson Welles for the role and couldn't get him, so he jumped to the next coolest voice he could find. And yet, there are so many valid ways to criticize the treatment of race in those films, so why jump to something so flimsy and silly? It seems to me typical of her approach: to avoid real, functional deconstruction in favor of a one-off example that doesn't quite work.
  
  Yet, it can be so difficult to talk about this--there is so much context, so much history, and there's often a sense that it's your responsibility to drag in all the baggage every time the point comes up. Of course, as anyone familiar with literary criticism knows, this is just another distraction tactic, a way to avoid having to produce any real statement or conclusion, because it's easier to just leap into digressions until the whole discourse stretches thin and collapses. Because it's rarely productive (or even possible) to drag all that in every time without simply drowning the conversation. When some frat douche says something thoughtlessly inappropriate at a party, it isn't a productive response to start in on the history of reparations--nothing good is going to come of that.
  
  If I say of a white male author that he's angry and incoherent, no one bats an eye, but to say it of a black woman is another thing. People start bringing in
  the continuing repercussions of chattel slavery, and
  white fragility--which, while fascinating (and harrowing) topics, don't really get to the heart of the fact that I just don't find this author to be a very effective critic. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that whatever risk I might take as a white man criticizing a black woman, it pales in comparison to the risk a black woman takes when she publicly criticizes a white man.
  
  But look around this website, or the internet in general, and you'll see loads of people looking for a reason to disregard the words of others--whether it's based on race, or sex, or class, or politics. I've gotten comments saying 'only a woman could write something this dumb', saying I'm too old to understand, or too young to understand--often on the same book. I've always maintained that it's the words that matter, not whatever chromosomes or melanin levels might lie behind them.
  
  There is this weird sense that the races need to be 'kept apart', that we shouldn't be talking about each other, that blacks should talk about blacks, and whites about whites, and women about women--after all, when a woman critiques a man on the internet, she receives death threats--but
  I agree with Said that it's all of our responsibility to speak about each other, and to try to meet somewhere in the middle. As a white man, I have power and privilege despite having done nothing to deserve it--and that being the case, it's my responsibility to use that power and privilege to bring up these difficult issues and try to promote an open discussion.
  
  I've had to rewrite this review completely because while I originally wrote something criticizing a particular author for her approach, the responses I got were all about her racial and sexual identity, and mine--which just shows how much of a problem inequality still is, that we aren’t allowed to speak about one another as individuals, but only as representatives of groups, and are forced to bring in all the baggage of those socially-constructed identities every time--though talking about it is still better than acting like those identities don't affect us.
  
  In the end, this book is little more than a semantic exercise, which plays into her avowed "right as a subject in resistance to define reality". Unfortunately, it seems her need to redefine reality is just her way of avoiding having to actually deal with it.
• 
  Jenny (Reading Envy)

  “A black person unashamed of her rage, using it as a catalyst to develop critical consciousness, to come to full decolonized self-actualization, had no real place in the existing social structure.”

  This book took a while to read because it is dense and difficult. Part of the difficulty, no surprise, is being confronted with places I didn't see as embodying racism because I am part of the white dominant group. For instance, integration... mind blown. But the other part of the difficulty is the current climate, in realizing that bell hooks wrote this 20 years ago and she could have just written it.
  
  She takes a lot of time at the beginning to establish her main argument, that feminism and racism must be considered together, also a defense of black rage. She goes on to discuss many specific topics from the importance of mental health care to the role of the media all the way to redefining Martin Luther King Jr.'s concept of a "beloved community."
  
  One point that really resonated with me was a clear argument to deflect the argument I still hear a lot now, claiming "black people are racist too."

  “Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation? The prejudicial feelings some blacks may express about whites are in no way linked to a system of domination that affords us any power to coercively control the lives and well-being of white folks.” (154-5)

  I can't not say that I found a few areas of omission glaring. Other groups of non-whites are not mentioned very often, and when they are it is rather critically, in the sense of how those groups often perpetuate racism by trying to conform to the white patriarchy. She does later acknowledge that everyone needs to work together, but I found myself wondering about their experiences, if a history of slavery changes the experience of racism (or not), etc. That is just one area where my main take away was that I needed to learn more. Fair enough.
  
