Product Description

Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection - personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest - on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62303 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780415929134
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Library Journal
This incisive examination of class is rooted in cultural critic hooks's (All About Love) personal experience, political commitment, and social theory, which links gender, race, and class. Starting with her working-class childhood, the author illustrates how everyday interactions reproduce class hierarchy while simultaneously denying its existence. Because she sustains an unflinching gaze on both her own personal motivations and on persistent social structures, hooks provides a valuable framework for discussing such difficult and unexplored areas as greed, the quest to live simply, the ruling-class co-optation of youth through popular culture, and real estate speculation as an instrument of racism. Although the reading level and the price are both steep, this title is highly recommended for most public libraries and academic social science collections.DPaula R. Dempsey, DePaul Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"[A]n engaging, thought-provoking memoir." -- Boston Herald

Where We Stand: Class Matters is a statement of self, reaching through all of those selves who think properly on class, to embrace a society transformed by redistribution...hooks moves analytically to grasp what so many theorists of our time have evaded. -- Literary Review of Canada
hooks's story is both inspiration and cautionary tale. -- Washington Post
hooks delves into the deep divisions of class, socio-economics, and race that are too often lightly stepped around and avoided and brings them out, lays them on the table, and helps us bravely through the pieces and make sense of them. -- Black Issues Book Review
hooks is often refreshing simply because she says so clearly what she really means. No academic rigamarole or mystical jargon for her. The good news is that such occasionally awkward phrases...are sometimes preludes to her seamless depictions of the complex cultural nuances that make up contemporary American culture. -- The Washington Post Book World
This incisive examination of class is rooted in cultural critic hooks personal experience, political commitment, and social theory, which links gender, race, and class. Starting with her working-class childhood, the author illustrates how everyday interactions reproduce class hierarchy while simultaneously denying its existence. Because she sustains an unflinching gaze on both her own personal motivations and on persistent social structures, hooks provides a valuable framework for discussing such difficult and unexplored areas as greed, the quest to live simply, the ruling-class co-optation of youth through popular culture, and real estate speculation as an instrument of racism. -- Library Journal
[A]n engaging, thought-provoking memoir. -- Boston Herald
In often-evocative prose, bell hooks utilizes her own life to quickly 'get to the heart of matters,' developing insights and pithy truths that resonate long after her books are put down. Where We Stand is a deeply felt rendering that engages us through descriptions of her childhood and her process of coming to class awareness. -- NSWA Journal

Where We Stand: Class Matters is a statement of self, reaching through all of those selves who think properly on class, to embrace a society transformed by redistribution...hooks moves analytically to grasp what so many theorists of our time have evaded. -- Literary Review of Canada
hookss story is both inspiration and cautionary tale. -- Washington Post
hooks delves into the deep divisions of class, socio-economics, and race that are too often lightly stepped around and avoided and brings them out, lays them on the table, and helps us bravely through the pieces and make sense of them. -- Black Issues Book Review
hooks is often refreshing simply because she says so clearly what she really means. No academic rigamarole or mystical jargon for her. The good news is that such occasionally awkward phrases...are sometimes preludes to her seamless depictions of the complex cultural nuances that make up contemporary American culture. -- The Washington Post Book World
This incisive examination of class is rooted in cultural critic hooks personal experience, political commitment, and social theory, which links gender, race, and class. Starting with her working-class childhood, the author illustrates how everyday interactions reproduce class hierarchy while simultaneously denying its existence. Because she sustains an unflinching gaze on both her own personal motivations and on persistent social structures, hooks provides a valuable framework for discussing such difficult and unexplored areas as greed, the quest to live simply, the ruling-class co-optation of youth through popular culture, and real estate speculation as an instrument of racism. -- Library Journal
[A]n engaging, thought-provoking memoir. -- Boston Herald
In often-evocative prose, bell hooks utilizes her own life to quickly get to the heart of matters, developing insights and pithy truths that resonate long after her books are put down. Where We Stand is a deeply felt rendering that engages us through descriptions of her childhood and her process of coming to class awareness. -- NSWA Journal

About the Author
Bell Hooks has published three books with Routledge: Teaching to Transgress, Reel to Reel, and Outlaw Culture. Her most recent publications are All About Love and her children's book Happy to Be Nappy.

Customer Reviews

Towards a Just Society
I recommend this book. This is the first bell hooks I have read, and was deeply impressed by her clear, rooted moral position on the state of American and global society. Her writing in this piece shifts from a narrative of her own history growing up in the South, to a present academic, political critique of today.
I found her writing fluid and her point of view significant. As a black woman in America and someone who has experienced lower and upper class existence and the according journey between them, her perspective is complex, making her voice deep and necessary.
In no way can I specify difference with this book. She calls for a morally just society, which denounces the consumerism that perpetuates exploitation, racism, sexism while it is advertised and fantasized about as a life pursuit. Seeing the current issue of Newsweek's cover story, titled "How to Win," regarding a CEO's expertise in making money and succeeding the "American way," immediately brought Where We Stand into consideration.
This book is a call to action, and an illumination of the depressing and unjust, cruel and foolish system which ignores and is afraid of reforming itself enough to allow for "a world where we can all have enough to live fully and well."
I particularly appreciated her chapters on living simply, and think it is an appropriate and bold call to make in a place where stuff and acquisition are social symbols of significance.
To conclude, I found this description of class from page 103, by Rita Mae Brown, to be important: "Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act."

Review on bell hooks Where We Stand
Reading bell hooks, Where We Stand, was a challenge in itself. I had never thought of myself as being racist or having strong bias against any one group of people, but I did find myself getting angry with some of the things that she wrote about. I thought in the beginning that she painted a very sad harsh picture of her life growing up, and the trials she had to go through to get where she wanted to be. They were long and hard days, but she did get there. What I was most frustrated with was her repetitive nature. It was almost like she was going to make sure we GOT IT! I just think that when someone is on a soapbox about something they beat the subject matter into their audience's head until it is no longer interesting. I found myself becoming defensive about things. I got frustrated with her at times, but then I read on and began to see the injustices that were out there. Making it unfair in many different ways for blacks. I particularly felt strong about a chapter dealing with real estate, and how it is manipulated by "desirables" to keep "the undesirables" out. It is sad to think that you can put a dollar amount on the color of a person's skin. I felt ashamed at times, thinking the same things perhaps at one time or another. This reading has helped me grow as a person and it opened me up to the ways of the world. At least I hope that it has.

I suggest that everyone takes a look, it will be worth it.

Class Matters
When reading the book I began to realize what social class I am in and how it effects the person I am. I never really thought about how my social class effected me or exactly where I fit into society. It was never an issure for me or my family. Bell Hooks did a good job at describing her social class and how her family never talked about it and how that effected her. I would recommend this book to anyone.