Charmaine Crawford, affiliate professor of Africana Research at Kent State, speaks on the “Speaker on the Path: The Phrases and the Works of bell hooks” occasion on the Williamson Home on Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022.
Stepping as much as the microphone, Cassie Pegg-Kirby welcomed a gaggle of in-person and digital friends to the most recent of Kent State’s occasions within the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration sequence – “Seeker on the Path”: The Phrases and Works of bell hooks.
“That is our providing to the group,” mentioned Pegg-Kirby, director of the Ladies’s Middle. Together with a number of of her colleagues, she was grieving the current lack of creator and activist bell hooks after they produced the thought of a celebration honoring what Pegg-Kirby calls “the continued legacy and the way her work and phrases proceed to influence us.”
Friends arrived in an surroundings curated to be inclusive, a room within the Williamson Home full with gentle jazz music, individually-wrapped cookies and buckets to succeed in in and pull out hooks’ famed quotes.
First to share her ideas was Heaven Brown, a senior at Bio-Med Science Academy and intern for the Ladies’s Middle. Her first encounter with bell hooks got here by way of the ebook “Ain’t I a Lady?” Brown shared her perspective that the idea of the “sturdy Black girl” is an “exhausting normal” to succeed in.
“I don’t assume that survival ought to be equated with superpowers,” she mentioned, explaining that Black girls are on the heart of race and gender violence.
Members of the Kent State group have been joined by school from Berea School, the place hooks taught from 2004 to her demise in Dec. 2021. The attendees shared quotes honoring her legacy.
“For me, she’s gone too quickly,” mentioned Affiliate Professor of Africana Research Charmaine Crawford, as she cracked open the yellow paperback of hooks’ “Educating to Transgress.”
Crawford first encountered hooks when researching for a paper on Black girls and work, when her professor photocopied the primary chapter of “Ain’t I a Lady?” for her. Years later, she purchased the stack of books she introduced along with her tonight.
She first mentioned how hooks was in a position to study intersectionality and the exploitation of black girls’s our bodies “with a boldness and a fearlessness.”
bell hooks referenced Martin Luther King Jr. in a passage Crawford shared from “Educating to Transgress.” King believed “we needed to embrace ‘true values’ to maneuver ahead into therapeutic.”
“Justice happens in a number of varieties, proper? Political, financial and social, but it surely additionally happens on the epistemic stage in relation to like and care and group,” Crawford mentioned.
Idris Syed, affiliate professor of Africana research and Kent State alum, and affiliate English lecturer Denise Harrison, each shared how hooks impressed them to be susceptible within the classroom.
“Now we have to permit these sharp edges to point out and we’ve got to keep in mind that the classroom is probably the most radical house in American society,” Syed mentioned. “And bell hooks’ work will proceed to dwell with us endlessly due to these ideas.”
hooks is well-known for her prose, in addition to the poetry that the Wick Poetry Middle Director David Hassler highlighted. He learn from “Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place,” her examination of her Kentucky roots, during which she “holds grief and reward in every hand equally knowledgeable by her love.”
Scholar leaders Chazzlyn Jackson and Zaria Johnson shared how hooks had affected them as Black girls and leaders. Johnson, senior journalism main and editor-in-chief of The Kent Stater, shared the affirming portrayal of black rage in “Killing Attain: Ending Racism.”
Jackson, senior Africana research main and president of United Scholar Authorities, discovered of hooks in Crawford’s class the place she learn the ebook “Speaking Again: Considering Feminist, Considering Black.”
“I discovered to embrace my voice and be affirmed as a black girl – one thing that’s nonetheless an ongoing lesson for positive right here in America, but it surely actually jump-started after studying this ebook and Dr. Crawford’s class,” Jackson mentioned.
This authenticity was echoed all through this system, and particularly within the quote behind the occasion’s title, “Seeker within the Path: The Phrases and Works of bell hooks.”
“If I have been actually requested to outline myself, I wouldn’t begin with race. I wouldn’t begin with blackness. I wouldn’t begin with gender. I wouldn’t begin with feminism,” hooks mentioned in an interview with Tricycle.
“I might begin with stripping down what essentially informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the trail.”
After this system, senior schooling research main Taiwo Mack shared her historical past with hooks. Mack was raised within the south, the place Black girls lecturers have been her secure house and radicalized her love for studying.
“What folks touched on so much was her vulnerability, her radical vulnerability,” Mack mentioned, referring to how she plans to make use of bell hooks to encourage her future college students. “Exhibiting up authentically is one thing that excites me.”
Sophie Younger is a reporter. Contact her at [email protected]