  Another exclusion is the lgbt community and how their issues intersect with racism and sexism, hardly mentioned at all in this entire book! There seems to be room for an argument that there is a triad, rather than a pair, of issues that must be looked at simultaneously for change to occur. Of course intersectionality wasn't such a buzzy word twenty years ago. I imagine bell hooks has embraced that concept now, because it was what she was saying all along. She clearly led the charge on an issue that remains central to inequality in our country.
  
  Near the end, I teared up in reading this statement, because I'm feeling it to the tips of my toes lately.

  “Some days it is just hard to accept that racism can still be such a powerful dominating force in all our lives. When I remember all that black and white folks together have sacrificed to challenge and change white supremacy, when I remember the individuals who gave their lives to the cause of racial justice, my heart is deeply saddened that we have not fulfilled their shared dream of ending racism, of creating a new culture, a place for the beloved community.” (263)

  I'd happily entertain recommendations for similar/related books, if you have suggestions!
  
  
• 
  Michael Finocchiaro

  bell hooks was an amazing black feminist activist and this confrontational book has her at her peak of militancy but always articulate and balanced in her views. Given the current political climate, a great book to discover or go back and re-read!
• 
  Trish

  By rights I should not be giving this any rating because I did not read it all. I borrowed this book now and skimmed it because I'd never seen anything by bell hooks and wanted to just look at it to see what folks are talking about when they raise her name.
  
  Dense, delicious seasoned reasoning, so hard to back away from, to turn one's back on. Any objection one might raise to giving African Americans their due and proper place in the growth and history of this country, she will have a calmly devastating critique and counter-argument. I love those sentences so thick with references and erudition, and logic that defies. Open the book to any page and dip a toe in:

  "All marginal groups in this society who suffer grave injustices, who are victimized by institutionalized systems of dominance (race, class, gender, etc.), are faced with the peculiar dilemma of developing strategies that draw attention to one's plight in such a way that will merit regard and consideration without reinscribing a paradigm of victimization."

  Growl. Not written for an amateur in the art of verbal swordplay. She gives no quarter:

  "Recently, I gave a talk highlighting ways contemporary commodification of black culture by whites in no way challenges white supremacy when it takes the form of making blackness the 'spice that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.' At the end of the talk a white woman who sounded very earnest asked me: 'Don't you think we are all raised in a culture that is racist and we are all taught to be racist whether we want to be or not?'....I shared how I was weary of the way in which white people want to deflect attention away from their accountability for anti-racist change by making it seem that everyone has been socialized to be racist against their will..."

  Ha! The quiet ferocity of her language produces something like slavish devotion or admiration in me. All those times we have begged people "just tell me straight...what you are thinking or what is annoying or what do you want..." and she obliges. She doesn't fool around with linguistic niceties or obfuscation. She reminds me of all the writers (like Hannah Arendt, Thomas Pynchon, etc) who tell us we must think and not just accept what is said or written as truth. We must continue to learn and add things to our cache of knowledge if what we think or see or experience is not in accord with what we have been taught.
  
  This deserves way more attention than I can give it now, but I am pleased to know better what she is about. Love it. Her logic and argument has no expiration date. This was published twenty years ago, but her work has the universality and freshness of literature. Her thinking transcends any particular time or place. Agree or disagree, but meet her in the field and bring your best game 'cuz she's gonna give you as much as you can handle. Grrr.
• 
  Kristen

  hooks has a real talent for conveying complex theory in highly-readable prose. In killing rage, she argues convincingly that ignoring race doesn't make one a non-racist person (neither a non-racist white person, nor a person of color free from internalized racism.) Rather if one wants to become a non-racist person, one must commit to confronting and dismantling, consciously and conscientiously, the insidious ways in which white supremacy is institutionalized in our society.
• 
  Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea

  After watching the George Zimmerman trial, while at the same time working with a disabled African American man and his family who was brutalized by the Rochester Police Department, I needed some inspiration and analysis about race and white-supremacy in Amerikkka. bell hooks offered both in her book killing rage: Ending Racism. Even though the book was written in the mid-1990's, it has so much to offer that is absolutely relevant now.
• 
  Will Shetterly

  The opening essay is very much worth reading, though not for the reasons Bell Hooks offers. Think of her as a Nabokovian unreliable narrator, and it's both sad and hilarious. It's the story of a ticket mix-up on a plane. A white man has a ticket for a seat, and due to some error, a black woman believes the seat is hers, but her ticket says otherwise. To Hooks, all the whites who observe what happens are complicit in racism because they don't ignore the ticket and accept the black woman's word.
  
