Free Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks

find themselves paying more than their white counterparts would pay In the old days, after slavery and reconstruction, this was called the “race tax” — “you can get it but you gotta pay more.” Your paying more reassures the racist white seller that white supremacy is still the order of the day for the white folks have shown they are smarter.
    When I first purchased land in the Kentucky hills, I was first a silent partner with a white male friend. We did not know whether or not the owner of the property would have been prejudiced against black folks, but we chose not to openly disclose our partnership until all transactions were completed. Many of my white friends and acquaintances who own land in the Kentucky hills are gay yet their gayness is not initially visible, and shared whiteness makes it possible for them to move into areas that remain closed to black folk because of prejudice. Liberal and progressive white folks who think it “cool” to buy land next to neighbors that are openly racist rarely understand that by doing so they are acting in collusion with the perpetuation of white supremacy. I like to imagine a time when the progressive non-black folks who own hundreds and hundreds of acres will sell small lots to black people, to diverse groups of people so that we might all live in beloved communities which honor difference. M.Scott Peck introduced his book, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, with the powerful insight that: “In and through community is the salvation of the world.” By definition, he tells us, community is inclusive.
    Writing about the issue of race in The Hidden Wound published in 1968 and then again in the 1988 afterword, Wendell Berry reminds us that issues of freedom and prosperity cannot be separated from “the issue of the health of the land,” that “the psychic wound of racism had resulted inevitably in wounds in the land, the country itself.” My own deep wounds, the traumas of my Kentucky childhood are marked by the meeting place of family dysfunction and the disorder produced by dominator thinking and practice, the combined effect of racism, sexism, and class elitism. When I left Kentucky I hoped to leave behind the pain of these wounds. That pain stayed with me until I began to do the work of wholeness, of moving from love into greater understanding of self and community. It is love that has led me to return home, to the Kentucky hills of my childhood where I felt the greatest sense of being one with nature, of being free. In those moments I always knew that I was more than my pain. Returning to Kentucky, doing my part to be accountable to my native place, enables me to keep a sublime hold on life.
    Everyday I look out at Kentucky hills. They are a constant reminder of human limitations and human possibilities. Much hurt has been done to these Kentucky hills and yet they survive. Despite devastation, and the attempts by erring humans to destroy these hills, this earth, they will remain. They will witness our demise. There is divinity here, a holy spirit that promises reconciliation.

6
To Be Whole and Holy
    Reading from a Kentucky journal written before I left my homeplace to live elsewhere, I find these words: “Troubled in mind and heart I take to the hills.” The sublime happy years of my childhood were spent roaming the hills. Also in my journal I wrote: “The hills are where I am home.” As a family we were isolated in the hills surrounded by nature, not another house in sight. Houses in the hollows close to ours were inhabited by poor white folk, who we were taught were rabid racists. They were not our friends. Even if they were by chance neighborly, we were taught to mistrust their kindness. We were taught to see their friendliness as simply a gesture aimed at luring us into a trap where we would be wounded and hurt like any captured animal. No wonder then that as children we feared and yet were fascinated by white hillbillies. Individual black