- Read (or listen to) the following articles:
hooks’ “Killing Rage”.pdf. Before reading and answering the questions about this article, learn more here about who bell hooks is. It’s always a good idea to do some research on the authors you are reading for your college courses, and to investigate the context of the texts you are assigned.
Johnson’s Why You Should Stop Saying ‘Slut…’.pdf
Listen to this podcast interview of bell hooks on the “Roots of male violence against women” (this is a 9 minute audio program)
- While reading hooks’ “Killing Rage,” write down your responses to these Reading Questions, and then upload your responses to the text box below. Be prepared to share your responses with your classmates.
How does the style in which this chapter was written affect you as the reader?
How is rage “potentially healing,” rather than “pathological”? (hooks 12). How can we express anger in a positive and/or constructive way?
Students have pointed out in the past that the “militant rage” hooks encourages people of color, especially African-Americans, to express could be misconstrued as falling into the stereotype of an angry or violent person of color. What do you think hooks’ response to that might be?
White people “claim to fear that black people will hurt them even though there is no evidence which suggests that black people routinely hurt white people in this or any other culture…Now, black people are routinely assaulted and harassed by white people in white supremacist culture. This violence is condoned by the state. It is necessary for the maintenance of racial difference” (hooks 15). Respond to this quotation, and the extensive evidence that supports it.
When have you felt rage in response to feeling silenced, targeted, or oppressed due to age, class, disability, sexual orientation, race, gender expression, or religion? Do you think that expressing that rage might be a form of resistance for you? [Resistance as a method of engaging in the struggle for agency and personal liberation by fighting back against the oppressive forces in your life.]
What does hooks describe as the large-scale, personal effects of the suppression of rage, particularly black rage?
This chapter is taken from hooks’ deeply compelling book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism. This tells us how she wants the chapter, and by extension the whole book, to be read: as a method for ending racism.