Patricia Hill Collins - Sociological Work

Sociological Work

In 1990, Collins published Black Feminist Thought, which looked at the title topic through such figures as Angela Davis, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. The analysis incorporated a wide range of sources, including fiction, poetry, music and oral history. Collin's work concluded with three central claims:

• Oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality and nation are intersecting, mutually constructing systems of power. Collins utilizes the term "intersectionality," originally coined by Kemberle Crenshaw, to refer to this simultaneous overlapping of multiple forms of oppression.
• Because Black women have unique histories at the intersections of systems of power, they have created world views out of a need for self-definition and to work on behalf of social justice.
• Black women's specific experiences with intersecting systems of oppression provide a window into these same processes for other individuals and social groups.

First published in 1992, Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology was a collaboration with Margaret Andersen, in which Collins helped edit a compilation of essays on the issues of race, class and gender. The book is widely recognized for shaping the field of race, class and gender studies as well as its related concept of intersectionality. The included essays cover a variety of topics, from historical trends and their lasting effects today, to the current media portrayal of minority groups. The sixth edition was published in 2007.

Collins published a third book Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice in 1998. Fighting Words focused on how black women have confronted the injustices against them within black communities, expanding on the idea of "outsiders within" from her previous book. She examines how outsiders resist the majority’s perspective, while simultaneously pushing for and creating new insight on the social injustices that exist. Collins also notes how acknowledging the social theories of oppressed groups are important because their different experiences have created new angles of looking at human rights and injustice. This has not always been the case because, as she points out, the “elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal". “Fighting Words” seeks to explore how black women can change from simply having “thoughts”, to rather being considered as having “theories”.

Another book by Collins is Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, published in 2004. The work argued that racism and heterosexism were intertwined, and that ideals of beauty work to oppress African-Americans males and females, both homo- and heterosexual. Collins believes that people must examine the intersection of race, class, and gender, and that looking at each issue separately leads to missing a large part of the problem. Her argument for resisting the creation of such narrow gender roles requires action on individual and community levels, and recognizing success in areas other than those typically respected by Americans, such as money or beauty. Collins also makes the important observation that the oppression of African-Americans cannot be successfully resisted until oppression within their own group, such as towards women or LGBT, are stopped. Black Sexual Politics won the Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association.

In 2006 she published From Black Power to Hip Hop : Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism, which examines the relationship between black nationalism, feminism and women in the hip-hop generation. The book is a compilation of multiple essays of hers, written over multiple years, and compiled into one cohesive examination of the current situation of African-Americans. Collins examine the prejudice existing today, which she calls "new racism", and explores how old ideas about what racism is prevents society from recognizing and fixing the wrongdoings that still very much exist. The author explores a range of examples, from American identity, to motherhood, to feminine portrayal in hip-hop. Following the Civil Rights Movement, Collins argues, there was a "shift from color-blind racism that relied on strict racial segregation to a seemingly colorblind racism that promised equal opportunities yet provided no lasting avenues for African American advancement".

Her most recent books include Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media and Democratic Possibilities published in 2009, and The Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies published in 2010.