  It never occurs to Hook that she might be mistaken. She defines herself as an anti-racist, and therefore she must find racism to oppose wherever she goes. Like many middle class black folks, she has an especially odd take on Malcolm X: she talks about his rage rather than his demand for getting and giving respect, and she prefers what he said when he served the Nation of Islam to what he said later.
  
  She also has a double-standard on class that I find among many of her fans: she'll mention that class matters, but she expects full deference from those who wait on her. If working-class folks are trying to finish another task before getting to her or goof up when they're helping her, it's because of their racism. If people always served me instantly and perfectly, I might give her claims more weight.
  
  This is not to say that hooks has never faced racism. An old joke applies: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. The tragedy of racism is that folks who might be its victims have to wonder if they're its victims whenever a person of another race does anything that hurts or inconveniences them.
  
  I didn't start this book expecting to agree with her, but I expected to find more substance for her beliefs. Her desire to "liberate subjectivity" explains why there's not.
  
  I strongly recommend that anyone interested in anti-racism theory google Adolph Reed Jr.'s "The limits of anti-racism." He never mentions hooks by name, but his critique of the vagueness of the theory applies.
• 
  Alexis

  Hooks says, “White rage is acceptable, can be both expressed and condoned, but black rage has no place and everyone knows it” (15). First, I just love her confidence as a writer—and everyone knows it—and second, her position here is important. Black rage needs a place, a public forum. If it is not claimed or re-claimed, as she suggests earlier in the book, then a kind of self-immolation and cultural immolation occurs.
• 
  Johnny Correa-Lowrance

  This book gave me the vocabulary to finally describe the pain and anger I have felt in my past.
• 
  Shanice

  A lot of people said this book was angry but I got more urgency than anger. I think when reading or talking about race people get uncomfortable and hear an indictment out of truth. I found this book to be very challenging to my own thoughts about Blackness and my own class/educational/straight/cis privilege. I've learned new ways to be thinking of how to hold myself accountable and it's reinvigorated my interests in the importance of cultural/media literacy. She offers so many solutions in this books that I wish the book were read more widely.
• 
  Sonia Crites

  This is definitely not easy or light reading. It has given me much to consider when it comes to my own personal views and values. It's encouraged me to expand my thoughts on both racism, feminism and the intersection of them both.
• 
  Christine

  hooks' influence is widely felt today. This book raises questions and concerns that are still not answered. It isn't easy reading, but then again, very few things worth listening to and thinking about are. Agree or disagree with her, think she is a prophet or a fool, at least she will get you to think and talk.
• 
  Asim Qureshi

  Short, but so incredible. Just one small vignette:
  
  "With the television on, whites were and are always with us, their voices, values, and beliefs echoing in our brains. It is this constant presence of the colonizing mindset paSSively consumed that undermines our capacity to resist white supremacy by cultivating oppositional worldviews."
• 
  Laura

  Searingly powerful book calling out the injustices embedded in American society. I had to remind myself several times it was written 30 years ago. (I think I read it right before law school). It ties those injustices tightly with our economic system in a way that is likely true and exhausting. I know how a bill becomes a law. I know how to amend a constitution. I don't know how to build a more just economic system.
  
  The first paragraph of the last section ("Beloved Community") will haunt me.

