bell hooks was one of the first Black environmentalists I ever knew

By now, many of you have probably seen the many odes to bell hooks circulating online since her death on Wednesday. What I haven’t seen as much is recognition of bell hooks as one of the most influential writers of color writing and thinking about travel, nature, the POC relationship to the environment — all topics I originally started this blog to explore (This year, I also started teaching a course on these same topics. It wouldn’t have been possible without her influence).

And so I wanted to share some quotes from her book Belonging: A Culture of Place, a book that has so deeply influenced my writing and work in the last few years. In the book, she writes about how leaving her hometown in Kentucky for Stanford University, New York City, and other places that provided her elite career opportunities ultimately felt like “exile,” and left her craving a return to rural life, and made her reconsider her concept of travel, nature, and her idea of home. In the book, she even quotes James Clifford’s Notes on Travel and Theory, which basically poses the questions verbatim that fundamentally drive this blog, and my work in general: 

“How do different populations, classes and genders travel? What kind of knowledge stories and theories do they produce? A crucial research agenda opens up.”

This is all to say: I owe so much of my life to bell hooks. I hope these quotes move your life in the powerful ways they moved mine: 

On travel as a Black woman: 

“From certain standpoints, to travel is to encounter the terrorizing force of white supremacy. To tell my “travel” stories, I must name the movement from a racially segregated southern community, from rural black Baptist origin, to prestigious white university settings…I think that one fantasy of whiteness is that the threatening Other is always a terrorist. This projection enables many white people to imagine there is no representation of whiteness as terror, as terrorizing. Yet it is this representation of whiteness in the black imagination, first learned in the narrow confines of poor black rural communities, that is sustained by my travels to many different locations.”

On the intersections between white racism + capitalism + ecological collapse:

“The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe because he assigned the hard labor, and in that, the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth.” 

“Estrangement from our natural environment is the culture contest wherein violence against the earth is accepted and normalized. If we don’t see the earth as a guide to divine spirit, then we cannot see that the human spirit is violated, diminished when humans violate and destroy the natural environment.” 

On the intentional disconnection of Black communities from nature:  

“There has been little or no work done on the psychological impact of the “great migration” of black people from the agrarian south to the industrialized north……If we think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept a 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. And we can know that when we talk about healing that psyche we must also speak about restoring our connection to the natural world.”

“Erasing the agrarian roots of African American folk was a strategy of domination and colonization used by imperialist white supremacist capitalists to make it impossible for black people to choose self determination.” 

On the intentional degradation of rural life as a tool of capitalism: 

“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”

On finding belonging and home:

 “No one is seeking timeless paradise… what people are seeking is not so much the home they left behind as a place they feel they can change, a place in which their lives and strivings will make a difference.”

“A true home is the place — any place — where growth is nurtured, where there is constancy. “