Keeping Close to Home by Bell Hooks Summary and Analysis PDF

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It is a summary and analysis of "Keeping Close to Home" by Bell Hooks....

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Week #1 Keeping Close to Home by Bell Hooks Significant passage: “We must assume greater responsibility for making and maintaining contact, connections that can shape our intellectual visions and inform our radical commitments” (112). Making right contacts is really important because It can affect our intellectual visions and commitments. Summary/Synthesis: Bell Hooks argues that it is essential to maintain one’s family and community ties as one pursues higher education, whether as a student or a teacher in his article, Keeping Close to Home. She mentions that people must mix their public individuality an own individuality to become more successful. In her article, Hooks describes her own painful departure for college first time; her parents were unstable about her leaving, and her intellectual ambitions made her departure painful. Then she mentions that class differences create invisible barriers that divide working-class students from other collegians. She was afraid to discuss her shame, and she felt different from all the peers. Then, she shares her racial background and states, “A Southern black girl from a working-class background who had never been on a city bus, who had never stepped on an escalator, who never traveled by plane (74). She believes that because they share resources and build an active community, black people have created their values in opposition to those of the privileged. While going to Stanford for her B.A. in English, she ran across different people that wanted to get rid of their past, but she was trying to tell them to embrace their background because it makes them who they are. Your history makes you so embrace it. She thinks when the working class and poor learn about and value their pasts, they can stay connected with their families and communities even as they move toward a different future. Education ought to bring people closer to their homes and communities rather than separate them. Just because she respects where she comes from because she was born into poverty in a small town in Kentucky. Critical reflection: Staying connected with one’s family and community means acknowledging the parts of the past that have enriched one’s life. Denying oneself of familiar speech patterns while adapting to the university leads to unfortunate separation from one’s past. All the working class and poor people should nurture the successes of those who choose education; similarly, educated working class and poor people must nurture and affirm their own family’s values. Too often, oppressed people in higher education are seen as the exception, as above the average person who doesn’t belong in the university....