Where We Stand: Class Matters | 
 enlarge | Author: Bell Hooks
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 174952
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.4
ISBN: 041592913X
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.50973
EAN: 9780415929134
ASIN: 041592913X
Publication Date: October 4, 2000
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Product Description
Where We Stand is a powerful new book by one of America's most admired critics and writers. For years we have turned to bell hooks-feminist, social thinker, memoirist, teacher-for her deeply felt ideas on women, race, culture, sexuality, and more recently on love and children. Now Bell Hooks talks about class-the 'elephant in the room'-the subject we all know is central to our culture and its problems but that hasn't been given the attention it so desperately needs.
Why is it that the face of poverty in America is a black face, even though most of the thirty-six million poor in America are white? How do fantasies of wealth's power help keep the poor poor? What do black teens want, and how do they learn to want it? Are wealthy black Americans any more aware of class issues than wealthy whites? Why do we need so much money, after all?
Bell Hooks talks about these subjects in her own style. Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan coop boards, Where We Standis 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...
 forthright, rigorous July 5, 2008
I finally decided to come to terms with how class affects the decisions I make and that people make on my behalf. bell hooks is a rigorous thinker who questions assumptions,especially her own. I liked the blend of experience and academic evidence she uses in the essays. Thinking about class raises a lot of emotion, especially shame, and having an intellectual basis for processing it helps. An excellent place to start.
concise and clear January 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'm always interested in what bell hooks has to say, but this is one of her best. We hear more these days about the increasing class divide in America, and bell speaks clearly to the cultural issues and access to political power of the working classes, especially when those poorer people are of ethnic groups and when they are women.
Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks July 16, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
All books written by bell hooks are powerful, direct, and very brave. Exactly when I was hoping bell would write a book about class, I discovered this one. Her writings about love lead to exploration of capitalism and its social structure more in depth, to strengthen points about the ways class loyalties and antagonisms prevent love ethic from becoming embraced by the society as a whole.
What I especially appreciate in Where We Stand are the two quite extraordinary qualities: a) bell showed us that we can talk and write about class without using "post-modern" or difficult to comprehend terminology, and b) she is not afraid to call to action, to change this depressing and unjust, cruel and senseless system into "a world where we can all have enough to live fully and well."
She started the book with self-critique, almost apologizing for not having enough theoretical knowledge to talk about class issues. However, bell is able to discuss very different aspects of class, such as class ideology (or the dominant social ideology being the ideology of the ruling class), class consciousness of the working class and intellectuals, intersections of class, race and gender, crossing class boundaries, and a vision of a classless society--society--without class hierarchies or antagonistic classes.
I read somewhere that some book reviews called this book a "novel". Where We Stand is not a novel, but I prefer to see this as compliment. bell masterfully intertwined her personal experiences and her family stories into the general discussion about class. Her feminist methodology brings much needed approach and analysis of one indivisible social system that is at the same time patriarchal, capitalist/imperialist, and white supremacist on a global scale.
bell hooks is always brave and principled. Her integrity is intact as she writes about the most important issues of our time. In addition, we can witness that she lives according to her values. She is compassionate and openly declares her solidarity with the working class and all of the people that Marx called proletariat. bell chose to live on a smaller income, without security that institutions provide, and to live simply.
Not only are the topics that bell writes about revolutionary, but she herself lives as an intellectual capable of leading a revolutionary movement.
I expect some critics to say that all aspects of class are not explored in this book, nor are those discussed explored in depth. Some will be tempted to say that bell is using Marx's concepts and creating relatively new terminology, as would many say that Anthony Giddens (Capitalism and Modern Social Theory; Class, Power and Conflict) is very much influenced by Marx. I understand that this book is only her first step, an introduction to a number of explorations of class issues in the contemporary American society, as well as one of her first calls for unity and strong advocacy for abolition of class and all other hierarchies.
Considering much of hooks' social theory, I see most parallels with Erich Fromm's work. Fromm wrote about "productive love" and "productive work", but he was also a very sharp critic of capitalism, exploitation, and alienation from our basic human needs, arguing for "productive humanistic communitarian socialism". Very much influenced by Marx, Fromm's theory of class also focuses on raising individual, group, and social conciseness in order to change the society into a future form that would allow us "to be" instead of "to have" and fulfill our basic human needs.
In terms of style, bell's way of writing resembles Joanna Kadi's Thinking Class who reaffirmed that working class members of our society are among best thinkers and most important agents of social change.
Book encourages reflection on recent events November 17, 2005
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
I started reading this book shortly before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and news clips began pouring in from New Orleans. More clearly than ever, I understood the need for books like Where We Stand to encourage us to think about issues of class in America and then take action in our own lives.
I read bell hooks because she challenges the notions I have from my white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist upbringing. Where We Stand continues in this tradition. While reflecting upon the events of her own life and her own actions, hooks is able to examine our culture while inviting us increase awareness of how issues of class impact our own lives. For example, while critically examining the influence of materialism in our society, hooks offers her own personal experience with owning a BMW and how her attitude toward the vehicle subtly affected her relationships with other people.
Anyone willing to examine how class, race, gender, and consumerism all collide will want to read this book.
Towards a Just Society April 4, 2005
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
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."
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