Killing Rage

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

If cultural critic hooks (Black Looks), distinguished professor of English at New York's City College, doesn't have a comprehensive plan for achieving her subtitle's promise, her sensitivity to the intersection of race, class and gender infuses many of these essays, written during the past 20 years, with challenges to conventional and liberal wisdom. Deeming her own rage ``constructive,'' she urges that collective black rage be linked to a passion for justice, even as she warns that privileged blacks' ``narcissistic rage'' leads to public trivialization of poor blacks' real grievances. Though her declaration that contemporary feminism has done little to help blacks seems sweeping, hooks rightly argues that white defenders of Anita Hill have done little for poor black women, and that whites who deny that they are racist must engage in regular interaction with black folk. The author discerns that the recent wave of black self-help books ignores the link between personal and political change, and rues that contemporary black activists have forgotten the ``profound critique of capitalism'' their forebears raised in the 1960s. Also, she wisely warns against turning Afro-centrism into utopianism and wrenching multiculturalism into narrow nationalism. Author tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal

In 23 mostly new essays, distinguished social critic hooks discusses the legacy of racism in America.

Bonnie Smothers

Hooks is in a rage about race and racism, and she brings to bear on the subject black woman and feminist perspectives. Some of the essays in the collection have been published before, but the majority of the pieces are new. The lead essay, "Killing Rage," sets the tone, and its meaning carries throughout the rest of the book, giving it coherence and power. Hooks contends that racism in the U.S. is as virulent as it has ever been, but that there is a systematic effort, with the media fully engaged, to deny it and to claim equality in our economic and cultural endeavors. Further, those middle-class blacks who go along with such claims do so because they are reaping the benefits of color blindness. Conservatism is the order of things recently because it serves to keep the lid on recognizing racism. As hooks sees it, the answer is rage, for the pain and destructiveness of racism must be acknowledged. But this rage should be channeled to constructive ends (unlike the rage expressed by so many of the boys in the 'hood) and thereby rid the country of racism and usher in hooks' "beloved community." Tough antidote."