How bell hooks got me through a tumultuous year

[AngelOfThyNight]

How bell hooks got me through a tumultuous year

In 2004, while waiting for customers at the local coffee shop where I worked in Berea, Kentucky, I wrote in my notebook, "The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin." I read bell hooks's "Communion: The Search for Female Love" -- the book from which this line is taken and whose words have stayed with me ever since -- during my free time at work, storing it under the cash register when I had customers. I had discovered "Ain't I a Woman" -- hooks's most famous book -- in a women's studies course at Berea College. It was my first encounter with a more inclusive idea of feminism, one that centered the experience, history and labor of Black women.

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