Pecking into Popular Culture

Bell Hooks

In class we watched Bell Hooks speak about her observations of her teaching experiences. She is a distinguished English professor at City College of New York.

Bell Hooks went from teaching at mostly white post secondary schools like Yale to teaching at a mostly black community college in Harlum New York. By being able to compare these different students, Hooks was able to make her observation that “thinking critically is at the heart of anybody transforming their life.”

Hooks argues that someone who is disadvantaged materially has the ability to transform their life in a deep and profound way if they can think critically. And that someone who may be very privileged materially would not be able to transform their life in a meaningful way if they needed to if they don’t think critically.

Hooks found that her students in Harlum were equally as bright as her students from Yale but she found that “their senses of what the meaning of what that brilliance was and what they could do with it, their sense of agency, was profoundly different.” She found that her students at Yale were open to embracing their future where as her students in Harlum didn’t have that sense of entitlement and many teachers at the college in Harlum would not give their students the gift of critical thinking that they need in order to really make a difference in their lives.

Hegemony

The term hegemony, according to Dr.Strangelove, is the idea that we embrace ideas thinking that they are in our best interest, when in reality they are in someone else’s best interest.

For example, ‘they’ (the elite of society and the owners of the press) push the idea of freedom of speech onto society. We are constantly told that we are free to express ourselves. To an extent, we are can express ourselves freely by the means of outlets such as Facebook, blogging, and protesting, however, what is lacking is the quality of speech which the elite of society and the owners of the press do have!

A lot of our cherished values, such as freedom of speech, and private property, are cherished because ‘they’ deceive us into cherishing them in order to maintain the status quo. Freedom of speech is part of the foundation of democracy. ‘They’ have to keep us thinking that it is a great honour to have freedom of speech in order for us to continue to support democracy, and to not revolt against it.