  Some days it is just hard to accept that racism can still be such a powerful dominating force in all our lives. When I remember all that black and white folks together have sacrificed to challenge and change white supremacy, when I remember the individuals who gave their lives to the cause of racial justice, my heart is deeply saddened that we have not fulfilled their shared dream of ending racism, of creating a new culture, a place for the beloved community. (263)

  
  
  May we make it so.
• 
  Owen

  Another totally transformative book by bell hooks. The pages of the copy I borrowed were underlined like crazy. The book should just have one big underline under it, and many circles around it, and on the side, a big "YES!!!". Ok that is extreme, I am not that kind of underliner, but so many of the concepts in this book have been enlightening for me.
  
  Here is one quote, explaining the namesake of the book. At some point I'd like to compare this quote with Amber Hollibaugh's description of how she felt after the gay riots following the shooting of Harvey Milk.
  
  "...I understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance struggle. Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action. By demanding that black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, to reap the benefits of material privilege in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize, oppress, and exploit." p16
  
  Some more quotes that were important to me:
  
  "...we talk about the way white people who shift locations, as her companion has done, begin to see the world differently. Understanding how racism works, he can see the way in which whiteness acts to terrorize without seeing himself as bad, or all white people as bad, and all black people as good." p49
  
  "...we...need to rethink our notions of manhood and womanhood. Rather than continuing to see them as opposites, with different "inherent" characteristics, we...need to recognize biological differences without seeing them as markers of specific character traits. This would mean no longer thinking that it is "natural" for boys to be strong and girls to be weak, for boys to be active and girls passive. Our task in parenting and in education would be to encourage in both females and males the capacity to be holistic, to be capable of being both strong and weak, active and passive, etc. in response to specific contexts." p69
  
  "...males prove that they are "men" by the exhibition of antisocial behavior, lack of consideration for the needs of others, refusal to communicate, unwillingness to show nurturance and care. Here I am not speaking about traits adult males cultivate, I am talking about the traits little boys learn early in life to associate with manhood and act out." p74
  
  "Until all Americans demand that mass media no longer serve as the biggest propaganda machine for white supremacy, the socialization of everyone to subliminally absorb white supremacist attitudes and values will continue. Even though many white Americans do not overtly express racist thinking it does not mean that their underlying belief structures have not been saturated with an ideology of difference that says white is always, in every way, superior to that which is black." p116
  
  "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." p132
  
  "Black progressives suffered major disillusionment with white progressives when our experiences of working with them revealed that they could want to be with us (even to be our sexual partners) without divesting of white supremacist thinking about blackness." p148
  
  "And even though Malcolm X urged black folks to tear their gaze away from whiteness so that we could "see eachother with new eyes," black identity was fast being defined by two opposing factions that were both, in their own way, obsessed with whiteness." p241
  
  "Traditionally, black people who were able to grow their foods, to otain control over their shelter and basic necessities of life, lived well in the midst of povrty". p260
  
  "Since the notion that we should all forsake attachment to race and/or cultural identity and be "just humans" within the framework of white supremacy has usually meant that subordinate groups must surrender their identities, beliefs, values and assimilate by adopting the values and beliefs of privileged-class whites, rather than promoting racial harmony this thinking has created a fierce cultural protectionism." p266
  
• 
  chantel nouseforaname

  Great information serves as a reminder.. but honestly, corroborated a lot of emotions and thoughts I've been having for a long time. The thing about reading a book like this as a young black female is that it provides a sounding board and a place to feel like your thoughts are not crazy. It validates your mentality and shows you that what you're feeling is rooted in something much larger than you. It also reminds you that you have a role to play as well in certain situations by the way you think, act, respond to those situations. It expands your understanding.
• 
  Jeanette Lukowski

  A tough, but socially important book to read. We can only change behavior we are willing to acknowledge, after all.
• 
  Nathan Albright

  This book is a pile of contradictions that is as fascinating as it is ridiculous.  One wonders if the author is aware of just how much massive projection there is as she attacks a variety of facets while demonstrating the same qualities she decries.  Do you want a book that complains about black self-hating while demanding white self-hating, justifies anti-Semitism by accusing Jews of racism, argues for male self-hating while decrying female self-hatred in continual attacks on a supposed patriarchy, engages in continual coded discourse while claiming to be speaking in a vernacular that is most often just the author showing a lack of command of the English language?  If so, this is the book for you.  The way that the author on  the one hand expresses a killing rage against whites while in others looking for a blessed community that is able to rise above racism, and engaging in polemics against polarity on the one hand while also engaging simultaneously in false dialectics of her own is quite entertaining and typical of the incoherence and hypocrisy of leftist thinking [1].  Anyone who has not already drunk the radical kool-aid will find this book to be wildly inconsistent and deeply hypocritical, and a sign of some kind of pathology that indicates the author should be institutionalized somewhere other than our mental asylums of higher learning.
  
