Give Me Shelter: Re-Membering the Black Home, by Elleza Kelley

“I grew up in an ugly house,” wrote bell hooks. “No one there considered the function of beauty or pondered the use of space. . . . In that house things were not to be looked at, they were to be possessed—space was not to be created but owned—a violent anti-aesthetic.”[1] She compares this house to that of her grandmother, “A place,” she writes, “where I am learning to look at things, where I am learning how to belong in space. In rooms full of objects, crowded with things, I am learning to recognize myself. . . . [Baba] has taught me how to look at the world and see beauty. She has taught me ‘we must learn to see.’”[2]

Seeing, hooks suggests, is not what happens naturally when our eyes perceive shape and color; it is something we must learn, a (s)training of our eyes to glimpse beyond the immediately perceptible. To see beauty is to see “things” not as commodities, but to observe “what light does to color,” or to remember that “objects are not without spirit.”[3] Where “things” are untethered from the logics of property and ownership, we find and create beauty. Thus, beauty, for hooks’s grandmother, is precisely what slips away from capitalist capture. It is what the market cannot comprehend, evaluate, or commodify.

On the contrary, “The general understanding of home in America,” scholar Fred Moten observes, is “your home is your castle, it’s your sovereign space. You put a fence around it and barbed wire, if you can get some, and you get some goddamn surveillance equipment, and some dogs, and whatever the hell you can do to make sure that nobody comes up in your home.”[4] Here, Moten describes the American home as a bounded enclosure, fortified against the threatening “surrounds.”[5] The home is not only a physical enclosure—a contained area encircled by definite borders—but also the embodiment of ongoing processes of enclosure that transform land, space, and life into private property.[6] As both a figure and a historical process, enclosure is one of racial capitalism’s most vital technologies. Thus, the promises of privacy, protection, safety, and refuge offered by this image of home are inextricable from the brutal machinations of capital, property ownership, exclusion, and containment. But this conventional or “general” understanding of home speaks more to the aspirations of the American Dream and the imposition of the American political project than to the realities of American life.

Excerpt from  Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt |  The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with  Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial  (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)