Belonging Bell Hooks Quotes

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.

We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.

For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging. We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward .We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart's longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of our first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning--clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.

When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.

We are born and have our being in a place of memory. We chart our lives by everything we remember from the mundane moment to the majestic. We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where there is no death, where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection

To me the family has always been that place of familiarity that holds and hurts us.

With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality.

Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home.

To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom and our hope.

We must all decolonize our minds in Western culture to be able to think differently about nature, abut the destuction humans cause.

Nature was th eplace where one could escape the world of man made constuctions of race and identity.

If we are lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who love us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live…we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.

What has become clear is that education for critical consciousness coupled with anti-racist activism that works to change all our thinking so that we construct identity and community on the basis of openness, shared struggle, and inclusive working together offers us the continued possibility of eradicating racism.

...we must consistently challenge dehumanizing public representations of poverty and the poor. Restoring to our nation the understanding that people can be materially poor yet have abundant lives rich in engagement with nature, with local culture, with spiritual values is essential to any progressive struggle to halt mountaintop removal

The earth, like all of nature, could be life giving but it could also threaten and take life, hence the need for respect for the power of one's natural habitat.

From certain standpoints, to travel is to encounter the terrorizing force of white supremacy.

Erasing the agrarian past wherein black folks worked the land, sustained our lives by growing and tending crops, was a way to deny that there were any aspects of life in the white supremacist South that was positive. At the end of nineteenth century the cultural myths that made freedom synonymous with materialism necessarily denied the dignity of any agrarian based life style.

...if we think of the natural landscapes that surround us as simply, blank slates, existing for humans to act upon them according to our will then we cannot exist in life sustaining harmony with the earth.

The free thinking and non-conformist behavior encouraged in the backwoods was a threat to imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy hence the need to undermine them by creating the notion that folks who inhabited these spaces were ignorant, stupid, inbred, ungovernable. By dehumanizing the hillbilly, the anarchist spirit which empowered poor folks to choose a lifestyle different from that of the state and so called civilized society could be crushed. And if not totally crushed, at least made to appear criminal or suspect

I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream that dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.

We can restore our hopw in a world that transcends race by building communities where self-esteem comes not from feeling superior to any group but from one's relationship to the land, to the people, to the place wherever that may be. When we create beloved community, environments that are anti-racist and inclusive, it need not matter whether those spaces are diverse. What matters is that should difference enter the world of beloved community it can find a place of welcome, a place to belong.

Industrial capitalism was not simply changing the nature of black work life, it altered the communal practices that were so central to survival in the agrarian south. And it fundamentally altered black people's relationship to the body.

To end racism white folks who have accepted unearned white privilege must be willing to forego those rewards and stand down, expressing their solidarity with those who are the most imediate victims of racist assualt and domination.

From the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people share with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Creek Nation run-aways, the "Seminoles," methods for rice cultivation. Native peoples taught recently arrived black folks all about the many uses of corn. (The hotwater cornbread we grew up eating came to our black souther diet from the world of the Indian.) Sharing the reverence for the earth, black and red people helped on another remember that, despite the white man's ways, the land belonged to everyone.

Estrangement from our natural environment is the cultural contest wherein violence against the earth is accepted and normalized. If we do not see earth as a guide to divine spirit, then we cannot see that the human spirit is violated, diminshed when humans violate and destroy the natural environment.

We must seet a value in life that is above and beyond profit motives.

So little has been written abou tthe ways in which living in racial apartheid damaged the psyches of black folks, creating in some of us a pathological fear of whiteness, a fear rooted in unresolved trauma, that there is little open discussion of the way in which this psycho history, the legacy of racialized trauma keeps many black folks fearful of whites, convinced that all white folk have a deep seated will to harm us. This fear and the profound mistrust it engenders is especially intense among poor folks.

There are a few if any public spaces where black folks can express fear of whiteness, be it engendered by rational or irrational states of mind. However, white fear of blackness gains a constant hearing.

Within white supremacist capitalist culture in the United States there has been a concentrated effort to bury the history of the black farmer.

I have found white neighborhoods in all the privileged-class environments I have lived in throughout the United States, including Kentucy, to have as active a presence of racial prejudice as their poor counterparts.

From bell hooks: When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully. I believe this. the ancestors taught me it was so. as a child, I loved playing in dirt, in that rick Kentucky soil, that was a source of life. before I understood anything about the pain and exploitation of the southern system of sharecropping, I understood that grown-up black folks loved the land… from the moment of their first meeting, Native American and African people shared with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Seminoles methods for rice cultivation. Native people taught recently arrived black folks about the many uses of corn. Sharing the reverence for the earth, they helped one another remember that, despite the white man’s ways, the land belonged to everyone. Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body splits made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white-supremacist assumptions about black identity…if we can think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept the mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in the black psyche.

From her I learn about aesthetics, the yearning for beauty that she tells me is the predicament of heart that makes our passion real. A quiltmaker, she teaches me about color. Her house is a place where I am learning to look at things, where I am learning how to belong in space. In rooms full of objects, crowded with things, I am learning to recognize myself.

Aesthetics then is more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming. It is not organic. I grew up in an ugly house. No one there considered the function of beauty or pondered the use of space. Surrounded by dead things, whose spirits had long ago vanished since they were no longer needed, that house contained a great engulfing emptiness. In that house things were not to be looked at, they were to be possessed — space was not to be created but owned — a violent anti-aesthetic. I grew up thinking about art and beauty as it existed in our lives, the lives of poor black people. Without knowing the appropriate language, I understood that advanced capitalism was affecting our capacity to see, that consumerism began to take the place of that predicament of heart that called us to yearn for beauty. Now many of us are only yearning for things.

In one house I learned the place of aesthetics in the lives of agrarian poor black folks. There the lesson was that one had to understand beauty as a force to be made and imagined. Old folks shared their sense that we had come out of slavery into this free space and we had to create a world that would renew the spirit, that would make it lifegiving. In that house there was a sense of history. In the other house, the one I lived in, aesthetics had no place. There the lessons were never about art or beauty, but always only to possess things. My thinking about aesthetics has been informed by the recognition of these houses: one which cultivated and celebrated an aesthetic of existence, rooted in the idea that no degree of material lack could keep one from learning how to look at the world with a critical eye, how to recognize beauty, or how to use it as a force to enhance inner well-being; the other which denied the power of abstract aestheticism.

Giving is the way we also learn how to receive. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love. A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers -- the experience of knowing we always belong.

Cultivating a generous heart, which is, as Salzberg writes, “the primary quality of an awakened mind,” strengthens romantic bonds. Giving is the way we also learn how to receive. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love. A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers—the experience of knowing we always belong.