We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks is a collection of 10 essays on the way in which white culture marginalizes black males. The essays are intended to provide cultural criticism and solutions to the problems she identifies.

In We Real Cool, hooks suggests that black males are forced to repress themselves America's patriarchal, imperialist, white supremacist society for fear of being destroyed. She suggests the ways in which racist and sexist attitudes developed in American culture have criminalized and dehumanized black males, and the ways in which these myths are internalized, destroying the black community.

In the preface, hooks expresses her discontent with the fact that there is a diverse body of work available about black female liberation and resistance to self hatred, racism, sexism and classism but that is very little critical work (literature, films or otherwise) of work doing the same for black men. Her hope is that that black men will tell their stories of how they have decolonized their minds, escaped the yoke of patriarchal thinking and tried to end male self hate in their own lives.

[edit] Chapters

Chapter 1 plantation patriarchy
Chapter 2 gangsta culture: a piece of the action
Chapter 3 schooling black males
Chapter 4 don't make me hurt you: black male violence
Chapter 5 it's a dick thing: beyond sexual acting out
Chapter 6 from angry boys to angry men
Chapter 7 waiting for daddy to come home: black male parenting
Chapter 8 doing the work of love
Chapter 9 healing the hurt
Chapter 10 the coolness of being real

[edit] References

hooks, bell (2004). "We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity." New York: Routledge.

[edit] Further Reading

They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima
Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality by Rudolph Byrd