Politics & Power Quote by Bell Hooks

Hooks lands the punch by naming a disappearance that gets treated as normal: black women don’t just get ignored, they get structurally edited out. “Socialized out of existence” is deliberately clinical and violent at once. It suggests something learned, repeated, made polite through habit - a vanishing accomplished not by a single villain but by the routines of media, politics, academia, even everyday conversation. The line reads like a diagnosis of a culture that can only process race and gender one at a time, and even then chooses the versions most legible to power.

Her second sentence exposes the mechanism: representational default settings. “Black people” becomes shorthand for black men, because patriarchy trains audiences to treat men as the public face of any group. “Women” becomes shorthand for white women, because whiteness gets to pose as the universal. Hooks isn’t only complaining about lack of inclusion; she’s mapping how two movements - anti-racist politics centered on male experience and feminism centered on white experience - can each claim justice while reproducing hierarchy.

The subtext is a warning about coalition politics that prize simplicity over accuracy. If the story of race is told as male and the story of gender is told as white, black women are forced into a rhetorical orphanage: asked to pick one identity at a time, then blamed for being “divisive” when they refuse. Hooks’ intent is to make that refusal inevitable - to insist that any serious account of America’s power arrangements has to start where the culture least likes to look.