bell hooks: Don't you think the biggest lie of our contemporary liberation movements is that who you fuck radicalizes you?
OTI: It's the biggest lie.
bell hooks: And it also ends up becoming a defense of heterosexism. It says people are incapable of choosing political allegiances, that our political allegiances always come through the body. It's who we're fucking or who we're eating with and our political allegiance doesn't have to be more complex than that. There's no doubt in my mind that any person who attempts to live openly as a gay person in this culture encounters the fierce assault of homophobia. But what we should know from the situation of gay people of all colours and black people of all sexual preferences is that simply being a victim does not radicalize your consciousness. If that was the case, we would all be fighting the revolution right now together and he fact is we're not because people want heir particular form of victimhood to end with caring about what the implications of that are for other people. I think that what's really happening around the gay rights movement in this culture has become profoundly conservative. Pro-family values. We want to be just like you. We want to get married and have our nice homes. We have to move past the idea that our sexual preferences will radicalize our consciousness. Essentialized identity, whether it is race or sex, sexuality, etc. and the notion that just being the victim of something will enlighten you is also the big lie
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OTI: Do you think there is anything important
let me rephrase that question. What of importance is coming out of the academy?
bell hooks: I don't have any trouble with the question you ask which is, is anything radical and subversive coming out of the academy? What continues to be subversive about the academy is that the classroom remains a place for education for critical consciousness.
The primary site of genocide for black people right now in America is the public school system. It's not poverty: Black people have always been poor. Masses of black people are richer today than we've ever been in our history in this country. So the question is not a genocide that is rooted simply and solely in poverty, it's the condition of the poverty. I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can't read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance.
OTI: Do you see any conflict between women seeking positions of power and that power being firmly based in what you call white supremacist capitalist patriarchy?
bell hooks: Contradiction is the stuff of revolutionary struggle. The point is not to deny the reality of contradiction but to utilize the space of contradiction to come to a greater understanding. I have no trouble with any of us using the wealth we have accumulated within the existing social structure to undermine that structure. I'm much more interested in how you might want to undermine the structure with your resources than criticizing you for the fact that you have inherited resources, or that you have sold out your radical book to be re-made into some bullshit movie. I feel like forgiveness and reclamation and reconciliation are essential to revolution as well. And if nothing else, the tragedy of China and other places should show us the necessity of forgiveness and reclamation and reconciliation – which is to say that I'm quite happy for us all to begin where we are.
<...> So I think the point is not to think that the contradictions undermine us, but to work with the contradictions in the hope of creating the space of radical opposition; that marginal space within an existing structure where we can continue to fight for freedom.