keep up the struggle in difficult times

On The Week, I saw a book list titled Brene Brown's 6 Favorite books that inspire bravery. It's a great reading list and I loved seeing Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks. It's a great book and if you like it, you should also read Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope also by bell hooks. Teaching Community is a book we all need right now.

 From Publishers Weekly:

Readers of hooks's prolific body of work on feminism, racism, cultural politics, art and education will find much that is familiar here. Grounded in autobiography and storytelling and written for an intelligent lay audience, these essays exhort readers to keep up the struggle in difficult times. A distinguishing characteristic of hooks's work is the challenge to recognize, confront and overcome "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy," a recurring phrase that captures her hallmark theme: oppression occurs at the intersections of race, gender and the dominant economic system.

Some of my favorite parts:

We need mass-based political movements calling citizens of this nation to uphold democracy and the rights of everyone to be educated, and to work on behalf of ending domination in all its forms - to work for justice, changing our educational system so that schooling is not the site where students are indoctrinated to support imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy or any ideology, but rather where they learn to open their minds, to engage in rigorous study and to think critically. 

In education especially, this community connects us with the... 'great things' of the world, and with 'the grace of great things' ...We are in community with all of these great things, and great teaching is about knowing that community, and then drawing your students into it. 

Certainly as democratic educators we have to work to find ways to teach and share knowledge in a manner that does not reinforce existing structures of domination (those of race, gender, class, and religious hierarchies). 

Whether or not any of us become racists is a choice we make. And we are called to choose again and again where we stand on the issue of racism at different moments in our life. 

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

I highly recommend this book to teachers, facilitators, leaders  -  or for anyone interested in deconstructing racism and the existing structures of mysogyny, and kyriarchy.