Patricia Hill Collins

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.

Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media and Democratic Possibilities

In 2009, Collins published Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media and Democratic Possibilities, in which she encourages the public to be more aware of and prevent the institutional discrimination that African-American children are experiencing today in the public education system. Collins explains that teachers have a great deal of power to be the facilitators of either discriminatory attitudes or tolerant attitudes; they are the "frontline actors negotiating the social issues of our time." Claiming that the education system is greatly influenced by the media, Collins examines racism as a system of power preventing education and democracy to reach its full potential. Within the text, she provides examples of how people, specifically teachers in the education system, can resist colorblind racism to ensure children are provided with safe classroom environments and where they can be guaranteed freedom of expression.

One of the primary concerns in her book is the importance education has in producing citizens and making sure the disenfranchised feel empowered. Within the book, Collins includes personal stories about her position as an African-American child who felt "silenced in Philadelphia's public schools" in order to further elaborate on the important role the education institution has in establishing democracy.

Academic responses

Collins' influential books on intersectionality and community have led way to many references and responses in sociological spheres. Notably, Professor Shannon Sullivan of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte penned "Community as a Political and Temporal Construct: A Response to Patricia Hill Collins" in The Pluralist. In the article, Sullivan connected the four aspects of a politically constructed community as laid out by Collins with Philosophy Professor Alfred Frankowski. While Sullivan finds Collins' "hope that a political understanding of community could enable genuine change that is not part of a changing-same pattern" to be admirable, she contrasts this with Frankowski's assertion that the memorialization of Anti-Black violence is necessary for white-dominated communities to keep racist agendas in the past. Sullivan ultimately finds that Frankowski's pragmatist philosophy is needed for White America to successfully evaluate the communities in which echo chambers fuel racial ignorance.

References in other academic spheres

Patricia Hill Collins' work has not only been referenced and referred to heavily in sociological circles, but her assertions on intersectionality and the black female experience have also been cited in literary analysis. In 2020, Parvin Ghasemi and Samira Heidari of the Molana Institute of Higher Education in Iran published "Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminine Identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved" in the Journal of African American Studies. The article describes how Beloved's main character, a mother and former slave in the post-slavery south, epitomizes and subsequently shatters Collins' proposed matrix of domination: "In line with Collin's philosophy, Morrison's novel presents a reaction to matrix of domination. In fact, the multiplicity of experience that Collin refers to can be found in the novel through the fact that readers see simultaneously the experience of being a marginalized, a murderer, a mother, a people of color, a traumatic woman, and a former slave. All these aspects help the collective experience of race disentangle itself from the structural oppression and discrimination. Though Seth is a traumatic figure, this portrayal helps to expose the true picture of a discriminatory society that produces such failing characters."

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.

Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice

Collins' third book Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice was published in 1998. Fighting Words focused on how Black women's knowledge examines social injustices within Black communities and wider society. 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 into 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, "elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal".

In 2021, Collins was interviewed by the Oprah Winfrey Network, "Finding the Full-Range of Your Voice," where she reflected on her quote, "publicly articulating rage typically constitutes less a revelation about oppression than a discovery of voice." She says that the terminology now would be "speaking your own truth, claiming all parts of yourself, including the rage." She asserts, "Why would we reject anger, when there's so much to be angry about that affects us, that affect our children, that affects our communities, that affects our loved ones? Why would we want to tamp that down to become a good girl?"

From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism

In 2006, Collins 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 collection of essays by her, written over multiple years, compiled into one cohesive examination of the current situation of African Americans. Collins examines contemporary structural racism, which she calls "new racism", and explores how old ideas about what racism is prevent society from recognizing and fixing the wrongdoings that persist. The author explores a range of examples, from American national identity, to motherhood, to feminine portrayal in hip-hop. Following the Civil Rights Movement, she argues, there was a "shift from color-conscious 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".

Other books

Collins co-edited with John Solomos The Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies (2010), a book on racial and ethnic stratification through an intersectional lens.

In 2012, she published On Intellectual Activism, a collection of personal essays and interviews where she explains how ideas play an important part in bringing about social change.

In 2016 and revised in 2020, Collins also published the book Intersectionality, with co-author Sirma Bilge, which discusses, in depth, the intertwined nature of social categorizations such as race, class and gender, sexuality and nation, and how these ideas create a complex web of discrimination and disadvantage in society. Taking a global perspective, topics covered include the history of intersectionality, critical education, human rights, violence, global social protest, identity politics, and women of color feminism in the United States and Brazil.

In 2023, she published the book Lethal Intersections: Race, Gender, and Violence, which explores how violence differentially affects people according to their class, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity.

Career honors

Collins is recognized as a social theorist, drawing from many intellectual traditions. She reconceptualizes the ideas of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationalism as interlocking systems of oppression. Her more than 40 articles and essays have been published in a wide range of fields, including philosophy, history, psychology, and most notably sociology.

In 2023 she became the first African American woman to be awarded the Berggruen Prize, a $1 Million Prize by the Berggruen Institute awarded annually to a thinker shaping political, economic, and social institutions.

Faculty of the Year Award at the University of Cincinnati (1991)

C. Wright Mills Award for the first edition of Black Feminist Thought (1991)

Distinguished Publication Award by the Association for the Women in Psychology for Black Feminist Thought (1991)

Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians for Black Feminist Thought (1991)

Award for Outstanding Service to African-American Students at the University of Cincinnati (1993)

Jessie Bernard Award by the American Sociological Association for significant scholarship in the area of Gender (1993)

Named the Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology by the University of Cincinnati, making her the first-ever African American, and only the second woman, to hold this position (1996).)

Emeritus Status from University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, (2005).

Emeritus Status from University of Maryland, College Park (2018)

Distinguished University Professor from University of Maryland (2006)

American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for her book Black Sexual Politics (2007)

Morris Rosenberg Award for Student Mentorship from the University of Maryland (2009)

Doctor of Humane Letters. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY. (2009).

Alumni Achievement Award from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (2011)

Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize her contributions to racial and ethnic relations from Brandeis University (2012)

Doctor of Humane Letters. Arcadia University, Philadelphia, PA. (2012).

Doctor of Humane Letters. Duquesne University. Pittsburgh, PA. 2014.

Doctor of Humane Letters. College of Wooster. Wooster, OH. 2015.

W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from American Sociological Association (2017)

Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2022.

Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism

Collins's next book, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism, was published in 2004 and won the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association. This work argued that racism and heterosexism were intertwined in multiple areas of life. For example, how ideals of beauty work to oppress African-Americans males and females, whether homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. Collins asserts that people must examine the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality because looking at each issue separately can cause one to miss a large part of the problem. Her argument for resisting the creation of such narrow gender roles requires action on individual and community levels as well as recognizing success in areas other than those typically respected by Americans, such as money or beauty. Collins also contends that the oppression of African Americans cannot be successfully resisted without analyzing how intersecting oppressions influence their own group, such as the treatment of women or LGBTQ people.

On October 13, 2014, Patricia Hill Collins gave a lecture at DePaul University in Chicago, IL titled, "Charting a New Course: Intersectionality and Black Activism" to a group of 182 university students as well as to other residents of Chicago. In the lecture, Collins discussed activism stereotypes as well as intersectionality and how to use intersectionality to challenge the oppression they may face. She also encouraged the audience to create coalitions and to participate in activism themselves. Additionally, Collins' lecture allowed her audience to think critically about sociological thought and to figure out "what it means to strengthen one's power through ideas."