Now a Distinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, hooks lives in Greenwich Village (her well-appointed home was featured in the New York Times) and Tampa, Florida, where she’s renovating a 1920s bungalow. The Phoenix spoke with hooks when she was in Boston recently promoting her new book.

Q: Did you stumble upon Salvation: Black People and Love while you were writing All About Love?

A: I can tell you the precise moment. I was in Flint, Michigan, talking about All About Love to fifth-graders, and all of these young black kids were telling me, “Well, there’s no such thing as love.” And I found that to be so sad, so disheartening. It was really like an arrow to my heart, in the opposite way of Cupid. I just thought, how could you feel life had any meaning whatsoever if you didn’t feel that there was love?

Q: I tend to categorize these kids as the MTV generation, parked in front of the TV, not getting the nourishment that they need.

A: As a nation, we’re moving away from a focus on love. We focus on material stuff as the only thing that matters, and these children believe that happiness and joy will come from material things, and not from substantive values in one’s life, like love. In Salvation, I talk about how there’s a big difference between the music of an Otis Redding, saying “This is my lover’s prayer, I hope it reaches out to you,” or my favorite, Jackie Wilson, “Your love has lifted me higher.” Here you had black men singing about the weariness of being a black man, a working-class black man in this sort of classist, racist culture. But the kind of new music you have — Dr. Dre or R. Kelly or somebody saying about a woman, “You remind me of my Jeep” — I mean, that’s a totally different sense of valuation. It’s that whole sense that it isn’t about love, it’s about material exchange. I saw the tide turning with Tina Turner’s big hit a few years ago, “What’s Love Got To Do with It?”, and there’s a song that came after that, [Janet Jackson’s] “What Have You Done for Me Lately?”

If you came to my kitchen, I have images of Louis Armstrong all over the place and people say to me, “What is it about Louis Armstrong?” I [say], “This is a man who really loved women.” He loved his mother and he loved the women in his life.

And we have people like John Coltrane, who we know for many years had a very anguished personal life and struggled with addiction before he came to wonderful things like A Love Supreme. Which again, let’s contrast A Love Supreme against some of the kind of horrible gangsta-rap stuff. I mean for this black man to be able to say, “I’ve gone through so much, and what I’ve come to is a realization about the importance of love.

Q: On the flip side of that is your conversation with rapper Lil’ Kim.

A: She said to me, “What’s love? I’ve not known any love.” I worship at the throne of Otis Redding and I really worship at the throne of Aretha Franklin. And I think that when we read the biographies of women singers, of Etta James, whose music I love, black women singers, we hear tragic stories of incest and abandonment.

But music like Aretha’s — there’s this one song where she says, “If you can’t trust anybody’s love in this world, trust mine” — that’s the kind of music that I think brought a pedagogy of love into popular discourse and into our lives. It’s not that I don’t appreciate some forms of rap — I do — but I’m concerned that children not just be raised with rap music as the quintessential expression of black popular culture, because Aretha Franklin’s music, especially those years of writing those passionate ballets — it’s eternal music. You know, that music that really gets at the heart of our emotional universe, what we long for.

Q: It seems that Salvation can be broken down into two perspectives, two categories of how love is looked at: historical and cultural.

A: Absolutely. I think people don’t realize that historically, one of the big pro-slavery arguments was that black people were not capable of complex emotionality, and as a consequence we were seen as not capable of love. And if people do their research they’ll know that there were lots of discussions among black writers as late as the ’60s and early ’70s, wondering whether we have been so dehumanized by white supremacy and racism that we are not able to love. The theme of “where’s the place of love in our life?” comes up again as black people struggle.

I think [that for] any group of people of color in our nation, who are trying to make it economically — it could equally be said of Jews, at the moment when Jewish immigrants first came to this country — the emphasis is on survival, how will you become a success. But what happens to your emotional well-being and your emotional life?

Q: Reading the introduction to Salvation, it seems that there was strong love between your grandparents, but not such strong love in your immediate family.

A: My maternal grandparents, Bay-Bay and Daddy Guss, were these people who were married for 75 years, and they fashioned, like any wonderful love relationship, a relationship that was about who they were. My parents, who will have been together 50 years come a few more months, have not fashioned a mutually satisfying bond together. So in a way, I saw both types of marriages, because we all know that longevity where there is unhappiness does not mean much. But when you are able to see people stay together through the ups and downs of life, and create sustained bonds, that’s a very powerful thing, and that’s what I witnessed. I wanted what I saw my grandparents having.

