Black Feminist Thought (1990)

Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment is a 1990 book by Patricia Hill Collins.

Defining Black feminist thought

Black feminist thought is a field of knowledge that is focused on the perspectives and experiences of Black women. There are several arguments in support of this definition. First, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and Karl Manheim in Ideology and Utopia (1936) similarly argue that the definition implies that the overall content of the thought and the historical and factual circumstances of Black women are inseparable. Proposition is that other groups in the field act as merely transcribers, whereas Black women are the actual authors. Second, the definition assumes that Black women possess a unique standpoint on, or perspective of, their experiences and that there will be certain commonalities of perception shared by Black women as a group. Third, while living life as Black women may produce certain commonalities of outlook, the diversity of class, region, age, and sexual orientation shaping individual Black women's lives has resulted in different expressions of these common themes. Thus, universal themes included in the Black women's standpoint may be experienced and expressed differently by distinct groups of Afro-American women. Finally, the definition assumes that, while a Black women's standpoint exists, its contours may not be clear to Black women themselves. Therefore, one role for Black female intellectuals is to produce facts and theories about the Black female experience that will clarify a Black woman's standpoint for Black women. In other words, Black feminist thought contains observations and interpretations about Afro-American womanhood that describe and explain different expressions of common themes.

Black women's insistence on self-definition, self-valuation, and the necessity for a Black female-centered analysis is significant for two reasons. First, defining and valuing one's consciousness of one's own self-defined standpoint in the face of images that foster a self-definition as the objectified "other" is an important way of resisting the dehumanization essential to systems of domination. The status of being the "other" implies being "other than" or different from the assumed norm of white male behavior. In this model, powerful white males define themselves as subjects, the true actors, and classify people of color and white women in terms of their position vis-a-vis this white male hub. Since Black women have been denied the authority to challenge these definitions, this model consists of images that define Black women as a negative other, the virtual antithesis of positive white male images. Moreover, as Britain and Maynard (1984:199) point out, "domination always involves the objectification of the dominated; all forms of oppression imply the devaluation of the subjectivity of the oppressed."

Book description

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, originally published in 1990, Patricia Hill Collins set out to explore the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without. Here Collins provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Drawing from fiction, poetry, music, and oral history, the result is a book that provided the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought and its canon.

Key concepts

Outsider-within

Patricia Hill Collins coins the term outsider-within in a former essay and redefines the term in her book to describe the experience of black women. In the book, she situates the term historically to describe the social location of black women in domestic work before World War II. While domestic work gave black women an opportunity "to see White elites, both actual and aspiring, from perspectives largely obscured from Black men and from these groups themselves", they were still economically exploited by their white employers. Collins asserts that black women cannot fully be members of feminist thought nor black social thought because the former assumes whiteness while the latter assumes maleness. The makeup of their identity - and consequently their experiences as black women - maintain their position as outsiders within spaces of oppression. However, as Collins notes, the black woman's position as an outsider-within provides her with a unique perspective on social, political, intellectual, and economic realities. Therefore, although black women are marginalized, they can bring a more nuanced outlook to feminist and social thought.