bell hooks Class Quotations

As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.

Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.

Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world.

None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.

Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

Yearning is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice.

A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women.

What's so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy.

The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women's studies classes and said, "Black women have always worked."