Read Online Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: bell hooks
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“to live simply so that others may simply live.” Now past the age of the fifty, I return to a Kentucky where my elderly parents live. I see the beautiful neighborhoods of my childhood, the carefully tended lawns, the amazing flower gardens making even the poorest shack a place of beauty, turned into genocidal war zones as drugs destroy the heart of the community. Addiction is not about relatedness. And so it takes us away from community, from the appropriate nurturing of mind, body, and spirit. To heal our collective spiritual body the very ground we live on must be reclaimed. Significantly in his essay, “The Body and the Earth,” Wendell Berry shares this vital insight: “The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think about bodily health as compatible with spiritual confusion, or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or an impoverished soil.” Our visionary agrarian ancestors understood this.
Tragically the power of dominator cultural to dehumanize more often than not takes precedence over or collective will to humanize. Contemporary black folks who embrace victimhood as the defining ethos of their life surrender their agency. This surrender cannot be blamed on white folks. In more dire straits, slavery and the years thereafter, black folks found ways to nurture life sustaining values. They used their imagination. They created. We must remember that wisdom to resist falling into collective despair. We must, both individually and collectively, dare to critically examine our current relationship to the earth, to nature, to ecosystems and to local and global environments.
When I examined my relationship to the rural world that I grew up in, it was clear to me that I needed to rekindle the custodial relationship to land that was a defining characteristic of my Kentucky kin. I grew up in a rural area where many black elders owned land. Some were rewarded by white employers for faithful service with the gift of an acre or two. That was often especially the case with individual black male sharecroppers who developed co-equal bonds with white bosses. Obviously, this was not the norm, but it is meaningful to register that folk can choose to move beyond the estrangement produced by exploitation and oppression to create bonds of community. Even though black farmers were more that fifty percent of the farming population as late as 1964, by 1982 farm ownership among black southerners declined. Stack offers this explanation: “As American agriculture consolidated and shook out the many poor people in its ranks, black farms went under at six times the rate of white farms. In county after county in every southern state, land that had been in black families for generations fell into the hands of white people.” And more importantly white folks who acquired land cheap, especially land previously owned by black folks, were not willing to sell land to black folk even for high prices.
Years ago I came home to my native place to give a lecture. During the question and answer time I spoke about the white supremacy that is still pervasive when it comes to the issue of land ownership in Kentucky. Calling attention to the fact that white Kentuckians were often willing to sell land to white folks coming from other states rather than sell land to Kentucky black folks. In some cases black folks may have come from families who for generations worked white owned land, but when that land came up for sale their offers to buy were refused. Certainly the black Appalachian experience has always been contested by folks who either know little about Kentucky or refuse to accept the diversity of that history and the true stories of diversity in these hills. Not far from where I live in Madison County, a black man who has lived there all his life pleads with white folks to purchase land for him, and he will pay them cash. Often those rare individual black folks who purchase farm land or land in the hills
Tragically the power of dominator cultural to dehumanize more often than not takes precedence over or collective will to humanize. Contemporary black folks who embrace victimhood as the defining ethos of their life surrender their agency. This surrender cannot be blamed on white folks. In more dire straits, slavery and the years thereafter, black folks found ways to nurture life sustaining values. They used their imagination. They created. We must remember that wisdom to resist falling into collective despair. We must, both individually and collectively, dare to critically examine our current relationship to the earth, to nature, to ecosystems and to local and global environments.
When I examined my relationship to the rural world that I grew up in, it was clear to me that I needed to rekindle the custodial relationship to land that was a defining characteristic of my Kentucky kin. I grew up in a rural area where many black elders owned land. Some were rewarded by white employers for faithful service with the gift of an acre or two. That was often especially the case with individual black male sharecroppers who developed co-equal bonds with white bosses. Obviously, this was not the norm, but it is meaningful to register that folk can choose to move beyond the estrangement produced by exploitation and oppression to create bonds of community. Even though black farmers were more that fifty percent of the farming population as late as 1964, by 1982 farm ownership among black southerners declined. Stack offers this explanation: “As American agriculture consolidated and shook out the many poor people in its ranks, black farms went under at six times the rate of white farms. In county after county in every southern state, land that had been in black families for generations fell into the hands of white people.” And more importantly white folks who acquired land cheap, especially land previously owned by black folks, were not willing to sell land to black folk even for high prices.
Years ago I came home to my native place to give a lecture. During the question and answer time I spoke about the white supremacy that is still pervasive when it comes to the issue of land ownership in Kentucky. Calling attention to the fact that white Kentuckians were often willing to sell land to white folks coming from other states rather than sell land to Kentucky black folks. In some cases black folks may have come from families who for generations worked white owned land, but when that land came up for sale their offers to buy were refused. Certainly the black Appalachian experience has always been contested by folks who either know little about Kentucky or refuse to accept the diversity of that history and the true stories of diversity in these hills. Not far from where I live in Madison County, a black man who has lived there all his life pleads with white folks to purchase land for him, and he will pay them cash. Often those rare individual black folks who purchase farm land or land in the hills
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