Patricia Collins

Professor Collins is a social theorist whose research and scholarship have examined issues of race, gender, social class, sexuality and the nation. Her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association for significant scholarship in gender, and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second book, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology is widely used in undergraduate classrooms in over 200 colleges and universities. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism received ASA’s 2007 Distinguished Publication Award. She has published many articles in professional journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Signs, Sociological Theory, Social Problems, and Black Scholar, as well as in edited volumes. Professor Collins has taught at several institutions, held editorial positions with professional journals, lectured widely in the United States and abroad, served in many capacities in professional organizations, and has acted as consultant for a number of businesses and community organizations. She is also Charles Phelps Taft Emeritus Professor of Sociology within the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati.
While Patricia Collins was in high school, she encountered a few problems while trying to get her education. Her public school education stressed conformity to set of values that she has found very troublesome. She has kept silent when the classroom discussions were about race. The school she was in also did not promote the social setting she was in, which was the working class. She felt inferior, and she also felt much silenced.
The high school that I attended was called Sewanhaka Central High School. The area it was in is a town called Floral Park, New York located in Nassau County, Long Island. The area was a majority white area but the school seemed to be