  This book consists of a variety of essays that read like the diary of a mad blackish woman.  The book starts with the author discussing an incident of alleged racism that shows her to be occasionally unfriendly and hostile and irritable towards innocent people who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then with an incident of black rage which the author trumpets and supports, all of which undercut her efforts at portraying herself as being beyond racism.  She moves on to other topics like a few discussions of black sexism, black views of white people, efforts at building political coalitions, efforts at tearing down political coalitions through attacking black men, black middle class people, Jews, fundamentalists and other political and religious conservatives, liberals she believes has sold out, people who are not quite as black as others and who enjoy a certain amount of privilege on account of their bi-racial identity, and so on.  In reading this book it is clear that the author has some marked schizoid tendencies and should probably remember to be on her meds when she is trying to write a book like this one.  The author even manages to talk about mental health, which makes sense as she is definitely not entirely sane and desperately trying to justify her actions as an appropriate response to reality rather than to face the truth of her madness.
  
  Although this work, like many of its kind, is a text that is highly critical of others and seeks to deconstruct what it sees as hostile discourses, the book itself is a text of a kind that itself is worthy of the most intense deconstruction because of the incoherence within.  That which is pathological sees pathology in anything and everything else because it wants to define itself as normal and normative for everything else.  The hypocrisy of every part of this book is itself eloquent and somewhat poignant evidence of the hypocrisy of so much of leftist discourse that results from a great deal of trauma and the schizoid response to that trauma that is faced by those who are oppressed but seek revenge, who want justice for the injustice that they have suffered but who do not see in themselves the potential and reality of acting unjustly, who want to criticize others but see themselves as above criticism.  That which is most blameworthy about this book, and it is a lot, is simultaneously a reminder of all that is in ourselves that we must fight against if we wish to avoid the insanity, hypocrisy, and incoherence of this book and its suffering author.
  
  [1] See, for example:
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...
• 
  Randall Wallace

  Angela Davis and bell hooks are great authors for examining race and racism the way they really should be examined – through their interrelationship to class and gender. After the suppression of the Black Panthers by the FBI’s Cointelpro program, black rage, however justified, became a sacrificial offering to whites. Blacks had to learn to choke down their rage. We still live in a white supremacist state (racism’s strongest weapon is not prejudice but domination) with violence condoned by the state, which labels all black rage as evil or destructive. The solution is fully decolonized self-actualization, which demands black rage because rage is a necessary part of all resistance struggles. Whites still appear to often come into many black lives as a “terrorizing imposition”. The vast majority of black African Americans still feel some form of racial harassment daily. Feminism in the 80’s was for white women only and more was achieved for white women then than had been achieved for black men and women during the civil rights movement. White feminism, unlike black feminism, however had relied on the rhetoric of victimhood. Bell shows how the top male black thinkers historically supported the patriarchy that continues to keep black women down by insisting it is black men who must assert themselves as decolonized while only lip service is given to rampant sexism. Manhood (much like today’s police) had quietly moved from a “provide and protect” mode to “coerce, control and dominate” mode. The present Patriarchy undermines community and family and so bell and other black feminists must continue to fight to end sexism and sexist oppression. The problem with Black Nationalism is that it historically is pro-patriarchy and pro-capitalism. You cannot have a love of both justice and patriarchy. It is black women and women of color who are at the forefront of the anti-racist revolutionary feminist agenda. You simply can’t have a feminist revolution without ending racism and white supremacy; the first feminist “revolution” ended up another Jim Crow all-white affair pretending to speak for all. We humans must see we have a revolutionary interdependency and act accordingly. Ah America, founded on the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another...
  
