These offerings and musings are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, and stolen lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta First Nations. These lands known as Miami.
These are stolen lands built by stolen people
Dear bell hooks,
Dear bell hooks,
I hope that you are in the arms of your ancestors and that you had a safe and pleasant voyage to the other side. I was convinced that you and I would meet before you became an ancestor: like I would have bet the farm on it. I was sure that I would get to bow before you and thank you for saving my life many times and for paving the road for me. I am not sure if I would be the current version of who I am if I never engaged with your scholarship. My life is currently fashioned after the blueprint you provided us.
You are the OG Black feminist public scholar. Like you, I espouse a Black feminist politic. Like you, I majored in English, and like you, I am an aspiring cultural critic who is pursuing a doctoral degree. And because of the freedom path, you charted for yourself I have decided to reject the academy and its trappings before it kicks me out or kills me prematurely. You are the reason that I can be so audacious in my ambitious pursuits. You gave birth to me, you shaped me, and you taught me much of what I know about theory and praxis. When I read your book Feminism is for Everybody I felt the tectonic shift within me. My life can be easily marked in the following ways: the Lutze that existed before I read bell hooks and the Lutze that exists after reading bell hooks.
You taught me that I can be a serious feminist thinker and be an avid reader of self-help literature. You gave me the courage to no longer be ashamed or hide the fact that I am a consumer of self-help. Through reading and listening, you also demonstrated to me how one can be a serious feminist thinker and bring that into your spirituality and recovery journey. You made M. Jacqui Alexander's words ring true, “the spiritual is also political.” You read Louis Hayes and were deep into the woo-woo and it meant the world to me that someone as sociopolitically sharp and rigorous as you could have diverse spiritual teachers.
I am so profoundly sad that you are gone at sixty-nine years of age. That feels entirely too young of an age to lose someone like you. You are the same age as my mom and aunt and you are the same age Linda (Pamela’s mom) was when she died. So many women I know both Black and non-Black and non-binary folks were deeply affected by your passing. I hope that you were able to feel a glimpse of our love and reverence for you when you were alive.
I invoke your name often and thought about you frequently. I often wondered if you ever found love again. I remember you gave a talk somewhere and you said if you knew after leaving that man you would be single for twenty years you are not sure if you would still leave him. It is comments like this that made me love and revere you so much. You were not afraid to speak publicly about love, loss, and how you yearned for romantic love. One of my biggest fears is that my being a Black feminist will make love hard for me to find and if I am being truthful being a serious sociopolitical subject has indeed made the pursuit of romantic love very difficult. This is why I love your book All About Love so much. You always encouraged us to take love seriously and to prepare ourselves for love and its transformative power. Thank you so much for writing about love and always bringing love up. We needed it. In that book, you made it clear how the personal is political and that love requires our attention. It is by reading All About Love I found the book The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck which also fundamentally changed my life. I am currently rereading Sisters of the Yam, the copy I have been borrowing from the library for almost a decade now and it makes me miss you even more.
You were always ahead of your time and even when it was profoundly unpopular. I remember when Black Twitter was mad with you for your comments over Beyonce and wanted to cancel you. I vehemently disagreed. Thank you for being a complicated human being and teaching us that not even our beloved faves are above critique and that which we hold sacred should also be interrogated. The world is a scary place for smart Black women with strong unpopular opinions. Thank you for showing us how to do critique with a Black feminist care ethic.
Thank you for loving Black people as much as you did. It is because of you that I make sure to imbue my politics with a radical love ethic. I wonder if you ever watched us Black feminnist thinkers on Instagram, YouTube. Or read our tweets and thought to yourself, “look at what I have created?” Were you pleased with your creations? You are the blueprint bell. You taught us how to do cultural criticism through a Black feminist lens and everyobdy is eating it up abd trying to copy it . Thank you for taking yourself, your ideas, and your purpose in life seriously. Thank you so much for showing us another way.
The same way that I relentlessly invoke Audre Lorde and Harriet Tubman I will make sure to invoke your name with the same fervor. I am working hard to spread the gospel of Black feminism and to make sure everyone knows that feminism is for everybody. May you find the rest, the healing, the love, and the community in the realms of the ancestors that may have evaded you in life.
