Sisters of the Yam

Black Women and Self-Recovery

bell hooks explores notions of self-care among communities of Black women, locating it alongside the work of grief, testimony, and reconciliation. Where so much of the self-care discourse is oriented around personal solutions to personal problems, hooks looks instead to practices of collective care and truth-telling that work to dismantle systems of oppression and domination. This is a communal, political, and radical approach to self-care, a corrective to the consumerized discourse of self-care that brings little relief and leaves the world unchanged.