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We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
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About We Real Cool: Black Men And Masculinity
From Booklist Hooks asserts that black men have been so dehumanized that they are in crisis emotionally and at risk within society. Yet she posits that the greatest threat to black life in America is patriarchal thinking and practices. She points to the current instability of black male employment in contrast to improved employment opportunities for black women, something many black men have trouble accepting because of the cultural dictates that men should dominate women. Too many black men face a host of troubling social dynamics--including alienation from their fathers and their children. Hooks advises them to emulate the many black women who turn to self-examination and self-love and to break with the macho demands and values of a patriarchal culture. Although hooks is heavily feminist in her critique, her recollections of her own family experiences and growing up black in America reflect extraordinary insight into both our cultural frailties and our potential. Readers interested in black cultural issues from a feminist perspective will enjoy this book. Vernon Ford Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Product Description "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?" From Publishers Weekly 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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review "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 a
