Black Feminist Thought by Patricia

Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins was originally published in 1990; the revised tenth anniversary edition, published in 2000, won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for significant scholarship in gender and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Black Feminist Thought, subtitled Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, was Collins' first book, which she said was written as part of "my ongoing struggle to regain my voice" (Collins, 2000). Collins' purpose was to explore Black feminist thought in its own context, not framed by white feminist thought. For Collins, voice is important: "Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group" (Collins, 2000). In a review of Collins' original Black Feminist Thought, Inniss (1991) wrote "She [Collins] successfully attains the goal she set for herself in the first chapter: to describe, analyze, and explain the significance of black feminist thought."

For the second edition, Collins examines Black women's thought in a greater context of social justice, as race, class and gender studies had become more prevalent in a decade. Collins identifies four basic components of Black feminist thought for the second edition: thematic content, interpretive frameworks, epistemological approaches, and significance for empowerment (Collins, 2000, p. 17).

The experiences of Black women are unique in American society and thus worthy of study by Collins and others. Collins points out that while not all Black women have had the same experiences or even agree on the significance of those experiences, there are common challenges (Collins, 2000, p. 25). She finds common themes in historical and modern examples. She examines the roles of Black women, control, and suppression in the contexts of work, family, relationships, and stereotypes.

The foundation for Black women's activism, Collins writes, is the struggle to provide for the survival of one's children (Collins, 2000, p. 201). It makes their struggles personal and explains, in a way, Black women's absence from "both positions of formal authority and the membership rosters of political organizations" (Collins, p. 201). She gives the example of a Black mother who contests school policies harmful to her child yet who is unable to formally articulate political ideology (Collins, p. 203). This is not to say that Black women have never participated in formal movements. Collins cites participation in the abolitionist movement, anti-lynching campaigns of the early 20th century, and recent civil rights work in the South, where Black women have not only worked on behalf of themselves but for all African-Americans (Collins, p. 218). The overarching theme, however is the belief that teaching people how to be self-reliant fosters empowerment. Collins cites Angela Davis (1989), who wrote that activism was designed to empower everyone: "We must climb in such a way as to guarantee that all our sisters, regardless of social class, and indeed all of our brothers climb with us" (Collins, p. 219).

Collins writes "epistemology points to the ways in which power relations shape who is believed and why" (Collins, p. 251). She charges that many Black women are not viewed as credible witnesses for their own experiences (Collins, p. 254) and that the ideas of a relatively select few are safe and respected from the majority perspective. Collins argues that much Black feminist thought is borne, understandably, from lived experience and hopes that collective thought can serve "as one specific social location for examining points of connection" (Collins, p. 270). The goal of understanding these points of connection is to foster the paradigm shift necessary to change the balance of power, tilted unfavorably according to race, class and gender, and to change the underlying knowledge base that supports the shift.