Bell Hooks, whose government name is Gloria Watkins is a author, cultural critic, and feminist theorist that hails from Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Over the past decade she has written plenty of novels that aroused the souls of many African-Americans. Salvation: black people in love is one of her most recent attempts to educate black people on the importance of love, which she claims is what black people today are missing. I can see that her views are well respected, by all of the positive criticism she receives from people like Maya Angelou and magazines like Essence and the Black Issues Book Review. Moreover, in this novel she makes a lot of claims and most hold to be true. But one significant claim that is made by Hooks is that Tupac Amaru Shakur was and still is a negative influence on young black males today. In this essay I will challenge that claim. I believe that Tupac Amaru Shakur has had a positive influence on young black males today because through his music and writings he was able to teach young black males to respect people like they would want to be respected, to constantly search for knowledge, and to always have self-esteem.
             Bell Hooks, as well as the mass media portray to us that black people are not loving, and that our lives are so burdened with violence and aggression that we have no time to love. She involves Tupac Shakur, an influential and revolutionary rapper/activist into this general statement. Due to Tupac and a handful of other rappers, young black men try to take on the image of being "hard". "Hardness," is usually associated with being nonchalant about life, rebelling against the social structure, and being violently aggressive at times. In the dictionary, "hard" means tough, unbreakable, and stiff. I feel that Bell Hooks' definition of "hard" means incompetent, devalued and destroyed and that once they learn this way of life, they will ultimately become ...