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

Part 1 of Collins’s book outlines the need for Black feminist thought and describes its goals. The overarching aim of Black feminist thought is to resist oppression. So long as intersecting oppressions exist, there will be a need for Black feminist thought. Collins stresses the importance of group experiences and group consciousness. She anticipates criticisms of these ideas by emphasizing the diversity of Black women’s experiences and views:

There is no essential or archetypal Black woman whose experiences stand as normal, normative, and thereby authentic […] Instead, it may be more accurate to say that a Black women's collective standpoint does exist, one characterized by the tensions that accrue to different responses to common challenges (28).

By highlighting the diversity of Black women’s ideas and experiences, Collins counteracts the tendency of mainstream scholarship to make a select few Black women spokespersons for the group and ignore everyone else, a point she also makes in the Preface to the First Edition (viii).

Part 1 introduces Controlling Images and the Intersectional Oppression of Black Women as a central theme in Black Feminist Thought. Black women in the US have been oppressed since slavery. White, affluent men have perpetuated and justified this oppression through racist and sexist ideologies: “The supposedly seamless web of economy, polity, and ideology function as a highly effective system of social control designed to keep African-American women in an assigned, subordinate place” (5). Black women are oppressed not only as Black people, but also as women, and the intersection of these racist and sexist forms of oppression makes their experience of oppression different from that of either Black men or white women. As members of an oppressed group, Black women intellectuals suffer from dominant ideologies, which not only undermine their work, but also support oppression: “This larger system of oppression works to suppress the ideas of Black women intellectuals and to protect elite white male interests and world views” (5). Suppressing the knowledge of Black women and other oppressed groups facilitates oppression by suggesting that subordinate groups accept and collaborate in their own victimization.

Part 1 presents Black Women’s Resistance to Oppression as an important theme in Black Feminist Thought: “As an historically oppressed group, U.S. Black women have produced social thought designed to oppose oppression” (9). For Black women intellectuals, this resistance includes centering Black women’s experiences to counter their exclusion from academia and other institutions that generate, communicate, and validate knowledge. Collins characterizes Black women intellectuals as outsiders within, a status generated by their marginalization. As Collins notes, Black women are marginalized by white feminists for being Black, by Black social and political thinkers for being women, and by traditional academia for being Black women: “Prevented from becoming full insiders in any of these areas of inquiry, Black women remained in outsider-within locations, individuals whose marginality provided a distinctive angle of vision on these intellectual and political entities” (12). This outside-within status has prompted Black women intellectuals to develop creative and unique ways of resisting oppression:

U.S. Black women have produced social thought designed to oppose oppression. Not only does the form assumed by this thought diverge from standard academic theory—it can take the form of poetry, music, essays, and the like—but the purpose of Black women's collective thought is distinctly different (9).

Collins supports her arguments with a robust scholarly apparatus of citations in the main body of the text, endnotes, a glossary of terms, and an extensive bibliography. She draws on a wide range of sources, from academic publications to personal testimonies. These varied sources attest to her expertise, lend credence to her claims, and situate her work in relation to that of other Black feminists. For example, Collins opens her book with a discussion of Maria Stewart, a Black American teacher and journalist who supported abolition and women’s rights. Stewart lectured on political issues and left copies of her texts, which addressed the exploitation of Black labor by white people, the importance of self-definition, self-reliance, and independence, and the importance of social activism for survival: “Sue for you rights and privileges. Know the reason you cannot attain them. Weary them with your importunities. You can but die if you make the attempt; and we shall certainly die if you do not” (1). By starting with Stewart, Collins places herself and other Black feminists in a long continuum of Black women who resisted white oppression: “As the first American woman to lecture in public on political issues and to leave copies of her texts, this early U.S. Black woman intellectual foreshadowed a variety of themes taken up by her Black feminist successors” (1). By centering, at the outset, a Black woman leader whom many readers may be unfamiliar with, Collins announces a key part of her project: to rescue from obscurity as many as possible of the progenitors of Black feminist thought—knowledge of whom has been actively suppressed by the dominant power structures.

In addition to historical sources, Collins draws on recent scholarship to support her claims. In Chapter 1, for instance, she describes the exclusionary nature of white feminism, arguing that white feminists have marginalized Black women and suppressed the ideas of Black feminist intellectuals. The work of Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan exemplifies this trend. Chodorow focused on white middle class women in her book on sex role socialization (Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), as did Gillian in her study of the moral development of women (Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). As Collins observes, these two foundational works in feminist theory promote the idea of a generic woman who is white and middle class. By excluding both working-class women and women of color from their studies, they failed to fully challenge the hegemony of mainstream scholarship. By contrast, Collins’s book centers the experiences of Black women, as does the work of other Black feminist intellectuals, such Joyce Lander, a sociologist who studied Black female adolescence (Ladner, Joyce. Tomorrow’s Tomorrow. Garden City, N.Y., 1972), and Alice Walker, who challenged racism and the patriarchy in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Color Purple (1982).

Collins stresses the importance of flexibility in Black feminist thought. Although she draws connections between past and present, as evidenced by her discussion of Stewart, she also recognizes the necessity of adapting to social change and keeping Black feminism relevant to contemporary Black women. She uses examples to explain her approach. Earlier scholars, for instance, studied the exploitation of Black women’s labor through the lens of live-in domestic workers. This type of work is no longer common. Thus, Collins reorients the focus to new forms of mammy work, such as low-paying jobs in daycare centers and nursing homes. This flexible approach allows Collins to point out continuities between the past and present, while keeping her material relevant to contemporary Black women who still do a “remarkable share of the emotional nurturing and cleaning up after other people, often for low pay” (40).