Bell hooks and JD Vance

Bell hooks AKA Gloria Jean Watkins

I hope you get some pleasure from this revelation. I did and it explained what I had needed to know.

bell hooks (born September 25, 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, U.S.—died December 15, 2021, Berea, Kentucky) was an American scholar and activist whose work examined the connections between race, gender, and class. She often explored the varied perceptions of Black women and Black women writers and the development of feminist identities bell hooks (born September 25, 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, U.S.—died December 15, 2021, Berea, Kentucky) was an American scholar and activist whose work examined the connections between race, gender, and class. She often explored the varied perceptions of Black women and Black women writers and the development of feminist identities.

Watkins grew up in a segregated community of the American South. At age 19 she began writing what would become her first full-length book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which was published in 1981. She studied English literature at Stanford University (B.A., 1973), the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1976), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (Ph.D., 1983).

Hooks assumed her pseudonym, the name of her great-grandmother, to honour female legacies; she preferred to spell it in all lowercase letters to focus attention on her message rather than herself. She taught English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California from the mid-1970s, African and Afro-American studies at Yale University during the ’80s, women’s studies at Oberlin College and English at the City College of New York during the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2004 she became a professor in residence at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. The bell hooks Institute was founded at the college in 2014.

In the 1980s hooks established a support group for Black women called the Sisters of the Yam, which she later used as the title of a book, published in 1993, celebrating Black sisterhood.

But this is what brought me to the post today!
Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002), and the companion books We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2003) and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004). 
And JD Vance, who has done something he almost certainly never intended: he has helped a Black feminist reach the New York Times bestseller list. More than two decades after bell hooks published “Communion: The Female Search for Love,” and nearly five years after her death, the book landed on the paperback bestseller list for the first time in June. Its sales were up 1,000% over the year before, driven by readers who went looking for it after Vance announced a memoir of the very same name.

bell hooks wrote about whatever she thought was being ignored — racism, poverty, patriarchy, and, in her later years, love, which she took as seriously as any of them. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, she took her pen name from her great-grandmother and kept it deliberately lowercase, wanting readers to attend to the substance of the books rather than to the woman who wrote them.

She published more than forty of them before her death in 2021, among them the landmark “Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.” The one now climbing the charts, “Communion,” is a 2002 meditation on love — on how women have been taught to search for it everywhere except within themselves, and how learning to love oneself is the work of a lifetime.

Vance’s “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” released in June, is a memoir of his conversion to Catholicism and the way his faith has shaped his politics, and its title is a word-for-word match with hooks’s. It isn’t the first time one of his titles has echoed one of hers: his 2016 “Hillbilly Elegy” shares both its defining term and its subject with hooks’s 2012 poetry collection “Appalachian Elegy,” each of them an elegy for the same mountains.

Whether by coincidence or design, Vance has never said, declining to comment through his publisher, and HarperCollins — which publishes them both — maintains that the resemblance is accidental and that the books have nothing to do with one another. Twice is harder to wave off. He’s just another MAGA hack and a heretic!

Whitney Alese, a content creator in Philadelphia who has been reading hooks since college, saw the announcement this spring and decided the answer wasn’t to fight his book but to buy hers — a case she began making to the nearly 150,000 people who follow her online. Her videos spread widely, a few drawing more than 800,000 views, and the conversation they set off grew large enough that Alese opened a free online book club devoted to “Communion,” which more than five thousand people joined. Her thinking was straightforward: hooks’s book was about love, and love seemed a better use of everyone’s energy than outrage.

The independent bookstores — the ones that had been keeping hooks on their shelves for years, whether anyone was asking for her or not — did the rest. Just Book-ish in Boston sold through its first fifty copies and ordered a hundred more, stacking them where no customer could miss them. The Word Is Change, a Brooklyn bookshop, posted its own appeal on Instagram without ever typing his name: if any book called Communion was going to make the bestseller list that week, the store wrote, let it be the one bell hooks wrote.

12. Gale Greenlee, a literary scholar co-editing a forthcoming volume about her, has said that hooks died afraid she would be forgotten. She was not forgotten. She was read instead, argued over, pressed into the hands of strangers — and her book was lifted onto a list it had never reached in the twenty-four years since she wrote it, by thousands of ordinary people who used the only leverage available to them, which was their voices and their money and one another. It entered the Times paperback list at No. 12.

It was an argument she made all her life — that speaking is how the powerless make themselves real — and she once compressed it into eight words. “Coming to voice,” she wrote, “is an act of resistance.

This article came in just when I needed a hard-hitting piece to show more WH players failings. I hope this piece coming to voice shuts up JD’s hypocrisy. I needed to show how low he goes to elevate himself. It’s what bell hooks wrote about and what JD “lifted” from someone much more talented than himself.