Call and response taking a stand bell hooks

Reading Silas House's speech "Our Secret Places in the Waiting World," I hear him speak our collective pain and lamentation, those of us who are exploited, oppressed, dominated. I hear the lamentation of the privileged who witness suffering, who long for justice but who feel more often than not overwhelmed by powerlessness. Even though Silas powerfully calls us to act again and again, to revolt and resist on behalf of freedom and justice for all—on behalf of fairness—there are not many who are answering the call. Then there are those who have answered, but whose voices grow weary from burnout, from encroaching fear and despair that there will be no change coming. All too often, when freedom fighters are telling our stories again and again, speaking truth to power with no response that brings about progres­ sive change, we grow weary. We become afraid, and we long to be silent. But, Audre Lorde, poet, activist, lesbian, has already told us in her poem "A Litany for Survival" that "when we are silent / we are still afraid / So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive."

To re-kindle a spirit of home, Silas evokes the emergence of a "New Ap­ palachia" made up of folk who are outsiders, nomads, immigrants. House declares:

We are gathered as a community to talk about a New Ap­ palachia of the rural and the urban, the white and the black, the Cherokee and the Hispanic, the straight and the gay and the transgendered, the queer, the Other. We are a new Appalachia made up of a people who are perpetual immi­ grants, those whom the rest of the nation see as the Other, no matter how assimilated they may be within this culture.

When I read these words, the speech in its entirety, I affirm the spirit of difference and diversity evoked. Yet, I do not see us as representing a new Appalachia. What is new is our visibility, our speaking out without change, our solidarity. Yet this diverse Appalachia has always been and will always

Professor, activist, and feminist bell hooks is the author of numerous award-winning works that seamlessly blend the study of race, class, gender, culture, and teaching into a unique and thought-provoking call to action, hooks, born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, received a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983. She has taught English, African studies, and African American studies at Yale University and women's studies and American literature at Oberlin College, and was a distinguished lecturer of English literature at the City College o f New York.

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be. And we must be careful not to fall into the binary separations that simply re-articulate another version of us and them.

I am almost twenty years older than Silas. And what I remember most about my growing up life in the Kentucky hills was the widespread belief that those of us who lived in the hills were different because we chose to separate ourselves from the conventional world and its laws and creeds. No doubt there was plenty of racism and sexism in those hills, but there was always racial integration, the crossing of boundaries, folks living the life that they wanted to live in spite of all manner of prejudices and obstacles. Truly shared class positionality was a unifying factor; everyone around us was living with less, everyone around us was poor and working class, squatters, renters, and a few owners. There was much diversity in that world, and even though many folks were not educated, they were radically open, refusing to judge and condemn others.

I evoke this subculture of Appalachia that has always been because I think it is vital that we honor connections to a past where difference, however relative, survived and was at times celebrated. With critical awareness, we must recognize the spaces of openness and solidarity forged in the concrete experience of living in communities that were always present in radical spaces in Appalachia both then and now. Rather than speak of a "new Appalachia," I believe it is essential for unity in diversity to gather those seeds of progres­ sive change and struggle that have long characterized the lives of some indi­ viduals in rural Kentucky. While Silas says "in Appalachia, we have always been about remembering," he declares: "I hate the fact that so many of us within this region believe that we must cling to the past without ever going forward." With insight, he shares that "we must find balance between . . . remembering and going forward." A fundamental aspect of that balance has to be that those of us who are progressive, who are more critically conscious and aware, not construct hierarchies wherein we separate ourselves from those who are still held in bondage by dominator thinking. For we will not convert or change folks without extending the forgiveness and compassion that is essential for the building of communities of solidarity.

There is no evil that exists in the larger society that is not present here in Kentucky, and in our beloved hills—the hatreds that abound in the world at large (hatred of queer folk, hatred of colored folks). The only way to change from dominator culture to a culture of fairness is to teach folks to love justice. And that teaching begins with those who are most likely to be the targets of hate-embodying principles, the revolution of values that are the heart of all true movements for social justice.

We are not calling forth a romantic nostalgia about the Appalachian past when we work to reveal and remember the roots of radicalism, linking progressive change in the past to the progressive change we long for in the present.

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