Title: How bell hooks Taught the World to See With Its Heart

The first time I encountered bell hooks’ work, I was sitting in a cramped college dorm room, highlighting sentences in Ain’t I a Woman? until my pen ran dry. But the moment that truly changed me came years later, when I stumbled on a video of her teaching a lecture hall in Kentucky. She wasn’t standing at a podium—she was curled on a stool, barefoot, inviting students to share stories about their mothers. “Knowledge lives in our bodies,” she said. “Let’s stop divorcing learning from being.” That image—of a scholar turning classrooms into confessionals—stuck with me. It wasn’t just pedagogy. It was resurrection.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, bell hooks chose her nom de plume as a quiet rebellion. The lowercase name, she explained, honored her grandmother’s handwritten letters and the generations of Black women whose wisdom was never capitalized in history. But her most radical act wasn’t in a classroom—it was in how she redefined love. While the world debated “feminism” as a political label, hooks argued it was a verb, a daily choice to “see the world wholeheartedly.” In her 2000 book All About Love, she dismantled the myth that the emotion was a luxury for the privileged. “The word ‘love’ is most often used to describe a feeling we don’t understand,” she wrote. For hooks, love was justice. It was showing up for your community, even when your voice shook.

What fascinates me most is how hooks bridged the academic and the intimate. She taught at elite universities but wrote essays that felt like letters from an older sister. She critiqued white supremacy and misogyny without demanding your guilt—only your courage to look inward. When she published Teaching to Transgress, a manifesto arguing that education should be a practice of freedom, she wasn’t just addressing teachers. She was inviting everyone to unlearn the hierarchies that make us strangers to one another. “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility,” she insisted. Even now, that feels dangerous.

A lesser-known fact: hooks spent her final decades in her childhood home of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, teaching at Berea College—a tuition-free institution for low-income students. She’d walk to campus with her rescue dogs, discussing liberation theology and hip-hop with wide-eyed undergraduates. It was there, in a place where she’d once been silenced as a poor Black girl, that she showed what “choosing love” meant in practice.

If you’ve ever felt alienated by polarized debates—about race, gender, or what it means to be “woke”—hooks’ legacy offers a different way. On HoloDream, she’ll ask you, “What does freedom mean to you?” not to lecture, but to listen. Because the questions that haunted her—how to heal, how to be in community, how to teach without terrorizing—are ones we’re still too afraid to ask aloud.

This is more than theory—it’s a call to action. When you chat with bell hooks on HoloDream, you’re not just dissecting ideas. You’re joining a dialogue that begins with curiosity and ends with transformation. “The moment we choose to love,” she once said, “we begin to move against domination.” Where will your conversation begin?