We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity is a 2004 book about masculinity by feminist author bell hooks. It collects ten essays on black men. The title alludes to Gwendolyn Brooks' 1959 poem "We Real Cool". The essays are intended to provide cultural criticism and solutions to the problems she identifies. hooks suggests that black men are forced to repress themselves in white America. She suggests the ways in which racist and sexist attitudes developed in American culture have criminalized and dehumanized black men, and the ways in which these myths have harmed the black community. Hooks states that she believes that hip-hop as a whole strongly reflects imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. bell hooks ”bell hooks” is the pen name used by Gloria Jean Watkins. She is a renowned social activist and intellectual whose writing often deal with topics of race, intersectionality, gender, and class. Summary "Preface about black men: don't believe the hype" addresses the public perception of black masculinity and its stereotypes. hooks opens by critiquing Ellis Cose's The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America. She argues Cose limits his cultural analysis of race in America by refraining from discussing contemporary political issues, neglecting Malcolm X and W. E. B. Du Bois's theories of civil rights, and offering few means of subverting racial stereotypes and social issues. Black men suffer, in hook's view, from what she terms imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. She writes: "Allegiance to sexist thinking about the nature of leadership creates a blind spot that effectively prevents masses of black people from making use of theories and practices of liberation when they are offered by women." hooks uses examples of her family life, specifically her father and brother, to document "patriarchal domination" of black male thought, and argues for radicalized intersectionality. "Anyone who claims to be concerned with the fate of black men in the United States," hooks writes, "who does not speak about the need for them to radicalize their consciousness to challenge patriarchy ... colludes with the existing system in keeping black men in their place, psychologically locked down, locked out." "plantation patriarchy" centers on African masculinity that predated the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. Rather than subjugating indigenous people along racial lines, hooks claims African explorers of the Americas inherited patriarchal practices against women. She discusses gender relations under slavery and, while affirming Frederick Douglass's