The Home as a Site of Resistance
bell hooks (from the same interview I keep quoting, because it’s just that good):
I bought my current house from a conservative white male capitalist who lives across the street from me, and I’m so happy in my little home. I tell people, when I open the doors of my house it’s like these arms come out, and they’re just embracing me. I think that is part of our radical resistance to the culture of domination. I know that I’m not who he imagined in this little house. He imagined a nice white family with two kids, and I think on some level it was very hard for him to sell his house to a radical black woman, a radical black feminist woman. I think all of us, in terms of houses, have our idea, when we love our home, of who we want to be in it. But I think black folks in general across class have to restore that sense of resistance in the home.
When we look at the history of anti-racist rebels among black people, so much organizing happened in people’s homes. I always think about Mary McLeod Bethune: “Let’s just start the college in your living room.” Self-determination really does begin at home. We’re finding out that one of the reasons for why so much black rebel anti-racist movements failed is because they didn’t take care of the home as a site of resistance. So, you have very wounded people trying to lead movements in a world beyond the home, but they were simply not psychologically fit to lead.
I’m slowly piecing this together with other thoughts about resistance and ideas about utopia (including how to define utopia), and how to go about “Clearing Space,” in which Jen Lowe writes:
"Starting a school from air goes like this: First, clear a space. A floor of a building. Ten weeks of your time. Fill the space with people. Don’t let the flies get the best of you. Ask all the questions. Build some answers. There you have it."
But I must also keep in mind that sometimes people don’t have more space than their homes to clear space and sometimes they have even less. In a talk she gave, watch Jen Lowe thinking about how to become more dangerous by “finding a quiet gesture that helps us to create less fear and more freedom.”
As I am lucky to have space and privilege, I will do my best to offer welcome and provide something like what Alan Jacobs describes:
[T]here need to be more pockets of resistance: more institutions with self-consciously distinctive missions, and within institutions more departments or even just informal discussion groups who seek to imagine the so-far unimaginable.
