Teaching Community Quotes

 Teaching Community by bell hooks

Open Preview

“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like..I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“Whether or not any of us become racists is a choice we make. And we are called to choose again and again where we stand on the issue of racism at different moments in our life.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“Like many white liberals, Ken sees the “whiteness” of his social life as more an accident of circumstance than a choice. He would welcome greater diversity in the neighbourhood. However, he does not consciously do enough work either in his social life or in the larger community to make that diversity possible.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“It is my deep belief that in talking about the past, in understanding the things that have happened to us we can heal and go forward. Some people believe that it is best to put the past behind you, to never speak about the events that have happened that have hurt or wounded us, and this is their way of coping —but coping is not healing. By confronting the past without shame we are free of its hold on us.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“White people who want people of color to do the work for them, who want us to draw the map and then carry them on our back down the road that ends racism are still playing out the servant/served paradigm.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy selfesteem in students as it promotes their capacity to be aware and live consciously. It teaches them to reflect and act in ways that further self-actualization, rather than conformity to the status quo.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“No one, no matter how intelligent and skillful at critical thinking, is protected against the subliminal suggestions that imprint themselves on our unconscious brain if we are watching hours and hours of television.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“We refuse to allow either/or thinking to cloud our judgment. We embrace the logic of both/and. We acknowledge the limits of what we know.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“Liberation of the Spirit

As a girl, touched by the mystical dimensions of Christian faith, I felt the presence of the Beloved in my heart: the oneness of our life. At that time, when I had not yet learned the right language, I knew only that despite the troubles of my world, the suffering I witnessed around and within me, there was always available a spiritual force that could lift me higher, that could give me moments of transcendent bliss wherein I could surrender all thought of the world and know profound peace.
Early on, my heart had been touched by its delight. I knew its rapture. Early on, I made a commitment to be a seeker on the path: a seeker after truth. I was determined to live a life in the spirit. The black theologian James Cone says that our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived:

'If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to prepare for it; for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.'

In reflecting on my youth, I emphasize the mystical dimension of the Christian faith because it was that aspect of religious experience that I found to be truly liberatory. The more fundamental religious beliefs that were taught to me urging blind obedience to authority and acceptance of oppressive hierarchies-- this didn't move me. no, it was those mystical experiences that enabled me to understand and recognize the realm of being in a spiritual experience that transcends both authority and law.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“Working within the conventional corporate academic world where the primary goals of institutions is to sell education and produce a professional managerial class schooled in the art of obedience to authority and accepting of dominator-based hierarchy, I often felt as though I was in the dysfunctional family of my childhood where I was often in the outsider position and scapegoated, viewed as both mad and yet a threat.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“No one, no matter how intelligent and skillful at critical thinking, is protected against the subliminal suggestions that imprint themselves on our unconscious brain if we are watching hours and hours of television. In the United States television has become primarily a series of spectacles that perpetuate and maintain the ideology of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus on resolution, we take away hope.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“changing our educational system so that schooling is not the site where students are indoctrinated to support imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy or any ideology, but rather where they learn to open their minds, to engage in rigorous study and to think critically.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“Hopefulness empowers us to continue our work for justice even as the forces of injustice may gain greater power for a time.” (xiv)”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“The classroom is one of the most dynamic work settings precisely because we are given such a short amount of time to do so much.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“When despair prevails we cannot create life-sustaining communities of resistance. Paulo Friere reminds us that “without a vision for tomorrow hope is impossible.” Our visions for tomorrow are most vital when they emerge from the concrete circumstances of change we are experiencing right now.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“When despair prevails we cannot create life-sustaining communities of resistance.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus on resolution, we take away hope. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope