bell hooks's warning that as a nation we are afraid to talk about class, even as the growing gap between rich and poor has already set the stage for ongoing class warfare, comes from the preface to her 2000 book Where We Stand: Class Matters. In it hooks turned her attention to the subject she believed Americans were most determined to avoid. The United States likes to imagine itself a classless society, where anyone can rise through hard work and poverty is a personal failure. hooks argued that this myth hides the reality of a society divided by deep and growing inequality, and that the refusal to talk about class keeps working people from seeing their common condition.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952, hooks grew up in a working-class Black family in the segregated South. She took her pen name from her great-grandmother and wrote it in lowercase to place attention on her ideas rather than herself. Her journey from Kentucky to Stanford and the halls of elite universities made her acutely aware of how class shaped every space she entered, and of how race, gender, and class were bound together. In books such as Ain't I a Woman, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and Teaching to Transgress, she named the system she called imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and she drew on Paulo Freire to imagine education as a practice of freedom.

In Where We Stand, hooks examined how consumer culture and the worship of wealth corrupt solidarity, including within Black communities, and how the privileged turn away from the suffering of the poor. She called for honest dialogue about class, for living simply and sharing resources, and for building solidarity across the lines that divide working people. She returned to Kentucky to teach at Berea College and died there in 2021. Her words remain a call to break the silence around class, to name the war waged on the poor, and to build a movement capable of ending it.