Q: It almost seems that that’s what we are witnessing right now with Jesse Jackson and his family, in the wake of his disclosure that he had a child outside of his marriage.

A: One of the things that is to me most boring and sad about the case with Jesse Jackson, as was the case with Clinton and the whole Lewinsky thing, is people who are not willing to come out and tell the truth about the fact that a lot of long-term marriages have become places where people say, particularly for the man, “You can go out and have a partner, you can have a sexual affair.” Instead we have to act like we’re back in Puritan times and the man is saying “I’m guilty, I’m guilty, please forgive me,” rather that saying, in fact, “I have an agreement with my wife and she maybe knows about this.” So there can be a different sense of how you negotiate a relationship.

When this story broke we didn’t have a sense of ... I mean, Jesse Jackson was like an adolescent, just as Clinton was; somehow these men are still being led by the penis. It’s just such a boring, old-fashioned, horrible sense of masculinity that men are not capable of making loving decisions about what they do with their bodies. And I think this is a constant in the chapter in Salvation on loving black masculinity: one of things I think we have to do is stop thinking about men as children who somehow are not capable of being in touch with their emotions. If we have created a society — and I think patriarchy has to a certain extent — where men don’t know what they feel and don’t know how to cope with their sexualities, then it’s time for us to change it. But we can’t keep acting like somehow men are so stupid that this is just what a man’s gonna do and then he can stand up and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” as Clinton did and now Jesse Jackson. How about a man who stands up and says, “This is what I’ll take responsibility for in my life”?

Q: How do we ensure that kids have access to the kind of love that can give them healthy self-esteem?

A: We have to put love on the agenda. Notice that Jesse Jackson didn’t immediately say, “I love this young woman” — so we thought maybe it was all about sex. Now of course we know, if you’ve done any research about it, that he’s had a relationship with her. It’s obviously more than something that’s about sex. But love doesn’t get talked about. In the Million Man March, for example, where there was this whole theme of atonement, there was no discussion of love. So I think that partially we do it by putting love on our agenda as something that is political.

Q: But guys are too macho to talk about love ...

A: The men, I think, who are our heroes are often people we never hear about. They’re not the men in the public sphere, but there are individual men everywhere in our nation who are saying, “I will no longer live a loveless life, and I will not allow my children to go without the love of their father.” There’s a big thing in this book about father love, because I think that in our nation as a whole, there’s been a tendency to feel like fathers are not important. Especially now, with so many female celebrities choosing to have babies without fathers. The truth is, most children, whether they’re raised by two lesbian parents or a heterosexual single mom, want to know who their father is — it has an impact on their psyche. It doesn’t mean that if the father’s absent, a kid won’t be loved and healthy, but they certainly want to have a sense of what the place of father love in their lives is. What’s the place of having love from a man?

I think about my own self, raised by a very harsh and punitive dad, and then the joy that came into my life with the tenderness of my grandfather. In my autobiography I said of my grandfather, “His smells fill my nostrils with the scent of happiness. With him all the broken bits and pieces of my heart come together again.” And I don’t think that I could love men today and trust in men today had it not been for that unconditional love that came to me from my grandfather.

Q: What about the stereotype of the little tough guy?

A: It’s really, really sad. I’m writing a series a series of books with Disney-Hyperion for boys, because I think that another aspect of boys that we don’t respect is we don’t teach boys how to be still, how to deal with difficult emotionalities. You know what happens to the boy in our society, and until we really come to grips with that, I don’t think we’ll come to grips with male violence. I don’t think we’ll come to grips with male hatred of women until we begin to say boys need love. We have all the marvelous new feminist research that’s telling us it’s been harmful to adolescent boys to let them drift into antisocial behavior. What has been wrong for some time is our cultural neglect of adolescent boys — our cultural sense that somehow they don’t need love. And it’s okay to let them stare at a computer and play games all day long or watch some violent films all day long, rather than teaching them connectedness.

Until we heal it, there can be no real love. Love is our hope and our salvation, and I think that when we have the revolution of love, a lot of our social ills will go away.

Henry Santoro can be reached at hsantoro[a]phx.com.