I love you and I am going to miss your brilliant hot takes.
Love, Lutze
VIEWINGS AND READINGS:
“Dave Chappelle and “the Black Ass Lie” That Keeps Us Down” by Jamilah Lemieux -Black America’s version of “the big lie”—“the Black ass lie”—is that Black men have it worse than any other group of Black people. In her best-selling Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, scholar and Crunk Feminist Collective cofounder Brittney Cooper writes, “Black men grow up believing and moving through the world politically as though they have it the toughest, as though their pain matters most, as though Black women cannot possibly be feeling anything similar to the dehumanization and disrespect they have felt.” There is little to no consideration of what those of us who are harmed by misogyny, and maybe hurt even worse, might endure. “That it might, in many cases, be worse for us,” laments Cooper, “seems to many men a preposterous supposition.”
Why Making Friends in Midlife Is So Hard by Katharine Smyth- “Looking out the airplane window at the great blue sky, I thought about how making friends in midlife, while challenging, might also be a gift, a chance to enlarge one’s world and one’s self. It sometimes feels at 40 as if our lives have assumed their final shape, entrenched as we so often are in our careers and cities and relationships. But to meet new people like Steph—who has already taught me about the Mountain West and what it’s like to grow up in a Mormon community, and who sees me as I am right now, not as who I used to be—is to acknowledge the growth that we all have left to do. When I imagine my life in another 40 years’ time—full of old friends, yes, but also friends that I have yet to meet—it looks like a sketch of heaven indeed.”
“NPR is losing some of its Black and Latino hosts. Colleagues see a larger crisis” by Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi – “But Garcia-Navarro pointedly disputed this in her tweet. “People leave jobs for other opportunities if they are unhappy with the opportunities they have and the way they have been treated,” she wrote.
Despite giving unprecedented opportunities to women since its founding in 1970, NPR has struggled for many years to diversify its audience and provide alternative perspectives. It hired its first African American host of “All Things Considered,” Michele Norris, in 2002 (Norris is now a columnist for The Post). It launched but canceled programs aimed at minority audiences, such as “News and Notes,” and “Tell Me More,” the latter hosted by Michel Martin, who went on to become the weekend host of “All Things Considered.”
Latino groups want to do away with “Latinx” by Russell Contreras – “Elected officials, a major newspaper and the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S. have all spoken out strongly in recent weeks against the continued use of "Latinx," the gender-neutral term promoted by progressives to describe people of Spanish-speaking origin.”
Jim Crow Debt: How Black Borrowers Experience Student Loan Debt created by The Education Trust- This report shows how cancelling student loan debt is indeed a racial and economic issue. As someone who has six figures worth of student loan debt that often makes me deeply anxious I appreciated knowing this report exists and centers Black borrowers who are MORE likely to have six figures worth of debt. Just sayin!
Dear Saweetie, It’s Not Giving Sis- In this YouTube video King of Reads talks about how Saweetie the rapper who is a lackluster and often mediocre performer is still given the opportunities due to colorism. Messy disclosure: I really like Saweetie and it's probably informed by attraction and with that said I would never pay real money to see her perform. We all have our things and we are all touched by socialization!
Meet America’s First Drag Queen for President by Whitney Skauge – This is a 10-minute documentary entitled The Beauty President which is beautiful and must watch and you can also read the article at the L.A. Times about the short film.
How Tumblr Became Popular For Being Obsolete by Kyle Chayka – “In the hyper-pressurized environment of social media circa 2022, it’s rare to encounter a past digital self, unless it is being dug up to defame you. What makes Tumblr obsolete, for the moment, are the same things that lend it an enduring appeal. The fact that it maintains a following should remind us that we use social-media services by choice; no platform or feature is an inevitability. As Karina Tipismana, the student, told me, “People say stuff like, ‘I wish we could still use Tumblr.’ It’s there, it’s there!”
