We Real Cool

Are black men cool, or are they despised? This text goes beyond the usual analysis of the black male - difficult childhood, white racism, poverty - to ask questions which other books are unwilling to address, examining what black males fear most and probing the depths of their longing for intimacy, for fathers and for meaningful relationships.

" We Real Cool is a slim book, but it's fat (or phat) with ideas on how to encourage black men to be their real selves in the truest sense of the word." -- Karen Grigsby Bates, Ms. Winter
"I read the first page of the preface holding my nose because I am sick of listening to others tell me who I am. I am out of patience with being the topic of someone's ill-informed master's thesis, dissertation, newspaper feature and magazine article. As I read on, though, Hooks put me at ease with her insight, honesty and clear prose...hooks writes to bring attention to the crossroads at which the black male stands. On one side is his very survival and perhaps his redemption. On the other is his enduring marginalization and even extinction." -- Bill Maxwell, St. Petersburg Times
"The black American feminist writer-critic and social commentator bell hooks is strong meat. Take the way she spells her name, militantly lower case. She uses terms that can scare the horses: imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It can never be said of this writer that she doesn't set her shop-stall up right from the beginning. In her latest work, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity , hooks states in the preface that these incendiary terms are her terms of reference." -- The Independent

bell hooks is one of our leading social and cultural critics. Among her more than twenty books is Salvation: Black People and Love and Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem . Four titles are published by Routledge: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom , Outlaw Culture , Reel to Real , and Where We Stand: Class Matters .