I am privileged. Every day this quarter, every person that I’ve met, that I’ve worked with, every book that I’ve read, everything points to how privileged I am to work in an institution of higher learning. This website is just one way of many that I want to use to acknowledge that privilege to empower others.
I got to attend a workshop/dialogue with bell hooks. I wish I had asked people who didn’t get to attend what questions they wanted to ask her because all I honestly didn’t know what to ask her. There was so much, yet not enough.
bell hooks got her Ph.D from UC Santa Cruz. In the workshop she talked about how hard it was for her to come back to this place. And being in Santa Cruz is hard. At the Student of Color Conference – a space we had to create for ourselves – I was constantly reminded that the real word sucks and that women need to be empowered to speak up. And that’s Santa Cruz today, with the works of bell hooks, with money for student-initiated outreach, with Engaging Education. The UC Santa Cruz of bell hooks’ day must have been something else altogether.
But hooks wasn’t scared of coming back to the same UC Santa Cruz of the 1980s. She wasn’t scared of white people constantly asserting privileges, or having to clue someone in on the role of race in, say, water rights. She already figured out, “White people are crazy!” as she told us happily. She didn’t want to come back because she said there were other women of color who were dying without hearing people praise their works. She mentioned Octavia Butler, who died in January of 2006, and began to cry. It was such an honest moment – one of many during that hour and a half we spent with her – and I remembered my own feelings of unexplainable loss when I found out.
hooks dedicated the main talk to Ruth Frankenberg who died earlier this year. Frankenberg also got her Ph.D from UCSC and a lot of the older members of the audience truly appreciated that.
It was a memorable experience, from her surprising down-to-earth manner, the friendly way she learned and used our names and her straightforward answers. She let you know when you were wrong, often with humor. She was as real and as powerful as her words. But she was physically fragile; she wasn’t able to come earlier this year because of that.
I admire her so much and thank her from the bottom of my heart for her courage.
Peace,
-a.
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