Patricia Hill Collins Quotes on Politics
Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (1990), Black Sexual Politics (2004), and Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory (2019) give contemporary American political philosophy one of its most influential statements of intersectional Black feminist thought. The central commitments — that the standard categories of class, race, and gender mutually constitute the lived experience of differently situated agents and cannot be analyzed in isolation, that the matrix of domination organizes the institutional structures through which these categories are reproduced, and that the partial perspective of the most marginalized supplies a privileged epistemic standpoint for the critical analysis of power — articulate the principal contemporary statement of intersectional political theory. The framework, integrating the Black women’s intellectual tradition from Anna Julia Cooper through the Combahee River Collective with feminist standpoint epistemology, shaped contemporary feminist, antiracist, and democratic political philosophy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Patricia Hill Collins:
“The matrix of domination is not a sum of separate oppressions; it is their interlocking.”
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Attributed to Patricia Hill Collins:
“Black feminist thought is shaped by, and shapes, Black women's everyday lives.”
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Attributed to Patricia Hill Collins:
“Empowerment requires a deep grasp of the systems against which it pushes.”
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“Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2000) p. vii”
Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups. -
“…In the United States, the dominant discourse is shaped by intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation as systems of power. In my work, I have investigated how racism, sexism, class exploitation, and heterosexism operate to shape the lived experiences of different social groups. Black women’s experiences were the point of entry into these larger questions of power and knowledge, but African-American women’s experiences are not the endpoint…”
On how she approaches any research regarding social inequality in “The Representation of African-American Women: An Interview with Patricia Hill Collins” in Global Dialogue