Where We Stand: Class Matters

hooks’s mother, referred to as “Mama” in the text, plays a significant role in shaping her early understanding of class, materialism, and economic survival. Mama represents both the resilience and contradictions of working-class Black women navigating a system designed to keep them economically vulnerable. A devoted mother who worked tirelessly to ensure her children’s well-being, she embodied the traditional values of frugality, resourcefulness, and pride—qualities necessary for survival in a world where financial security was never guaranteed.

hooks emphasizes Mama’s ability to obscure the family’s financial troubles, underscoring the text’s thematic interest in The Complexity of Class Beyond Economic Status. Mama refused to acknowledge their economic hardship, likely, hooks hypothesizes, due to internalized class shame and a desire to present a façade of stability. hooks recalls how her mother never openly admitted financial strain, even when the family was struggling. Instead, Mama maintained an image of dignity and control, protecting her children from fully understanding the realities of their financial precarity. This silence around money mirrored broader societal taboos regarding class and poverty, reinforcing the illusion that as long as appearances were upheld, economic struggle could be hidden or ignored.

At the same time, Mama displayed an attachment to materialism, particularly in the way she prioritized presenting a well-maintained household and ensuring her children dressed properly. For her, material goods signified respectability and upward mobility, even if they required financial sacrifices. This paradox—a desire to rise above working-class struggles while simultaneously obscuring them—illustrates the cultural conditioning that equates material wealth with personal worth.

Mama represents the complexities of class consciousness in marginalized communities. Her emphasis on maintaining dignity and appearances, while simultaneously engaging in acts of quiet resourcefulness, reflect the ways in which many Black women navigate systemic oppression while trying to create a better future for their children. hooks’s reflections on her mother highlight the psychological and emotional toll of class struggle, revealing the contradictions between aspiration, reality, and the ways people cope with economic uncertainty.

hooks’s father, “Daddy,” represents a patriarchal approach to economic power and control, reinforcing the traditional gender roles that shaped her childhood. Unlike Mama, who obscured financial struggles while striving for a sense of material dignity, Daddy embraced a rigid and authoritarian perspective on money, seeing it as a tool for control rather than a means for communal uplift.

Throughout Where We Stand, hooks describes her father as someone who wielded financial power to assert dominance over the household. He controlled the family’s money and limited what was given to his wife and children, adhering to traditional patriarchal values that framed financial provision as the man’s duty while simultaneously restricting women’s financial agency. His secrecy about earnings and spending further reinforced economic disparity within the family structure, creating an imbalance of power that left Mama in a position of dependency. This model of financial control reflects larger societal structures that keep women, particularly working-class women, economically vulnerable and unable to achieve self-sufficiency.

Daddy’s approach to money also highlights the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy, illustrating how financial withholding and coercion function as mechanisms of control. His reluctance to acknowledge or address the family’s struggles mirrored a broader cultural refusal to confront class realities. hooks’s experience with her father inform her critique of economic systems that uphold male dominance and perpetuate financial inequality, reinforcing the need for alternative models that emphasize economic justice and equity.