Black Feminist Thought Summary

Book Review on

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Black Feminist Thought is a classic book written by Patricia Hill Collins, in which she reflects on the knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment of African-American women. There are mainly two editions in total, the first edition being published in 1990, and the latter presented in 2000. Although Collins emphasizes black feminist thought’s purpose, namely black women’s empowerment and improving conditions of social justice in both editions, she achieved much more in the second edition.

After the first publication of the book, presenting her original arguments for the existence of a black women’s standpoint, her analysis on the

It would not serve Collins’ purpose if the production of theory and interpretation of knowledge are reserved for educated elites. Instead, Collins presents those Black women’s ideas “in a way that made them not less powerful or rigorous but accessible” and so that “the vast majority of African-American women could read and understand.”(Collins 2000, p.vii)

Collins has put forward several arguments and carried out in-depth analysis to support them. First of all, she argues for the importance that Black women intellectuals play in the field of Black feminist thought as “the primary responsibility for defining one’s own reality lies with the people who live that reality, who actually have those experiences.” (Collins 2000, p.35). In her book, Collins has repeatedly include ideas from Black feminist thinkers (e.g. Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Angela Davis) and novelists (e.g. Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker).

Collins also argues that there is a “dialectical relationship linking African-American women’s oppression and activism” (Collins 2000, p.22). In other words, if intersecting oppressions do exist, Black feminist thought and similar oppositional actions and knowledges would be necessary and vice

Most importantly, she broadened analysis beyond race, class, and gender and include sexuality and nation as form of oppression in the second edition. Utilising the term "Intersectionality” first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (Crenshaw, 1989), Collins brings focus to the intersecting of several different forms of oppression, and thus, reconceptualising the idea of social relations of domination and resistance. Collins’ new definition to the term “intersectionality” brings her to raise Maria Stewart’s view about how “it was not enough to just point out the source of Black women's oppression.” (Collins 2000, p.1). She argues that it is more important for Black women to forge self-definitions of self-reliance and independence to help