Ethnic and Racial Studies

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Black thought matters: Patricia Hill Collins and the

long tradition of African American sociology

Gurminder K. Bhambra

To cite this article: Gurminder K. Bhambra (2015) Black thought matters: Patricia Hill Collins and
the long tradition of African American sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38:13, 2315-2321, DOI:
10.1080/01419870.2015.1058497

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1058497

Published online: 24 Aug 2015.

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 Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015
Vol. 38, No. 13, 2315–2321, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1058497

Black thought matters: Patricia Hill Collins and

the long tradition of African American sociology
Gurminder K. Bhambra
(Received 19 January 2015; accepted 22 May 2015)

Black Feminist Thought is an iconic book. The fact that it is still in print twenty-five years
after its initial publication is testament to the value of the arguments and the quality of the
analysis. It has been both a scholarly beacon for researchers working through shared ideas
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and experiences, and an intellectual grounding from which further critical work has been
enabled and more voices brought into conversation. Its influence ranges across
disciplinary and geographical boundaries and dismantles conventional hierarchies in the
process. The production of knowledge is always for some purpose and, as scholars, it is
imperative that we are as straightforward and honest about those purposes as is Patricia
Hill Collins. We must hope that we can be as effective as her in our own work in terms of
communicating its purpose, politics and, crucially, its analytical import.

Keywords: black thought; African American sociology; intersectionality; W. E. B. Du Bois;

pragmatism; Patricia Hill Collins

I
Activism, Collins (2005, 112) writes in an autobiographical essay, ‘is not just talk.
Activism is trying to make a difference in people’s lives.’ The difference that is to be
made has to be rooted, in part at least, in analyzing and developing resources with
which to combat injustice, not just theoretically, but in its lived experience. The
collection in which this essay was published, The Disobedient Generation, gathered
together reflections by social theorists on what ‘the Sixties’ had meant to them.
Collins’s piece stood out with its patient and persistent critique that placed race as
central to the politics of that time and addressed its continuing resonance into the
present. In particular, I was struck by her discussion of sociological knowledge in the
context of claiming opportunities newly afforded to African Americans by entry into
historically white colleges and universities, and locating this discussion in terms of
the lives and experiences of those for whom the gains of the civil rights movement
were more limited. This interlacing of epistemology and activism is a distinctive mark
of Collins’s scholarship and is, for me, the defining characteristic of Black Feminist
Thought.
Collins argues that the collective traditions of what she brings together under the
rubric of ‘Black Feminist Thought’ provide a more adequate basis for thinking about
our contemporary conditions, how we arrived here, and how we might think of ways
beyond these situations. Rereading her book in late 2014, early 2015, while a visiting
academic in the United States, provides a particularly poignant context for the writing

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2316 G.K. Bhambra
of this review essay, given the critical juxtaposition of these themes with the current
political situation.
The last half of 2014 has seen the extrajudicial killings of Eric Garner, Michael
Brown, Kajime Powell, Aura Rosser and twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, among many,
many others. These deaths, together with the failure to indict the police officers
responsible, have sparked mass protests across a number of cities in the USA under
the coalition banner #BlackLivesMatter. These protests have also highlighted the
widening social and economic inequalities across racial lines, the disproportionate
levels of incarceration of African American men, and the rollback of legislative gains
made in the 1960s with the recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act and an
increasingly effective and organized backlash against affirmative action policies first
instituted during that period (for further discussion of this context, see Bhambra
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2015). In this moment, when a new or renewed civil rights movement is being called
for, it is valuable to look back at resources developed during earlier periods of
struggles and examine the lessons for our times contained within them. Collins’s
Black Feminist Thought is just such a resource.

II
Collins notes that the significance of Black feminist thought to the wider debates on
the politics of knowledge production is twofold. First, it ‘fosters a fundamental
paradigmatic shift in how we think about unjust power relations’ by highlighting the
intersecting oppressions at the heart of relations of domination (Collins 2009, 291).
Second, it ‘addresses ongoing epistemological debates concerning the power
dynamics that underlie what counts as knowledge’ (Collins 2009, 292). The explicit
move made by Collins to link reworked understandings of epistemology with
experiences borne out of activism against oppression and inequality resonates
strongly with the work and political commitments of people like Alice Walker,
Angela Davis and Barbara Smith. It was ‘in this border space between social
movement and academic politics’, Collins (2011, 92) argues, that the work and ideas
of intersectionality were birthed. Davis, for example, was a central figure within the
civil rights and Black Power movements and also active in relation to anti-Vietnam
mobilizations, and the feminist and gay liberation movements. Among her many
contributions to academic scholarship, she argued strongly for the necessity of
reconsidering the feminist and other movements to take into account the lives and
experiences of African American women and, in particular, their experiences of
enslavement, segregation and ongoing racism. Taking these specific abuses, historical
and contemporary, into consideration, Davis (1983) suggested, would further enable a
thinking through of the contours of the present socio-economic situation and expand
our understandings of the variety of oppressions present in the world. In this way,
Collins’s focus on black feminism as the necessary starting point for any feminist
critique or, indeed, broader politics of social justice builds on, and extends, Davis’s
work – political and intellectual. In this section, I will address these issues by focusing
on the development of these ideas in the context of a long tradition of African
American sociology to which Collins’s work is an exemplary contribution.
 Ethnic and Racial Studies 2317
Following Angela Davis, intersectionality has become a central organizing feature
within much feminist academic work addressing issues of injustice and identity,
particularly in terms of examining the multilayered aspects of race, gender, sexuality
and class (but not limited to such expressions). Moving beyond ‘additive models of
oppression’, Collins notes how debates on intersectionality have enabled a more
complex understanding of the ways in which different oppressions intersect and ‘work
together in producing injustice’ (Collins 2009, 21). She goes on, however, to argue for
the necessity also of thinking about how these ‘intersecting oppressions are actually
organized’ through, what she calls, ‘the matrix of domination’ (Collins 2009, 21).
This latter term, Collins suggests, allows us to move beyond binary oppositions and
provides us with an opportunity to examine the ‘structural, disciplinary, hegemonic,
and interpersonal domains of power’ as they appear and reappear across different
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manifestations of oppression (Collins 2009, 21). While it is important to understand

and address the ways in which different oppressions intersect, it is also necessary, in
her terms, to analyze the entire system of thought and the ways in which it meshes
with ‘political economies of race, gender, and class oppression’ (Collins 2009, 78).
This larger-scale analytical framework is complemented by a theoretical stance –
the ‘outsider-within’ – that Collins uses to examine the ways in which particular
social locations facilitate us as scholars in bringing different perspectives to bear upon
problems shared in common. This is not to suggest that all that is needed are different
perspectives, but rather a call to work through our different perspectives, and the
various insights they enable, and to collaborate in the resolution of those problems.
Collins elaborates the specificity of ‘outsider-within’ as a particular position that
emerged out of theoretical consideration of the social location of many African
American women who undertook domestic work within white households. This
allowed them access to know something about the lives of the dominant group and to
see, and assess, the differences between the lives being witnessed and the ideologies
that otherwise sustained notions of superiority and difference. The new angles of
vision that such perspectives bring, Collins argues, when explored through dialogue
and discussion, enable the building of ethical coalitions of political solidarity across
differences of identity. Collins’s particular development of the idea of ‘outsider-
within’ can be located within the long history of African American sociology, from
the metaphors of the ‘veil’ and ‘double consciousness’ used by W. E. B. Du Bois to
the idea of ‘black insiderism’ that was dominant in the 1950s and 1960s.
In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois ([1903] 1997) uses the concepts of ‘the veil’ and
‘double consciousness’ to explain the peculiar conditions within which African
Americans find themselves in the USA and the specific tools at their disposal to
understand (and hopefully dismantle) those conditions. The effects of segregation are
such that white Americans know little about the lives of their fellow African
American citizens and thus their view of the social world is limited simply to their
own experiences. African Americans, on the other hand, Du Bois argues, are only too
aware of the conditions of their own lives and the social and political activities of
their white neighbours that are collectively responsible for the creation of segregated
societies. Just as Collins argues that African American women, who undertook
domestic work within white households, were exposed to the norms, activities and
relationships within those households, very few, if any, white men or women would
 2318 G.K. Bhambra
have had (or wanted) similar access to African American households. The existence
of African Americans ‘behind the veil’ of segregation is hidden from the view of most
white folk, but those who live behind it also move in the ‘white’ world. As such, they
have knowledge about their own lives, about the functioning of the veil, and about the
activities of those who live on the other side of the veil as well. The double
consciousness that ensues from being both an African American and an American
provides the basis for deeper insights into the social realm and the possibility for more
effective actions against the systems of domination in place.
Sociology in the USA was forged in a period of racial segregation and scientific
(and social-scientific) racism in which African American scholars worked hard to
ensure that such ideas did not go uncontested. This alternative tradition of
sociological inquiry was inaugurated by Du Bois and continued by scholars such as
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Oliver Cromwell Cox, E. Franklin Frazier and others. It was a tradition that paid
greater attention to the social, economic and political environment in accounting for
contemporary patterns of inequality and, in doing so, provided a powerful, alternative
locus for scholarship on race and inequality. Oliver Cromwell Cox’s ([1948] 1970)
arguments on class, for example, are salutary in their distinction between standard
understandings of class as something that is objectively identifiable and statically
located, and class as understood in terms of dynamic association, emerging as a
consequence of people acting in common towards particular ends. In many ways,
Collins’s work, though arrived at independently of Cox and focusing more on issues
of gender and sexuality, parallels this key insight in terms of her interventions within
the debates on intersectionality.
Standard accounts of intersectionality start from a notion of identity based on
sociologically assigned attributes – gender, class, race, sexuality and so on – that are
presented as singular and discrete, albeit that any individual may lay claim to a variety
of such attributes and, therefore, display different ‘bundles’. In the same way, the
inequalities associated with particular identity claims are seen as specific to those
identities and, hence, theorists of intersectionality argue for the need to recognize and
address the new and different oppressions that manifest from the intersection of various
identity claims. If, however, we follow Cox, we would see identities as constituted
through activities, struggles and solidarities – in other words, association(s) – and
thereby understand the inequalities connected with them as emerging from the social
dynamics of associational life. By rooting her concern about inequalities firmly
within the social context – ‘the matrix of domination’ – Collins enables us to
examine the activities associated with the establishment of inequalities and through
other actions seek redress. This moves us from a simple notion of inequality
emerging from identity, to being able to examine the social dynamics and historical
processes that have brought inequalities into being and by addressing those dynamics
and processes seeking to bring about different configurations of, hopefully, more
equitable social relations.
The focus on examining the social relationships between people and thereby being
in a better position to delineate hierarchies of oppression and relationships of
domination has also been elaborated by E. Franklin Frazier. He argued that the
‘proper subject of sociology’ was the ‘various systems of social relationships which
come into existence as a result of association’ (Frazier 1968, 4). Frazier – in a similar
 Ethnic and Racial Studies 2319
way that Collins also comes to do – places the historical emergence of the social at the
heart of the possibility for social analysis and social change. That is, African
Americans are not regarded, a priori, as a group, but are instead located within the
historical conditions that produced them as a group. This history also produced
(white) Americans and the effacement of the description ‘white’ from their
categorization as Americans. This history is one of domination and of the production
of inequalities and injustices that cut across various identities and can only be
understood by locating them within the ‘matrix of domination’ that Collins identifies.
To return briefly to the present political context of Ferguson and all that it stands for,
Collins’s scholarship reminds us to keep central the historical processes that produced
inequality and the legacies of those inequalities in their different (and similar) forms.
She also cautions us to be aware of the intersecting oppressions that potentially divide
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groups from each other and to remain cognizant of the ways in which these can be
differentially amplified in their consequences across various identities.

III
Interestingly, the development of a ‘black insider’ perspective within sociology in the
1950s and 1960s was also charted by Robert Merton who noted that while ‘white
male insiderism’ in US sociology was tacit or de facto – taking the form of ‘patterned
expectations about the appropriate selection of specialities and of problems for
investigation’ – a more explicit form emerged from the work of ‘some black
intellectuals’ (Merton 1972, 13). This took both a weaker and stronger form. The
stronger form, according to Merton, advocated that ‘only black sociologists can
understand the social life of blacks’ (Merton 1972, 13) and ‘the Outsider … is
excluded in principle from gaining access to the social and cultural truth’ (Merton
1972, 15). The weaker version did not suggest that insiders and outsiders would
necessarily arrive at different findings and interpretations; rather, it was unlikely that
they would be motivated to deal with the same questions and so would conduct
research on different topics and issues. As such, Merton (1972, 16) argued, they
would ‘simply talk past one another’– an assessment that one could perhaps continue
to make of the largely separate traditions of African American and white sociology
(see Bhambra 2014). In this regard, it is useful to note that of all of Merton’s
scholarship, it is this essay, in which he examines the sociological insights of African
American sociology and their import for sociology more generally, that has been most
neglected by sociologists.
Collins, unlike many sociologists, does take Merton’s arguments seriously and
moves the debate on ‘black insiderism’ forward through her argument for the
‘outsider-within’. While this concept refers, in the first instance, to African American
women working within white spaces, it is open to the possibility of committed travel
and understanding in the other direction. In this way, the point is not that simply being
an ‘insider’ gives someone access to knowledge and understanding, but rather that a
commitment to know about the other and the time and space within which to do this
are also necessary requirements. Following Du Bois and the long tradition of African
American sociology, Collins maintains her analytical focus on demonstrating how
the historical processes of segregation continue to shape the experiences and
 2320 G.K. Bhambra
opportunities of people today and, in addition, how they continue to condition the
very possibilities of knowledge about these histories and their legacies. Collins argues
that while sociology, as a discipline, could have effectively addressed the logics of
segregation within which it developed – given that ‘its very reason for being was to
uncover and study the rules of social structure that were invisible in everyday social
interaction’ (Collins 2007, 577) – its embeddedness within those very same structures
mitigated against this. As such, it could be argued that her position as an ‘outsider-
within’ (white) sociology in the USA is precisely what will enable the reconstruction
of sociology to the benefit of us all.
This is apparent in Collins’s (2011) latest work, which seeks to bring theoretical
scholarship in the area of intersectionality into dialogue with that of American
pragmatism, including the often neglected African American figures central to this
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latter tradition. One of the key advantages of doing this, she argues, is that it enables
reconsideration of the notion of experience within an explicitly collective frame. This
frame is necessarily dynamic given that it emerges through the activities and
conversations of individuals in their relations to others – that is, in their movements
in the world. In this way, it expands the possibilities of dialogue and learning across
and through those experiences, instead of knowledge simply being seen to be rooted
in them. These arguments, I suggest, were already implicitly present within her earlier
work and are now elaborated more fully. In sum, Black Feminist Thought continues
engagement with the long-standing concerns of African American sociologists and
researchers, brings a specifically black feminist angle of vision to these conversations,
and expands the shared sociological canon in the process. While Collins’s focus has
always been on developing coalitions of solidarity and foregrounding the collabor-
ative nature of black feminist thought, it is incumbent upon us nonetheless to
acknowledge the singularity of vision and purpose that brought this collective
conversation to us in the hope that we might also learn from these traditions, come to
see them as our own, and contribute in some small measure to leaving the world a
better place than we found it.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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GURMINDER K. BHAMBRA is Professor in the Department of Sociology at the

University of Warwick and Visiting Fellow (2014–2015) in the Department of
Sociology, Princeton University.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: g.k.bhambra@warwick.ac.uk