bell hooks Is An Aphrodisiac, Part Six


Let us be Ta Nehisi Coates for a few. Let me hold your imagination, once again here, I promise to give it back to you exponentially increased. Okay, so you’re this small time freelance gambler that gets a chance to sit in the rooms with the likes of Al Sharpton under the bright lights of MSNBC. You’ve gone from the smoke filled rooms to the Player’s Table, and within a relatively short time given the type of career most of your breed must suffer through. You’re Ta Nehisi Coates. You’ve written for before it became the launching pad of Al Sharpton’s “Politics Nation” and Melissa Harris-Perry’s “The Melissa Harris-Perry Show”. In the debate of whether freelance writers should be paid for their services, you argued that they should not be paid because you spent time harnessing your craft at Slate for free, and others should follow your lead. You’ve risen from obscurity to being celebrated for your critique of Barrack Obama, and you even appear as a guest on your colleague, and I’m sure by now, friend’s MSNBC show, “The Melissa Harris-Perry Show”. Ta Nehisi Coates, welcome to your life as a privileged US Black writer.


How does one frame a renege as simple oversight in the lofty career of a card shark? How do you remind a multi-billion dollar company with advertising revenue driven by white mothers of adopted Black children that your star media personality meant those scathing statements about white people that adopted Black children did not mean it like that? If you are clever, and I would imagine a guy like Ta Nehisi Coates who has published on his blog for The Atlantic that he has written at length on how Harriet Tubman is not as impressive as her legend suggest and that possibly Harriet “Mother Moses” slash “Bytch Nigga, I Freed US Slaves In Real Life Not In Some Video Game” Tubman is undeserving of her stature, well, I would wager that a guy that can sink that low for approval and validation, and still find air to breathe, is most likely full of guile. If you are the guileful Ta Nehisi Coates, you look around that gambling room, you look at the MSNBC line up, and you start indirectly putting every one present under that White Ivory bus. Who else but Tulane professor of political studies with a Black feminist audience in the age of hashtag solidarity is for white women could fill the void that would exist if her show does not?


Sure, you could find another light-skinned woman of mixed racial heritage to add extensions to her permed hair and don braids, but will they have that peer reviewed political science background coupled with an almost religious following of middle class US Black women? See, bell hooks really had already provided Ta Nehisi Coates with his panoply.


“I’ve never been on a stage with a celebrity before!”


It was said in such a Black Women of age who really could care less about how she appeared, damn it, she survived being a US Black Woman. I almost cry when I replay the video because she reminds me so much of my own mother that due to a massive stroke can no longer articulate or walk. Her presence is archetype—bell hooks, in so many vast and immeasurable ways is invocation of US Black Woman. But, the title of this is not “bell hooks is a flower, or some romantic device”. It is not the application of metaphoric devise to point at the illusive customs that aid us in taking for granted the bonds sealed due to reproductive drives. No, bell hooks is utility, she is aphrodisiac. Her presence with us is not impractical deed done to promote escape; her presence promotes getting to the business at hand without immature and unreasonable obligations of one’s time spent on decorating already beautiful realities perceived as ugly by those existentialist thinkers that believe Life is ugly. bell hooks does not posture here much. bell hooks is not love letters and chocolate candy, she is good weed and wine.