I was 19 when I took hooks’s classes, and I was just becoming a young feminist myself. I had begun my study of feminism with Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, among other white women, and perhaps, because I was foreign-born — rightly or wrongly — I had not expected that people like me would be included in their vision of feminist liberation. Women and men of Asian ethnicities are so often neglected, excluded and marginalized in the Western academy, so as a college student I’d no doubt internalized my alleged insignificance. bell hooks changed my limited perception.

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Her book of theory taught me to ask for more from art, literature, media, politics and history — and for me, a Korean girl who had been born in a divided nation once led by kings, colonizers, then a succession of presidents who were more or less dictators, and for millenniums, that had enforced rigid class systems with slaves and serfs until the early 20th century, and where women of all classes were deeply oppressed and brutalized, I needed to see that the movement had a space for me.

In fostering a feminist movement, which can include and empower women from all different races and classes, hooks calls for an honest reckoning of its history. She indicts the origins of the white feminist movement for its racist and classist treatment of African-American women and repudiates its goals of imitating the power structure of white patriarchy. That said, she does not support a separate black women’s movement, and in fact, sees that as counterproductive to the greater power a well-organized collective women’s movement can have. hooks wrote in “Ain’t I A Woman”: “Without a doubt, the false sense of power black women are encouraged to feel allows us to think that we are not in need of social movements like a women’s movement that would liberate us from sexist oppression. The sad irony is of course that black women are often most victimized by the very sexism we refuse to collectively identify as an oppressive force.”

I am 50 years old now, and I worry when I hear that feminism is anything a woman chooses, because I don’t think that’s true. If a woman chooses to hurt another person or herself in the guise of feminism, surely that cannot eradicate sexism. bell hooks asserts that freedom “as positive social equality that grants all humans the opportunity to shape their destinies in the most healthy and communally productive way can only be a complete reality when our world is no longer racist and sexist.” This is very true, I think, and I wonder if today we are considering what is “most healthy and communally productive” for all of us, not just for some of us.

In college, I did not imagine that I could be a fiction writer. The wish to make art seemed like some incredibly expensive store I could never enter. Nevertheless, no matter what I would do with my life after graduation, “Ain’t I A Woman” allowed me to recognize the dignity and power of living privately and publicly as an immigrant feminist of color. At the time, I did not yet know of Kimberle Crenshaw’s brilliant term “intersectionality,” or Claudia Rankine’s vital concept “racial imaginary” — complementary and significant theories for understanding present day lives, but as a young woman, through hooks’s work, I was just beginning to see that everyone needs theory, and we need it like water.

bell hooks: A Starter Kit

‘Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center’ (1984) Considered a follow-up to “Ain’t I A Woman.” A smart analysis of the future of the women’s movement.

‘Talking Back: Thinking, Thinking Black’ (1989) Anthology of essays about feminism and finding her material and voice as a writer, including “to Gloria, who is she: on using a pseudonym” and “Ain’t I A Woman: looking back.”