  Colonialism needed no country because it colonized the hearts and minds of both whites and blacks. Integration often was used as a tool to decrease resistance and perpetuate white supremacy. Organized resistance had no place to occur since the colonized had no private space of their own. In many Hollywood films the black role is to bolster or caretake whites. Racial integration often means rejection of the ethic of communalism for the short-term pleasures of satisfying individual desire. When assimilated black folks get larger rewards from the culture, then you are looking at a color caste hierarchy. This leads to today’s emphasis of beautiful only light skinned black pop stars with long straight hair desirable “in the racist white imagination and in the colonized mind set”. Blacks hanging out by themselves should be seen not as threatening to whites but as merely a created sanctuary to escape to from white domination. The problem is that blacks trying to express themselves free from a colonial mindset can appear to the colonized person as unfriendly or dangerous. Another terrific book by bell hooks just filled with great insights like this for those who love justice everywhere…
  
• 
  Reid

  bell hooks is one of the most important antiracist voices in the world, yet is not often referenced these days. Certainly, antiracist scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi are aware of her importance as a forebear and put her forward in their writings. But, having as we do a fascination for the modern and recent, hooks has to a certain extent fallen by the wayside, which is a shame, for she has much to teach us.
  
  Killing Rage was written in 1995, and it is discouraging to see how little has changed in the society she described 25 years ago. At the same time, it is wonderful to see how the solutions and strategies she prescribes remain relevant, and perhaps more so in 2021 than they were then. Racism is as pervasive in the United States today as it has ever been, but its forms have changed. This may feel in many cases like progress, but hooks would argue, I think, that what has happened is more a matter of assimilation and co-optation than true evidence of movement toward meaningful racial equity and equality. This is an important point, because one of the primary themes of Killing Rage is that we have allowed ourselves to be lulled by the trappings of a movement into believing that more of a concerted effort toward an antiracist society is not needed. Racially skewed incarceration rates, poverty rates, death rates, life expectancy, employment rates, family wealth, infant mortality, and police brutality tell a different story. We continue to live in a severely bigoted society.
  
  It is easy to relax our vigilance. No one wants to think that every moment must be focused on struggle. We are predisposed to seek ease where we can get it. Thus, the pervasive belief that token evidence of individual people of color who have succeeded and excelled can be taken to mean that we have reached a post-racial society and it is only a matter of time until the slow changes take hold universally. This is the easy way out and a lazy way of thinking. We need only look at the blatantly racist efforts going on in state legislatures around the country to suppress voting to understand that virulent racism is in revanchist mode and going nowhere.
  
  One of the surest ways to power is to divide and conquer. If those in power can inspire in the well-meaning white person a deep-seated fear of blackness while convincing Black people that all white people are the enemy, those who cling to white supremacist power will not need to deal with a unified movement predicated on the idea that it is the white elite that threaten all of us. "Yet that power [of unity] is often obscured by white focus on fear," hooks writes. "The fear whites direct at blacks is rooted in the racist assumption that the darker race is inherently deprived, dangerous, and willing to obtain what they desire by any means necessary." The idea that we are living in a post-racial world also serves to defuse any movement toward meaningful change, and "the notion that differences of skin color, class background, and cultural heritage must be erased for justice and equality to prevail is a brand of popular false consciousness that helps keep racist thinking and action intact.... It is the...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."
  
  But "the time to remember is now. The time to speak a counter hegemonic race talk that is filled with the passion of remembrance and resistance is now.... All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity." Our dominant institutions are blatant in their desire that a certain perspective on race prevails, and hooks argues that "constantly and passively consuming white supremacist values both in educational systems and via prolonged engagement with mass media, contemporary black folks, along with everyone else in this society, are vulnerable to a process of overt colonization that goes easily undetected." This seems to me a vital point, that we have been systematically indoctrinated to believe white supremacy is normal and any deviation from it is an act of charity and benevolence. "Collective failure to address adequately the psychic wounds inflicted by racist aggression is the breeding ground for a psychology of victimhood wherein learned helplessness, uncontrollable rage, and/or feelings of overwhelming powerlessness and despair abound in the psyches of black folks."
  