The Relentless Reality of Anti-Fatness in Fitness by Kelsey Miller - “In the grand scheme of things, these are still small steps. For fitness to be truly inclusive, it will require many more practical changes: redesigned machines, much more visibility and opportunity for plus-size fitness models, multiple activewear brands selling 7X clothing. Beyond that, it will require a fundamental shift in our understanding of fitness, health, and weight. “Most of us have been taught to believe that the only reason to exercise is for weight loss,” Dr. Meadows explains. “And we’ve been taught that in order to exercise for weight loss, it has to look like Jillian Michaels screaming at some poor fat woman crying her eyes out and puking over the side of a treadmill on The Biggest Loser. Otherwise, it’s not real exercise; it’s not worth it.”
Disabled Americans Feel Abandoned by CDC. Now CDC Is Desperate to Make Amends by Marisa Kabas- “Maria Town, President and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, remains disheartened by Wallensky’s comments. “[It] highlights the fact that the Director and the CDC view people with disabilities as acceptable losses during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Town tells Rolling Stone. “Her comments, even with the additional context, reveal the systemic and institutional biases against disabled people that determine our lives are inherently worth less.”
Jesus and Hagar : The Form of a Slave by Reverend Wil Gafney Ph.D. – “There are and always will be those who say she didn’t really see God and certainly didn’t see God’s face. Some may not know that the Divine messenger called the “angel of the Lord” in older translations is really God in drag protecting us from the full splendor of their glory so they may interact with humanity without harming us. There will always be those folk who will tell us, womanists and feminists and those who read through rainbow-colored and trans-forming lenses that we haven’t seen the God we have seen, that we don’t know God because He doesn’t look or sound anything like what we bear witness to. Were Hagar’s and Sarah’s understandings of God reconcilable? Were they even the same God? Some of us have been asking that question about white Christianity for 400 years and some of us have been asking that question about conservative Christianity for the last 50 years.”
A Pandemic Romance Post-Mortem by Stacia L. Brown – “It might be foolish to expect that the person who you meet when you think you could die at any moment is the person who’ll suit you best in the long-unfurling years after that imminent threat subsides.”
A People’s History of Black Twitter Part 1 by Jason Parham – “More than a decade later, Black Twitter has become the most dynamic subset not only of Twitter but of the wider social internet. Capable of creating, shaping, and remixing popular culture at light speed, it remains the incubator of nearly every meme (Crying Jordan, This you?), hashtag (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #OscarsSoWhite, #YouOKSis), and social justice cause (Me Too, Black Lives Matter) worth knowing about. It is both news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury—a comedy showcase, therapy session, and family cookout all in one. Black Twitter is a multiverse, simultaneously an archive and an all-seeing lens into the future. As Weatherspoon puts it: “Our experience is universal. Our experience is big. Our experience is relevant.”
LISTENING:
For Colored Nerds – My absolute favorite podcast has come back and I am over the moon. If you listened to and loved The Nod podcast then you knew the voices Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings. Two Black people who love Blackness and Black people and it comes through in how they construct their programming. This is definitely FUBU.
Boys Like Me – Is a podcast series that comes out of Canada CBC. The series is about a man in Toronto who was a incel and who committed a domestic terrorist attack fueled by his hatred of women. If the intersection of white supremacy, patrichy, and violence is something that you make a habit of keeping tabs on, this podcast series is for you.
How To Love with bell hooks / The Truth of Romantic Love with Dr. Polly Young-Eisendrath – After hearing about the passing of bell hooks my grief led me to an Apple podcast to search if anyone had recently spoken to bell and that search led to this episode. bell hooks is the reason why I consider myself a Christian Buddhist because Buddhism was important to her as it is for me. Buddhism has saved my life many times.
Back Issue – Is a Blackity Black podcast hosted by Tracy Clayton and Josh Gwynn they take a look at past moments in Black pop- culture history and do an awesome job of bringing its cultural relevance to the present. If you are a millennial or young-ish Gen-Xer this podcast might be for you.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Communal Healing: a discussion of bell hooks' Sisters of the Yam - Lutze was able to be a part of this IG live with Jenn M Jackson, Alexandra Moffett-Beateau and Erika Totten. They discussed bell hooks' Sisters of the Yam and her critical contributions to our self-healing and self-recovery in this political moment. This discussion is a part of the #BlackFeministBookClub. Learn more via the link in my bio or at JennMJackson.com.
Patreon Shoutout: We want to give a special shoutout to our patrons who pledged this month!
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