bell hooks on the Power of Being in the Margins

Fifteen years into reading and writing in order to learn how to live, I looked back on these marginalia on the search for meaning and realized that the people whose lives and work have most moved me and fed me, consoled me and inspirited me, were people who existed in the margins of their time and place. (That is why Brain Pickings became The Marginalian.) They were people who were already other enough by some variable (realists in a religious world, women in a man’s world, queer people in a corseted world) that they had little to lose by thinking… read article