  This is the time to rededicate ourselves to antiracist work and move forward with changes to our society that have deep meaning for equity, equality, fairness, and justice. Every assumption we make must be examined in the light of the greater understanding of the deeply rooted racism at the core of who we are as a nation. We must become brutally honest with ourselves and each other if we are going to create change that is meaningful and lasting. We can no longer afford to believe that tiny changes to policy or superficial displays of harmony have any meaning in a world so thoroughly controlled by greed, hatred, and selfishness. This may seem a harsh judgment, but police killings, rampant poverty among people of color, their terrible health outcomes, employment figures, and incarceration rates, to name only a few of the more blatant, suggest that we have very far to go to find true justice; incremental progress can no longer be acceptable to us. When we combine with these racist attitudes and acts the facts of economic inequality and climate catastrophe brought on largely by the refusal of economic elites to acknowledge the grotesque damage of their greed, it should be a simple matter for us to turn to more radical reforms. This is a frightening and energetically challenging prospect. But having reached the 21st century with so many 19th century assumptions about how the world works and who should be on top surviving intact, it becomes clear we have little choice. We are at a crossroads, and the choices we make today will shape the world we will have to live in in the 22nd century and beyond, or whether we have a livable world at all, not only environmentally but socially and morally. While hooks encourages our anger and the courage of our commitments, she also counsels that love is the most transformative power we have; it is that which can bring us true peace and an end to the killing rage which sometimes threatens to overwhelm us. But the time to act is now.
  
  I truly have no criticism of the content of this brilliant book, but append here a few notes on hook's style:
  
  Sometimes the rhetoric can become a little thick, as in this perplexing quote from another author:

  I want to ask whether the growing centrality of the family trope within black political and academic discourse point to the emergence of a distinctive and emphatically post-national variety of racial essentialism. The appeal to family should be understood as both the symptom and the signature of a neo-nationalist outlook that is best understood as a flexible essentialism.

  Um...okay.... It's not that I don't more or less understand what is being said here, but the vocabulary could have been far more transparent, which would have made the point more accessible.
  
  hooks also engages in a few rhetorical tics that I found lulling rather than enlightening, in particular her constant use of the phrase "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" as a placeholder for "everything that ails us." Not that she's wrong, but the repetition begins to feel more like indoctrination than communication. She also has a few quirks, which I assume are based in some sort of linguistic theory, but which I found a bit jarring. For one, she leaves articles out when referring to movements, as in "the cultural impact of feminist movement" rather than "the feminist movement"; a small thing, I know, but I found it odd. Second, she seems to have eschewed question marks, which I find exceedingly strange.
• 
  Justher

  This work provides a good overview of what it means to have an anti-racist agenda. While every essay in this work is brilliant (with each section building on an idea mentioned in the previous essay), the organization could be tighter. However, as hooks herself explains, the simplicity and clarity in her writing makes her works accessible, which might just be the most important thing in texts that are intended to enlighten diverse audiences. I found myself enjoying the sections on black intellectuals the most, and I'm reminded of what Gloria Anzaldúa says in her "Speaking in Tongues" speech:

  "Throw away abstraction and the academic learning, the rules, the map and compass. Feel your way without blinders. To touch more people, the personal realities and the social must be evoked - not through rhetoric but through blood and pus and sweat."

  hooks writes with a focus on popular culture and personal experience, which in turn works to make her texts relatable and again, accessible. However, that's not so say that her works will explain every issue in one read. In each section, it becomes apparent how oppression is so deeply rooted in our society. Throughout the text, hooks continues to call out the ubiquitous white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and the complex ways it touches our lives.
  
  hooks explains that these interlocking systems of domination are what make the resistance so difficult, and it remains a strong theme in the text as a whole. However, at the end of each section there are glimpses of hope, especially in the way hooks advocates for coalition building across race, class, and gender. I would recommend this work to anyone who is interested in resisting racism and isn't afraid of the word "militancy."
• 
  Myriam

