Killing Rage: Ending Racism

As activists and fiction authors, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker provide both media presentations of Blackness as well as public speeches about the nature of white supremacy in America. Walker was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983. Morrison later won the same award in 1988, as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Their literary works have been met with resistance from mainstream media for their horrifying depictions of white supremacist violence, and also from Black leaders, including bell hooks, for marketing Black pain and suffering to white consumers. Nevertheless, their works have brought Black literature into the mainstream literary world: US high schools regularly teach Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Walker’s The Color Purple (1982).

Morrison, in the context of Killing Rage: Ending Racism, provides significant background on the phenomenon of terror. Morrison’s Beloved revolves around a mother who commits infanticide to keep her baby from falling into slavery. hooks takes issue with the way that the work positions racism in the past, but hooks also sees the terror depicted in Beloved as essential to the history of white supremacy, despite attempts to erase it. Morrison’s lectures on race and the literary imagination also provide supporting content for several essays on both white terror and Black trauma, two topics hooks frequently addresses in her nonfiction work.

Walker’s work in womanism, or intersectional feminism, is relevant to hooks’s Killing Rage: Ending Racism. While not directly mentioned in the collection, womanism informs almost every essay that addresses the failures of historic feminist movements and misogyny in the Black community. Like Morrison, hooks uses Walker as an example of an author who addressed Black trauma in her work and whose work changed after rising in social class. Indeed, decades after the publication of Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Walker began to heavily endorse antisemitism, publicly advocating for conspiracy theorist David Icke.

These two civil rights leaders provide much of the grounding for hooks’s descriptions of Black excellence and Black self-love, as well as depictions of how the American media flattens depictions of Black leaders. Both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. provided visions of potential Black communities freed from the power of white supremacy. In popular media, King is presented as a nonviolent, race-blind model of acceptable protest, while Malcolm X is presented as a terroristic radical whose rhetoric hurt the civil rights movement. The reality is more complex: At the time of the civil rights movement, King was viewed as a radical and was arrested for the protests he participated in, while Malcolm X’s advocacy for direct action and anticolonial theory of Blackness created incentives for the federal government to enact civil rights legislation.

In Killing Rage: Ending Racism, hooks quotes King for his imagination of a utopian community, his anti-capitalist messages, and his association with white terror and trauma through his death. In many of his speeches and writings, King connected white supremacist power to the social structures of capitalism. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King also details the theory of the white moderate, an individual who is opposed to racism but who is fixated on the concept of law rather than justice. King’s ideas support much of hooks’s writing on the way the media has treated racism as a condition of the past rather than a present concern.

In addition to writing a great deal on and participating in direct action, Malcolm X also wrote extensively about love for Blackness. In the context of Killing Rage: Ending Racism, he stands apart from many of his contemporaries for his position on rage as a positive force when directed effectively. At the same time, much of his work on separatism and early Black nationalism supports many of the patriarchal elements of Black movements that hooks critiques.

Despite its focus on American institutions and culture, Killing Rage: Ending Racism also cites international scholars on colonialism and Blackness. Paulo Freire was a Brazilian philosopher and teacher whose work on education is internationally recognized as foundational to almost all present-day liberatory ideologies and movements. Frantz Fanon was an Afro-Caribbean philosopher who, despite his death at only 36 years old, is noted as one of the foremost anti-colonial scholars of all time, second perhaps only to Edward Said. Despite their work emphasizing colonial subjects in South America, the Caribbean, and North Africa, Fanon and Freire’s work is widely applicable to those facing systems of economic and racial oppression, including those in the US.

In the context of Killing Rage: Ending Racism, hooks references Freire’s works regarding her academic experiences. She marks reading Freire as one of the transformative moments that informed her anger toward white supremacy and the media’s depictions of colonialism. hooks also draws from Freire’s pedagogy, or study of education, noting support for Freire’s thesis that the teacher should also be engaged in learning at the same time as the student. While not directly mentioned, Freire’s work also revolves around solidarities between classes and ethnicities in colonized spaces, which features frequently in many of the essays in Killing Rage: Ending Racism.

hooks also mentions Fanon’s work to describe it has inspired her efforts in developing her own theories. hooks directly cites Fanon’s theory of depersonalization in her discussions of Black consciousness, self-love, and trauma. Fanon’s invocation for subjects to decolonize their minds underpins much of hooks’s critique of assimilation and her calls for solidarity between Black communities and other targets of white supremacist violence.