Things seen differently boggle your prejudices

For two nights now I’ve sat in The Met listening to Get Lit! headline speakers talk about … different things.

bell hooks (and that’s how she spells her pen name, which my Microsoft Word program keeps wanting to correct) spoke on Wednesday about – and here’s a short list taken from my notebook – the power of love, accountability, her “fundamentalist Christian parents,” capitalism, Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh , blame, her lesbian sister, Spike Lee ’s sexism, Lee’s documentary “4 Little Girls,” patriarchy, Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X …

And that was all just in her 29-minute talk. In the question-and-answer session that followed, she continued:

A woman said that she attended a commencement address that hooks gave, and she said that her “bigoted” family hated what hooks had to say. That’s why, hooks said, she refuses to give college commencement addresses anymore: People tend to misconstrue what she has to say.

She decried how the power that “greed” has, pointing to the people who, she said, “are using money that should go to food and shelter to play the lottery.”

When Wal-Mart, she said, “comes into a town of 8,000 and is open 24 hours, it really changes things.”

Life can be hard, hooks said, but she added that it was during her teen years “that she wanted to kill herself the most.”

She said that her mother told her that if he just prayed to Jesus she wouldn’t have to write books. “I said, ‘Oh, mother, I did pray to Jesus. And he said, “Write, bell, write!” ’ ”

In talking about the sexism and racism in “Harry Potter” and the books of Alexander McCall Smith – who, she said, “is one of my favorite mystery writers” – hooks said, “We don’t have to live in an either-or world,” she said. “Things don’t have to be all good or all bad. We just have to learn to be discerning.”

In ridiculing the clichﾎd notion that “You always hurt the one you love,” hooks distinguished between “loving” and “caring for.” “You can’t love somebody and abuse them,” she said.

In response to a teacher who said that his school district was holding him and others to a strict accountability in terms of results, particularly the WASL testing , hooks said, “I really don’t like the use of the word accountability. I prefer fascist surveillance.”

“Accountability,” hooks said, is a word that tends to be complicated. In the Duke lacrosse team and the alleged rape of a young woman, she said it wasn’t “blaming” the young woman to question her decision to put herself in a dangerous situation. There’s no contradiction, she said, in saying that what (allegedly) happened to her was wrong and still question whether she did everything she could to protect herself.

As for the notion of forgiveness, hooks said that didn’t negate the obligation of punishment. “I think we have to forgive and yet hold people accountable.”

Below: bell hooks challenged the accepted view of life that much of America holds during her talk Wednesday as part of Get Lit! 2006.

Washington Post photo