We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks is a book collection of 10 essays on the way in which white culture marginalizes black males. 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.

In We Real Cool, hooks suggests that black males 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 males, and the ways in which these myths have harmed the black community. In the book hooks states that she believes that hip-hop as a whole strongly reflects imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.