The Impacts of Living in a White Supremacist Imperialist Capitalist Patriarchy

The first step in solving a problem is knowing what the problem is.

Naming is an act of power. Naming recognizes the reality of a situation (or the reality of a person) and helps contextualize experiences. A lot of bell hooks’ work surrounds naming the systems we are in, providing clarity where things are muddled, and offering precise language around solutions. She understood that language is always incomplete and that English is especially limited, and that by naming something, power can be redistributed. She also understood that our lack of precise language leads us to accept less than we deserve, to stay subservient, to sit in ignorance. This lack of precision helps uphold our systems of oppression, because not having a shared language around systems, or aro

und love, makes it easier to exploit and mistreat each other.

hooks named the United States as a white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy. In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, hooks said

We can’t begin to understand the nature of domination if we don’t understand how these systems connect with one another. Significantly, this phrase has always moved me because it doesn’t value one system over another. For so many years in the feminist movement, women were saying that gender is the only aspect of identity that really matters, that domination only came into the world because of rape. Then we had so many race-oriented folks who were saying, “Race is the most important thing. We don’t even need to be talking about class or gender.” So for me, that phrase always reminds me of a global context, of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism and of patriarchy. Those things are all linked — an interlocking system.

The first step towards liberation, then, is knowing what you need to be liberated from, to understand the systems in place that are designed to alienate us from one another.