We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

by bell hooks

Overview

"When women get together and talk about men, the news is almost always bad news," writes bell hooks. "If the topic gets specific and the focus is on black men, the news is even worse."

In this powerful new book, bell hooks arrests our attention from the first page. Her title--WeReal Cool; her subject--the way in which both white society and weak black leaders are failing black men and youth. Her subject is taboo: "this is a culture that does not love black males:" "they are not loved by white men, white women, black women, girls or boys. And especially, black men do not love themselves. How could they? How could they be expected to love, surrounded by so much envy, desire, and hate?"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135880545
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/02/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	184
File size:	399 KB

About the Author

bell hooks is one of our leading social and cultural critics. Among her more than twenty books is Salvation:Black People and Love and Rock My Soul: Black People andSelf-Esteem. Four titles are published by Routledge: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice ofFreedom, Outlaw Culture, Reel to Real, and Where WeStand: Class Matters.

Table of Contents

1. Preface: about black men: don't believe the hype
2. chapter 1: plantation patriarchy
3. chapter 2: gangsta culture: a piece of the action
4. chapter 3: schooling black men
5. chapter 4: don't make me hurt you: black male violence
6. chapter 5: it's a dick thing: beyond sexual acting out
7. chapter 6: from angry boys to angry me
8. chapter 7: waiting for daddy to come home
9. chapter 8: doing the love do
10. chapter 9: healing the hurt
11. chapter 10: the coolness of being real

Editorial Reviews

Veteran pundit hooks unpacks the explosive contents of Gwendolen Brooks's famous 1960 poem "The Pool Players: Seven at the Golden Shovel," taking her title from the opening of the poem. Like Brooks, hooks worries about the men in her life, black men experiencing crises of masculinity as prisoners (sometimes literally) of patriarchal imperialism. Hooks argues that black men have become chary of the simple goodness of being loved. From George Jackson's Soledad Brother to Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption, hooks finds that black men are taught violence and aggression as the keys to survival, an ideology that is reified in the lucrative gangs-and-guns side of hip-hop music and culture. Mainstream culture inculcates fear of black men, rewarding them most when they act out the "Native Son" role of brutal psychopath to confirm that fear, la the intensive media coverage of the Nicole Brown Simpson murder. Malcolm X, moving away from black separatism toward a politics of global justice, was gunned down by "state-supported black-on-black violence." Hooks attacks the stereotype of the older black woman as powerful matriarch, fiercely independent of men. In reality, she says, "most black women have been more than willing to surrender control over their hard-earned resources to the men in their lives: father, brothers, lovers, and husbands." Hooks, a writer of extraordinary skill, pads out her insights with lengthy quotations from many sources, which thin but don't fully dilute her revolutionary message of love. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"We Real Cool is a slim book, but it's fat (or phat) with ideas on how to encourage black men to be their real selves in the truest sense of the word." -- Karen Grigsby Bates, Ms. Winter
"I read the first page of the preface holding my nose because I am sick of listening to others tell me who I am. I am out of patience with being the topic of someone's ill-informed master's thesis, dissertation, newspaper feature and magazine article. As I read on, though, Hooks put me at ease with her insight, honesty and clear prose...hooks writes to bring attention to the crossroads at which the black male stands. On one side is his very survival and perhaps his redemption. On the other is his enduring marginalization and even extinction." -- Bill Maxwell, St. Petersburg Times
"The black American feminist writer-critic and social commentator bell hooks is strong meat. Take the way she spells her name, militantly lower case. She uses terms that can scare the horses: imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It can never be said of this writer that she doesn't set her shop-stall up right from the beginning. In her latest work, We Real Cool: BlackMen and Masculinity, hooks states in the preface that these incendiary terms are her terms of reference." -- The Independent

From the Publisher