Attitude As Strategy
bell (lowercase intentional by the author's convention) and her fellow black women have learned that if they want the majority of the American populace to listen to them, then they must adapt a specific attitude in order to attract the desired kind of attention. According to strategy, these women learn to conceal their rage in order to appeal to people logically. They must preserve a certain degree of casual conversation and humility in order to persuade anyone to listen because too much intensity too early can spell doom to any potential advocates. Employing an attitude of humility thus becomes part of a larger strategy for black women to spread the truth about the specific injustices they face in contemporary society, as members of two significant minority groups.
Disenfranchisement
Among the minority groups, black women have often received the most under-representation. This is because the black minority is headed by men, and the women's minority is led by white women. In either case, black women are often sent to the proverbial back of the class. They are still continually taught to observe, to let the "stronger" voices accomplish the task. As hooks observes, this sort of internal organization among minority groups only serves to propagate disenfranchisement which she and her fellow black women know intimately. When the cause of minority representation is still being accomplished within these two larger groups, how can a black women detract from these accomplishments by complaining about her own disenfranchisement among the group? She is told that she is being selfish, that internal discord will ruin the movement for everyone else. All of these scenarios exist in an intangible almost hypothetical state, but hooks writes about real life events which contribute to her discussion as evidence of an internal disenfranchisement which weighs heavily upon her and other black women in America.
Social Reform
bell hooks and her friends and fellow black women in America are engaged in a war against prejudice and injustice. They pursue this war through, largely, social relations. In every conversation they identify an opportunity to teach somebody about the injustice pervading social minorities like their own. Although, to some, this tactic may appear manipulative and one sided, but actually the nuance of this concept appears throughout hooks' essays. She is arguing that people are both the source and the victims of injustice, so only through reaching people can social reform be accomplished. In treating people to the truth, through establishing relationships, and by demonstrating their own disadvantages within the confines of trust these women are able to spread their message of truth in order to serve this larger cause which is the war against social prejudice and injustice.