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Two thinkers, side by side

Life

Portrait of bell hooks
bell hooks

1952 CE – 2021 CE

ModernFeministContemporaryAmerican

Born Hopkinsville

She wrote that the household is the first classroom of domination, and spent her career insisting that love, taught properly, is a political practice, not a private feeling.

Portrait of W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois

1868 CE – 1963 CE

PoliticalModernAmerican

Born Great Barrington

He coined 'double consciousness' — the sense of always seeing yourself through the eyes of others — and spent sixty years fighting the world that made it necessary.

Connection

W.E.B. Du Bois double consciousness and intersectional analysis bell hooks — hooks extended Du Bois's analysis of how race shapes self-perception to the specific position of Black women, arguing that mainstream feminism and mainstream civil rights thought each captured only part of a Black woman's double, or triple, consciousness.

Shared Ideas

EqualityInner Freedom

Ideas

EqualityInner Freedom
EqualityInner Freedom

Words

“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression.”

— bell hooks

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

— bell hooks

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

“One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

Key Moments

1976

Begins decades of university teaching

1981

Publishes Ain't I a Woman

1895

First Black American PhD from Harvard

1903

The Souls of Black Folk published

1909

Co-founded the NAACP

Works

Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

The Souls of Black Folk

Black Reconstruction in America

Atlas of Thinkers

A story-first philosophy atlas. Explore history's greatest thinkers through place, time, movement, and ideas.

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Volume I · Ancient Greece · 624-262 BCE