  I just recommended this book to a(n Italian) friend who told me she didn't understand US race issues so I thought I would post it here. bell hooks is controversial, to say the least, and some of her books (on love, for example) are all over the place at this stage but a number of her earlier books are thoughtful gems. This is one of them; in it, hooks looks at every day occurrences of racism and how racism affects the recipient. She examines the anger/pain caused by being in the receiving end of simply banal but relentless occurrences of racism for visible minorities in the US but also attempts to address how the engendered rage might be vanquished (by recourse, if I'm remembering correctly, to Thich Nhat Hanh's vietnamese buddhist principles of mindfulness, of examining rather than ignoring our very common human responses to outside stimuli in order to transform them into some useful substance in the process of striving towards peace and human communion).
• 
  Nancy

  I read this book immediately after reading Race Matters by Cornel West - they paired really well and kept my mind in focus and active on matters of discerning where and how racism plays out in the communities I participate in and in the broader society I live and work in.
  
  Just as Race Matters begins with a true real life story of Cornel West's so too King Rage starts with a story that takes place on an airplane for bell hooks. The best way to start - put the reality right out there. The story was the genesis for the book title.
  
  What I liked and where I got energy from reading this book is that it operates from the premise that rage fuels action and that action, when positive, can move mountains and open eyes.
  
  It is an energy-generating read on the one side - and the sad story on the other about the fact that so many people still judge others based on skin colour.
  
  
• 
  Petter Nordal

  This is a great book, a truly hopeful book. If you are put off by the first few pages or first few essays, I encourage you to persevere. many of us get so accustomed to racist injustice that we despair of ever seeing and end, and this is precisely why this book is hopeful. sometimes it is clumsy reading, since her insistence on avoiding euphemisms often means using technical or laden terminology, but because she does not get caught up in trying to put things nicely or trying to see the bright side, she can actually look at our cultural reality square in the face, and ultimately show that each and every one of us makes choices about how we participate in racism, whether we do so willingly or we do so as part of unraveling it, whether we participate by excusing racism, using racism as an excuse, or whether we participate by calling it what it is when we see it.
• 
  Macy

  It's uncanny that a book which was written in 1995 is still SO relevant all these years later. Reading this book made me pause and reflect on the world around me, but also on how I've been living my life up to this point. While I did not agree with everything she said (some points seemed very radicalized to me), there were nonetheless very profound points that were made and my respect for bell hooks is still great. I'd definitely recommend this book, but I suggest taking notes as you read to go over when you're finished because this is not something that should be read once and forgotten...the bold claims within it deserve to be revisited and shared in order for the "beloved community" to truly flourish.
• 
  Nicole Martin

  I haven't read anything by bell hooks that I didn't like, but this one really lit a fire in me. When I first picked up the book I thought the title meant "killing rage" as in to destroy rage, but actually she is explaining and justifying the rage that oppressed folks feel towards their oppressor that makes them want to murder them.
  In traditional bell hooks fashion she looks at not just racism, but sexism and class-ism as well.
• 
  RT

  Still relevant 18 years later. Honestly just read everything by bell hooks. I especially recommend this book to other people (esp. white people) looking to further enhance their knowledge of anti-racist movement and challenge their own biases.
• 
  Ruby

  This is a BOOK. bell hooks gets deep into so many facets of white supremacist capitalist systems of oppression it was frankly exhausting, but also invigorating. Like, she did that so that I could do that. "that" for me being think critically about the ways I benefit from and contribute to said oppressive systems and ways to NOT do that, and how those systems and resistance of them has or has not changed since this book was originally put together. Much to think about, and I don't know what else to tell ya. Took my sweet time with this one, and I don't regret it! Reading slowly is ok! it can even be good!
• 
  Jaclyn Hillis

  bell hooks wrote these essays at least 26 years ago and could have just written it. It’s sad to me how it feels like so little has changed.
  
  “When I remember all that black and white folks together have sacrificed to challenge and change white supremacy, when I remember the individuals who gave their lives to the cause of racial justice, my heart is deeply saddened that we have not fulfilled their shared dream of ending racism, of creating a new culture, a place for the beloved community.”
  
  I highly recommend reading this along your antiracist journey. Her theories are complex but well worth the read; they’ll make you think deeply and hopefully give you a new perspective.