Belonging: A Culture of Place

In this essay, hooks reflects on the enduring legacy of racial segregation, particularly in relation to land, housing, and community. Drawing on her return to Kentucky, hooks observes that while legal segregation has ended, its effects persist. She critiques the way in which real estate, zoning laws, and white community preferences continue to enforce racial separation and limit Black access to desirable land and housing.

Hooks explores how systemic racism continues to shape geographic belonging, noting that Black families are often excluded from white-dominated neighborhoods through economic barriers, cultural hostility, and institutional discrimination. She identifies a persistent ideology that equates whiteness with safety, cleanliness, and value, and Blackness with danger or disorder. This framing, she argues, reproduces segregation through so-called “neutral” mechanisms like housing prices, school zoning, and lending practices.

The chapter also addresses the emotional and psychological consequences of this spatial exclusion. Hooks expresses frustration at the way “progressive” white individuals often claim to support diversity but still resist integrated living. Even in liberal communities, she notes, many white people oppose policies that would allow Black families to buy land or build homes in their neighborhoods. She draws attention to the contradiction between public values and private choices—between what people say about race and what they do in terms of place.

Revisiting her own experiences with attempting to buy land in Kentucky, hooks reflects on her decision to settle in Berea—a place she speaks of with genuine admiration. She praises Berea for its progressive roots, especially its founding as an interracial community and the presence of Berea College, which embodies a long-standing commitment to educational access and social justice. For hooks, Berea represents a possibility, a space where belonging across racial lines might be nurtured and sustained. However, even there, she acknowledges that white residents sometimes hold on to subtle forms of exclusion or unease when Black people move into their neighborhoods. Rather than condemning Berea, hooks calls for more Black families to move there, encouraging a reclamation of space in a town that aligns with her vision of healing, community, and rootedness.

Hooks calls for a deeper reckoning with the spatial dimension of racism. Ending segregation, she insists, is not merely a matter of laws but of values and connective will. Without a fundamental shift in how communities define ownership, belonging, and neighborliness, the racial divisions that shaped the past will continue to determine the future.

Hooks examines how Black Americans have historically perceived and theorized whiteness from within their own communities. Though there has never been a formal scholarly body dedicated to this study, hooks argues that generations of Black people have cultivated a “‘special’ knowledge of whiteness” (89) passed down through conversation, observation, and experience. Drawing comparisons to ethnographic study, she asserts Black people, particularly those living under racial apartheid, studied whiteness closely as a strategy for survival in a white supremacist society.

Hooks contends that while white people often project a fascination with differing onto nonwhite others, they are generally unaccustomed to being viewed through the same critical lens. White discomfort with Black scrutiny, particularly in educational or intellectual spaces, is framed as a symptom of racism—a refusal to believe that the Other can observe and analyze the dominant group. She writes that white students, for example, often react with “naive amazement” or anger when confronted with Black critiques of whiteness, revealing a deep investment in sameness and the myth of universal subjectivity.

Through personal recollections and cultural references—including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Grace Halsell, and others—hooks explores the enduring association of whiteness with terror in the Black imagination. These representations are not merely reactive stereotypes but responses to lived experiences of racial domination and psychological trauma. In particular, hooks recalls the fear she felt as a child walking through white neighborhoods in segregated Kentucky, and compares it to her later experiences of racial profiling while traveling internationally.

Hooks also critiques the ways liberal discourse on pluralism and diversity can obscure the reality of racism and prevent honest conversations about power. She argues that progressive white people must actively interrogate their positionality, a process Gayatri Spivak calls “de-hegemonizing.” This repositioning can help disrupt the link between whiteness and terror and create space for genuine anti-racist solidarity. Hooks insists that acknowledging how whiteness has functioned as a site of fear and domination in the Black imagination is a necessary step toward healing and transformation. She writes that critically examining and deconstructing these associations allows for the possibility of “decolonizing our minds and our imaginations” (105).

Hooks reflects on the legacy of tobacco in the United States, particularly its entanglement with Black labor, rural life, and capitalist exploitation. Driving past Kentucky tobacco fields, hooks meditates on the plant’s symbolic weight and personal associations, connecting her childhood memories to a broader critique of systemic power. She describes how, for generations, Black families—including her own—depended on tobacco farming as a source of income, even while they remained structurally excluded from land ownership and economic power.

While tobacco has long been romanticized as part of Southern heritage, it is also a product bound up with racialized labor and capitalist greed. Hooks critiques the transformation of tobacco from a traditional, communal crop into a corporate commodity marketed for maximum profit: “Tobacco—smoked, chewed, or sniffed was a source of tremendous power to a growing capitalist culture of greed in the United States” (109). She draws a sharp contrast between the communal, small-scale cultivation of tobacco that she witnessed in her youth and the industrialized system that dominates today. The tobacco industry, she argues, exemplifies the moral contradictions of a system that valorizes profit over life and health.

Hooks urges readers to disentangle tobacco’s roots in rural Black life from the violence of capitalist commodification. “I do not want to forget,” she concludes, “I want to cherish the tobacco plant—let its sacred appeal be the legacy that calls to me” (115).

Drawing from childhood memories of her family’s home in the Kentucky hills, hooks contrasts the concrete foundation of their house—a remnant of capitalist exploitation during oil drilling—with the grounding presence of the earth. She critiques the legacy of capitalist expansion and the drive to extract from the land, positioning it against a more humble, reciprocal relationship with nature.

Hooks highlights how her grandparents modeled an alternative way of life rooted in subsistence, sustainability, and reverence for the natural world. For hooks, this lifestyle offered a tangible rejection of capitalist values and provided a blueprint for Black self-determination outside exploitative economic systems. She underscores the protective and restorative power of nature, noting how, even when land was owned by white oppressors, nature offered enslaved and exploited Black people a form of spiritual refuge. She portrays the land as an active force of memory, resistance, and freedom.

The chapter ends on a contemplative note, with hook emphasizing the emotional and spiritual nourishment that comes from being in nature.