Where We Stand: Class Matters By Bell Hooks

Where We Stand: Class Matters is an exploration of the class system in the United States and how it intertwines with other crucial themes of today's society like racism, sexism and feminism.
Author Bell Hooks emphasises throughout her book the argument that class is an uncool topic to talk about, ignored by mass media, avoided in the private and public dialogue, feared by wealthy and poor. In this book, Hooks focuses on the harm done by such silences and on the consequences that the American capitalist system has on its population at a behavioural as well as psychological level, always focusing on how different social, racial and gender groups are affected by the same system. Each chapter is written as a self-sufficient essay, dealing with

The author sees medias of all kind (television, newspapers, the Internet...) as covering a negative role especially in the United States, where they extend the values of the ruling class to all other social groups, while creating and broadcasting a negative image of the poor as parasites, predators exploiting the resources provided by the wealthy because of their laziness. Widespread embrace of 'hedonistic consumerism' (p.60) by all people is something Hooks sees as the cancer of American society today. It's a system which has tragic consequences both psychologically and behaviourally on the poor as personal value is considered to depend on material ownership. The desire to be wealthy is seen as the only meaningful aspiration, and the failure to satisfy one's material longings triggers psychological torment and

Both depict betrayal between members of the same group: class elites in both feminist and black liberation movements distorted the meaning of liberation to protect their own interests which, in this case, is status. The fact that class-based civil rights struggle destroyed solidarity between black people is a central topic in the book. Hooks describes how racism hit wealthy blacks too, who moved into white neighbourhoods, adopted typical white lifestyles and started hiring white underlings as a form of revenge for what they had to go through during the segregation years. The fact that the new wealthy black left the black poor behind is repeatedly attacked by the author, who insists that social mobility doesn't mean betraying those on the bottom. If this is true for mobility of the black population, then it is also true for women's mobility in society. The same concept is used by the author when analysing poverty among white people, an issue purposefully ignored by medias in the United States, who regularly seem to forget that the majority of the poor population is constituted of white