Salvation: Black People and Love. - Review - book review

Salvation: Black People and Love by bell hooks Morrow, William & Co., January 2001 $22.00, ISBN 0-060-18494-9

From the book's title, it might appear to the uninitiated that bell hooks has added to the never-ending stream of self-help books on inner healing or religious transformation. To some extent she has, but this is more of a society-help book--a manual for fixing our culture. What is missing in modern humanity, hooks argues, is love of self that is not narcissistic, and a love of each other, and of all humankind, that seeks a social good beyond ethnic, economic, political or personal self-interest.

As an unabashedly feminist cultural critic and scholar, she has written 17 books, earning international acclaim as a visionary, particularly on topics of race and gender politics. In her recent book, All About Love: New Visions, she carried her readers on a journey toward understanding love in all its forms, defining it as an action, not a feeling, and harnessing it to address national and international concerns. In Salvation, she pushes us still farther to embrace "a love ethic" in all that we do, addressing not just African Americans and not even individuals so much as citizens of the world. Yet, she does not let blacks off the hook either, and her words are not always comforting.

In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, she gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to help process. She examines historic patterns of white supremacy. That is the term she chooses over "racism" to account for random acts of complicity by our own kind that serve to maintain the status quo. hooks unflinchingly maps out how these patterns, including the color-caste system, contribute to the still-troubling status of African Americans today. "Teaching black folks to hate dark skin was one way to ensure that whether white oppressors were present or not, the values of white supremacy could still rule the day," she writes.

One of the book's major contributions, however, is its probing analysis of how the mass media--entertainment and news--helps to shape what we think about ourselves and what others think of us. "We live in a society where we are daily confronting negative images of blackness," she continues. "It takes courage and vigilance to create a context where self-love can emerge."

Recalling such philosophers as Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus Christ and the guru Marianne Williamson, hooks calls for cultivating love, atonement and forgiveness to cure national ills.

"Making the choice to love can heal our wounded spirits and our body politic," hooks concludes. "It is the deepest revolution, the turning away from the world as we know it, toward the world we must make if we are to be one with the planet--one healing heart giving and sustaining life. Love is our hope and our salvation."

Angela Dodson, a BIBR contributing editor, lives in New Jersey.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Cox, Matthews & Associates
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group