Black Feminist Thought

Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, first published in 1990 by Routledge, explores the work and ideas of black women and their conscious pursuit of knowledge and empowerment outside a white patriarchal epistemology. Collins creates a common space for scholarly and everyday dialogue about the various paradigms, movements, and aesthetics concerning race, class, and gender oppression as they relate overall to the liberation of black women and black people. She addresses how black women support, critique, and reject mainstream feminist concerns and objectives. Collins acknowledges the voices and experiences of black women who are traditionally overlooked, as well as the work done by prominent and very vocal activists, intellectuals, and artists.

Black Feminist Thought is divided into three parts: The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought, Core Themes in Black Feminist Thought, and Black Feminist Knowledge and Power. In the first part, The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought, Collins evokes black women's strong tradition of resistance to race, sex, and class oppression with the words of Maria W. Stewart, one of the earliest known African American women to address these issues in a public forum. She then posits six distinguishing features of black feminist thought as a model of convergence for the diverse experiences and bodies of knowledge of black women in America. Collins applies the distinguishing features to the informal work of black women whose work is simply an aspect of their survival, and to the formal work of black women activists and academics who make conscious efforts to empower black women and black people in white hegemonic power structures.

In the second part, Core Themes in Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits work and family, objectified images, self-definition, sexual politics, love relationships, motherhood, and activism as major areas for investigation of black women. Collins also uses these themes as sites to interpret black women's resistance to oppression. The third part, Black Feminist Knowledge and Power, engages readers in more academic dialogue about how mainstream politics and epistemologies are affected by the political and intellectual work of black women. Collins discusses how the collective ideology of black women challenges a political system that ignores them as black and female worldwide, and she argues for a black feminist epistemology that questions any system of knowledge that does not take into consideration the collective experience of race, gender, and class oppression. In addition, [Page 127]Collins proposes a model for empowerment based on black women's responses to various domains of power.

Black Feminist Thought is very useful as an introduction to the study of black women's oppression and resistance to oppression in America. With the term black feminist thought, Collins establishes an umbrella under which the common themes and opposing ideologies of black feminism, womanism, Africana womanism, and unnamed forms of knowledge can be addressed. However, Collins does not have the empirical content and theoretical grounding necessary for a deep structural Afrocentric analysis and advanced scholarship on black women. Though Collins makes available historical and literary examples, she fails to include statistical information from research studies to support these observations about black women's work. Collins's six distinguishing features are a set of principles to evaluate the diverse work of black women, but they do not take into serious consideration the theoretical work that exists. Overall, however, Black Feminist Thought remains a very good overview of the collective intellectual, aesthetic, and activist work by black women for self-empowerment.

...