Patricia Hill Collins (born May 1, 1948) is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Collins's work primarily concerns issues involving race, gender, and social inequality within the African-American community. She gained national attention for her book Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990.Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge.
In 2023, she was awarded the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture.
Family background Patricia Hill Collins was born on May 1, 1948, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only child of two parents living in a predominately Black, working-class neighborhood. Her father, Albert Hill, a factory worker and a Second World War veteran, and her mother, Eunice Hill, a secretary, met in Washington, DC. Since both of Collins' parents worked, she began attending daycare at two and a half years old. Collins' love for reading and education came from her mother, who had always wanted to be an English teacher and briefly attended Howard University. Unable to afford the tuition, Eunice was not able to graduate. After her daughter was born, Eunice made sure that she was exposed to literature at a young age, teaching her to read and introducing her to the public library.Gianoulis, Tina. "Collins, Patricia Hill." Contemporary Black Biography, edited by Paula Kepos and Derek Jacques, vol. 67, Gale, 2008, pp. 24–27. Gale eBooks, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3027700015/GVRL?u=mlin_c_collhc&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=81451dd0. Accessed 28 February 2022.
Early life As a child, Collins felt safe and secure in her stable Black working-class neighborhood. As she played in the streets with her friends freely, she trusted the safety of her observant community. She would spend time outside roller skating and jumping double Dutch rope on her block with her friends. She and her friends enjoyed making and singing music together. A musician, she can play the trumpet, piano, and organ. While in high school Collins worked at her church playing the organ. As she got older, Collins began to notice she was either the first, one of the few, or only African Americans and/or woman or working-class person in her communities. Of this, she wrote:
"I saw nothing wrong with being who I was, but apparently many others did. My world grew larger, but I felt I was growing smaller. I tried to disappear into myself in order to deflect the painful, daily assaults designed to teach me that being an African American, working-class woman made me lesser than those who were not. And as I felt smaller, I became quieter and eventually was virtually silenced."
Education Collins attended Philadelphia public schools—and even at a young age, Collins had realized that she attended schools that catered to mostly white middle-class students. During the 1950s and 1960s, when she was going to school, most schools in northern cities such as Philadelphia were channels for social mobility for Black migrants from the South or immigrants from Europe. Although they were adequately funded, they were not particularly easy to navigate, especially for African Americans and people of color like Collins. However, she was part of a group of young people who had access to educational resources and opportunities their parents did not.
Elementary school and high school As a child, Collins attended Frederick Douglas Elementary School. Later, she attended Philadelphia High School for Girls (known as Girls' High), which was founded in 1848 as the nation's first public high school for women. Collins was in attendance during the 1960s, which was when the process of the desegregation of schools began in the United States. This contributed to her growing interest in sociology, feminism, and activism for African-Americans and civil rights.
College education In 1965, Collins went on to pursue an undergraduate career at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, as a sociology major. While in college she devoted time to fostering progressive educational models in the schools of Boston's Black community. She graduated cum laude with honors with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology in 1969.
She proceeded to earn a Master of Arts degree in Teaching (MAT) in Social Science Education from Harvard University in 1970. From 1970 to 1976, she was a middle school teacher, curriculum specialist, and community organizer at St. Joseph Community School in Roxbury, Boston, and two other schools. Of which she says enabled her "to explore the connections among critical pedagogy, engaged scholarship, and the politics of knowledge production, delaying for a decade the deadening 'publish or perish' ethos of higher education. Instead, it put me on a different path of being a rigorous scholar and a public intellectual with an eye toward social justice traditions."
In 1984, she completed her doctorate in sociology at Brandeis University.
Career From 1976 to 1980 she was the director of the Africana Center at Tufts University. As such Collins worked on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion through bringing the research, ideas, and culture Black communities to the campus. Additionally, she had aimed to bring attention to issues surrounding Black women.
While earning her Ph.D., Collins worked as an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati beginning in 1982. She taught in the Department of Africana Studies for more than two decades and retired in 2005 as the Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Professor of Sociology.
In 1986, Collins published her first major article, "Learning from the Outsider Within," in the sociological journal Social Problems. The article focuses on how Black women gain special insight on social inequality from their marginalized placement as being both Black and women. Black women have been able to creatively fight against the status quo.
In 1990, Collins published her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. A revised 10th-anniversary edition of the book was published in 2000 and a 30th-anniversary edition in 2023. The book was translated into Korean in 2009, French in 2016, and Portuguese in 2019.
In 2005, Collins joined the University of Maryland's department of sociology as a distinguished university professor. Working closely with graduate students on issues such as critical race theory, intersectionality, and feminist theory, she maintains an active research agenda and continues to write books and articles in relation to social, racial, and gender issues. Her work has achieved international recognition. Collins is focused on understanding, in her own words, "How African American male and female youth's experiences with social issues of education, unemployment, popular culture and political activism articulate with global phenomena, specifically, complex social inequalities, global capitalist development, transnationalism, and political activism."
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment In 1990, Collins published Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, whose approach to the title topic was influenced by such figures as Angela Davis, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. The analysis drew on a wide range of sources, including fiction, poetry, music, and oral history. Collins'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, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, to refer to this simultaneous overlapping of multiple forms of oppression as a matrix of domination. 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. Systems of oppression that Collins mentions are government agencies, schools, and the news. Black feminist thought on race and gender came from Black communities rather than in opposition to white feminism.
In Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits how Black feminist inquiry highlights two very important themes. One is "how Black women's paid work is organized within intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender." Although these women no longer work in domestic work in private homes, they continue to work at low-paying jobs in the growing service sector. Moreover, she continues, the theme that "concerns how Black women's unpaid family labor is simultaneously confining and empowering" for them is also extremely important. Collins emphasizes this point because she points out that Black women see the unpaid work of their household as a method of resistance to oppression rather than solely as a method of manipulation by men.
In an interview with Global Dialogue magazine in 2017, Collins restated the argument that she laid out in Black Feminist Thought by emphasizing the controlling images faced by Black women: "In Black Feminist Thought, I examine how African-American women confront four main stereotypes: (1) the mule, the woman who works like an animal without complaint; (2) the jezebel, the highly sexualized woman who is often depicted as a prostitute; (3) the mammy, the Black woman domestic worker whose loyalty to her employer is beyond reproach; and (4) the Black lady, the educated Black woman who has given up family life in exchange for a career".Kunushevci, Labinot. "The Representation of African-American Women: An Interview with Patricia Hill Collins." Global Dialogue, 17 November 2017, http://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/the-representation-of-african-american-women-an-interview-with-patricia-hill-collins/. These controlling images are utilized mainly to make black women's subjugated state of being harassed and silenced appear standard and natural.
In an interview with Oklahoma's KGOU radio station in 2017, Collins' discussed her careful process while writing the book: "I think it was very difficult for me to come to voice around the types of work that I do because there was no space for this work," Collins says. "We had to create the space to write black feminist thought, to talk about race, class, gender, to talk about intersectionality. And that was all part of the process of being seen as legitimate, being listened to, being clear, being respected""Doctor Patricia Hill Collins Works To Expand The Platform For Black Women's Voices." KGOU, NPR, 13 February 2017.
Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology Published in 1992, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology was a collaboration with Margaret L. Andersen, in which Collins edited a compilation of essays on 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 essays cover a variety of topics, from historical trends and their effects today, to the current media portrayal of minority groups. The tenth edition was published in 2020.Andersen, Margaret L., and Patricia Hill Collins (2012): Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice