Патриция Хилл Коллинз: Жизнь и научный путь выдающегося социолога.

African American scholar (born 1948)

Patricia Hill Collins (born May 1, 1948) is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African American woman to hold this position.

Patricia Hill Collins was born on May 1, 1948, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only child of two parents living in a predominately Black, working class neighborhood. Her father, Albert Hill, a factory worker and a Second World War veteran, and her mother, Eunice Hill, a secretary, met in Washington, DC. Since both of Collins' parents worked, she began attending daycare at two and a half years old. Collins' love for reading and education came from her mother, who had always wanted to be an English teacher and briefly attended Howard University. Unable to afford the tuition, Eunice was not able to graduate. After her daughter was born, Eunice made sure that she was exposed to literature at a young age, teaching her to read and introducing her to the public library.

As a child, Collins felt safe and secure in her stable Black working class neighborhood. As she played in the streets with her friends freely, she trusted the safety of her observant community. She would spend time outside roller skating and jumping double Dutch rope on her block with her friends. She and her friends enjoyed making and singing music together. A musician, she can play the trumpet, piano, and organ. While in high school Collins worked at her church playing the organ. 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. In 1984, she completed her doctorate in sociology at Brandeis University.

From 1976 to 1980 she was the director of the Africana Center at Tufts University. As such Collins worked on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion through bringing the research, ideas, and culture Black communities to the campus. Additionally, she had aimed to bring attention to issues surrounding Black women. In 1990, Collins published her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. A revised 10th anniversary edition of the book was published in 2000 and a 30th anniversary edition in 2023. The book was translated into Korean in 2009, French in 2016, and Portuguese in 2019. In 2005, Collins joined the University of Maryland's department of sociology as a distinguished university professor. Working closely with graduate students on issues such as critical race theory, intersectionality, and feminist theory, she maintains an active research agenda and continues to write books and articles in relation to social, racial, and gender issues. Her work has achieved international recognition.

In 1990, Collins published Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, whose approach to the title topic was influenced by such figures as Angela Davis, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. The analysis drew on a wide range of sources, including fiction, poetry, music, and oral history. Collins's work concluded with three central claims:
Oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are intersecting, mutually constructing systems of power. Collins utilizes the term intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, to refer to this simultaneous overlapping of multiple forms of oppression as a matrix of domination. Because black women have unique histories at the intersections of systems of power, they have created world views out of a need for self definition and to work on behalf of social justice. Black women's specific experiences with intersecting systems of oppression provide a window into these same processes for other individuals and social groups. Black feminist thought on race and gender came from Black communities rather than in opposition to white feminism. In Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits how Black feminist inquiry highlights two very important themes. One is "how Black women's paid work is organized within intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender." Moreover, she continues, the theme that "concerns how Black women's unpaid family labor is simultaneously confining and empowering" for them is also extremely important. These controlling images are utilized mainly to make black women’s subjugated state of being harassed and silenced appear standard and natural. In an interview with Oklahoma's KGOU radio station in 2017, Collins' discussed her careful process while writing the book: "I think it was very difficult for me to come to voice around the types of work that I do because there was no space for this work," Collins says. "We had to create the space to write black feminist thought, to talk about race, class, gender, to talk about intersectionality. And that was all part of the process of being seen as legitimate, being listened to, being clear, being respected"

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.

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?" 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.

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".

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.

In 2009, a video from the C Span website titled "BookTV: Patricia Hill Collins, author "Another Kind of Public Education" Collins takes a visit to "Busboys & Poets", a restaurant/bookstore/theater located in Washington DC and provided an hour and 16 minutes long "book talk" regarding her book Another Kind of Public Education. In 2012, a video from the YouTube website titled "Dr. Patricia Hill Collins Delivers 2012 Graduate Commencement Address", Collins gives the commencement address at Arcadia University on Thursday, May 17, 2012, when she received an honorary doctorate. She provides stories of her past from growing up in Philadelphia, her and her parents' struggles, and being in a school that predominately caters to middle class white students. She also touches upon breaking her silence and how she came about using her voice as a critical instrument to make social change. Collins gives a talk to undergraduate students from Grand Valley State University in which she expresses her concern of mainstream colorblindness, especially focusing on issues of racial profiling (regarding African Americans) [regarding Trayvon Martin] and tackling other issues regarding race, sex, class, etc. Additionally, Collins reads mini excerpts from her book Black Feminist Thought. In 2016, Collins alongside Patricia Williams, Robin Morgan, Kate Harding, Polly Toynbee, Arwa Mahdawi, and Suzanne Moore were all asked the following panel question by The Guardian following the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump in the 2016 United States Presidential election: "What does the US election result say about misogyny?" In her answer, Collins exclaims: "I am disappointed but I will keep up the fight." She discusses the sadness she feels for Clinton's loss. Additionally, Collins brings one's attention to the idea that to gain social change, Americans must remember they will deal with struggles. Collins leaves the reader on a positive note by saying she believes that America has made progress in being committed to  opportunity, equity, civility and fairness. However, she still sees a need to keep fighting to achieve a strong democracy. In this lecture, she reflected on her sociology career as well as "discussing critically the intersectional approach and alternative knowledge projects, and returning to the core question that motivates her work: What will it take for Black people to be free?" In 2022, Collins was interviewed by Gênero e Número where she talked about Black Lives Matter, social justice, and the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the United States. She claims that the "Killing of George Floyd was very significant in shifting the discussion of that particular social movement to the point where you had people not just in the United States but globally saying we believe in Black Lives Matter and issues related to that." When asked about the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the United States she says, "I think it was really shocking for a lot of young women in the United States that this right was taken away on a federal level, but it wasn't particularly shocking for many of us who never had it in the first place I think it's been very good for young women to realize that you don't get to keep something that you have, people come and take stuff from you it's not fair, but that's what power is." In Professor's Elizabeth Higginbotham's 2012 essay "Reflections on the Early Contributions of Patricia Hill Collins," Higginbotham talks about the impact Collins' work had on the interdisciplinary field of women's studies. She believes, "her early work was truly significant in helping other scholars combat the labels of particularism, challenge the language of essentialism in women's studies, and move in ways to demonstrate that our scholarship has much to say about the nature of social life in the United States and the world."

"Just Another American Story? The First Black First Family", in Qualitative Sociology 35 (2), 2012: 123–141. "New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in the Global Marketplace", in Ethnicities 6 (3), 2006: 297–317. "Like One of the Family: Race, Ethnicity, and the Paradox of the US National Identity", in Ethnic and Racial Studies 24 (1), 2001: 3–28. "The Tie that Binds: Race, Gender, and U. S. Violence", in Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (5), 1998: 918–938. "What's In a Name: Womanism, Black Feminism and Beyond", in Black Scholar 26 (1), 1996: 9–17. "The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships", in Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Woman 4 (2), 1987: 4–11. "Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought", in Social Problems. 33 (6), 1986: 14–32.

Gale Group, Contemporary Authors Online, 2001 article on Patricia Hill Collins, published on Biography Resource Centre, 2005. Feminist Authors, St James Press, 1996, article on Patricia Hill Collins. Reproduced on Biography Resource Centre, 2005. "Patricia Hill Collins", World of Sociology, 2 volumes, Gale Group, 2001. Reproduced on Biography Resource Centre, 2005. "Patricia Hill Collins", Directory of American Scholars, 10th edition, Gale Group, 2001. "Dr Patricia Hill Collins, Who's Who Among African Americans, 18th edition, Gale Group, 2005. Tonya Bolden, "Review of Black Feminist Thought", in Black Enterprise, July 1992, v22, n12, p. 12(1). Tamala M. Edwards, "The F Word", Essence, May 1999, volume 30, issue 1, p. 90. Katherine C. Adams, review of Black Sexual Politics, Library Journal April 1, 2004, v129 i6, p. 111. Charles Lemert, "Social Theory", The Multicultural and Classic Readings 4th Edition Westview Press, 2010. James Farganis, Readings in Social Theory: The Classic Tradition to Post Modernism. 7th edn. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 2016.