Bell Hooks

In my opinion I feel that race, gender, class, and sexual orientation is not an important thing to know about the authors I will be reading in school. When Bell Hooks says " That white world made me doubt myself. And in the space of that doubt I needed proof that they were all wrong—that there are great writers who happened to be black, just as my beloved Emily Dickinson happened to be white." When she said this I thought to myself that she meant that everyone is equal and the same as white people in writing. That it didn't matter if you were a African American or white writer because you could be a great writer no matter what race you are. She says how Emily Dickinson is a writer who she beloved who happened to be white just as she was a writer who happened to be African American. So don't judge a authors writing base off of there ethnicity. I think that it should not be an issue or concern that you need to know the writers gender or race to base your opinion on their writing. 
While I was continuing reading Writing Without Labels I came across Bell Hooks saying "Writers who seek to flee any reference to identifying labels of race, gender, class, or sexual practice often do so because the tendency is to make too much of them. " I thought about how hard it shouldn't be for a writer to be able to express their writing without anyone judging it based off of their race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. From the quote my understanding of it was that writers run from the things they don't want to label them because thats not what its suppose to be about when it comes to their writing. 
This isn't as important as hooks starts off saying because when she talked about how Emily Dickson was her favorite writer she never thought about how she was a white woman. She just recognized that "Her vision resonated with mine. She evoked those emotions I felt but could not talk about with anyone. It was all there in her words." Emily Dickson was a writer who Bell could relate to from a woman perspective.