hooks Honors CMC's Mansfield at Ath
By Claire Becker
Staff Writer

bell hooks agreed to speak-a rare thing for her- Tuesday, March 25th at Claremont McKenna's Athenaeum, in order to honor the late Sue Mansfield, a Claremont McKenna professor who hooks credited with having the courage to work on behalf of social justice and the "capacity to bond with people with whom we have grave differences."

hooks, cultural critic, author, and feminist theorist, spoke in a room whose walls were lined with huge paintings, nearly all of which were portraits of white people. Indeed, it was odd to see hooks speaking in the conservative environment of CMC. hooks herself noted this fact when she mentioned a speaker from the previous week with whose views she strongly disagreed. She wore a black dress, an orange cardigan, and a teal scarf. She didn't stand behind the podium, but leaned on the side of it, casually. Her round faced was framed with black glasses. She spoke with a strong, caring, high-pitched voice.

"I cannot stand before you and not stand against war," hooks said. She quoted Sue Mansfield as saying "We wage war because we are afraid; we are afraid of losing the opportunity to be greedy." Our culture, she postured, is dominated by greed and materialism-"Such a culture is a breeding ground for fascism." She recalled Vietnam war protests, and held up love and hope as the way to approach difficulties.

While many of those in the audience were probably familiar with terms such as "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy," which hooks mentioned in passing as a description of our nation, the audience was not so familiar with, nor, perhaps expectant of, the rich personal anecdotes that hooks told. hooks discussed the argument that some people are biologically predetermined for certain things. She refuted this argument by commenting "People are biologically predetermined to shit where they are." Clearly, what she meant by this was that we have the ability to change. She then mentioned a situation in which she read one of her children's books-with titles such as Happy to be Nappy-in an elementary school. During the question and answer session after she read, a boy raised his hand and said, "I have a zipper. This is the first day I'm wearing pants with a zipper." Take that biology! hooks also spoke of her delight over a small revolution that has recently occurred in the arena of "biological" predetermination: women were once said to be better typists than men because they had smaller fingers, but when computers became integral to all of our lives, men very quickly learned how to type for themselves, rarely complaining about the hindrance of big fingers.

hooks also spoke a great deal about her fundamentalist Christian parents. When she left Kentucky to go to college at Stanford they apparently told her, "California is Babylon. Satan is waiting. You must choose people to be with who are like yourself." While she disagrees with many of her parents' viewpoints, they have found a way to come together through love. hooks credited Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön with the recommendation that "If you want to teach people, you have to start where they are." In this way, hooks said, CMC students can try to understand people at the college who do not welcome diversity as others wish they would. We should not condemn people, but rather try to understand them, she explained, "We have to be more sophisticated in teaching people…"

In teaching what feminism is, for example, hooks suggested we look to Jehovah's witnesses and Alcoholics Anonymous, because their approaches to spreading a message cut through all class boundaries. She explained that we cannot confine ourselves to colleges, universities, and books, or we will make no further progress in any movement we stand behind.

The structure, or non-structure, of hooks's speech was evident and intentional. hooks covered a great variety of topics and used many different methods to do so. When the speech was over she added, "I hope you noticed that my talk sounded a bit fragmented." "We're in a shifting time," she said, "and it's hard to represent that with the same structures." She went on to say that in changing times, everything doesn't fit orderly. I found this at first to be sort of a cop-out-I tend to like a well-structured speech-but upon reflection, I realize how true her comments were. Sometimes traditional structures don't work. There is too much to be covered, too much happening to focus tightly. I think that the occasion of hooks's speech and the time in which she spoke made it appropriate and effective for her to do away with traditional structure.

It was a pleasure to get bell hooks's wise perspective in this time of war, a time in which many of us have a heightened awareness of just how strongly we disagree with the state of our nation.