Prejudice And Racism By Patricia Hill Collins

Today, the waves of feminism are far too big to be overlooked. Leading feminists work to achieve social equality of the sexes. Other from gender, race and/or color can also be an overlapping oppression. Patricia Hill Collins is one of many leading feminists that sit at the intersection of gender and race and has gone through it herself. Working as a woman of color in a white-dominated institution, she felt silenced and small, “I tried to disappear into myself in order to deflect the painful, daily assaults designed to teach me that being an African American, working-class woman made me lesser than those who were not” (ThoughtCo). Being a woman as well as African-American, it made increasingly difficult for her to be heard or respected. She
During her time as an undergraduate at Brandeis, Collins was able to rediscover and claim her voice studying sociology. Later on, she would proceed to earn a Master of Arts degree in Teaching (MAT) in Social Science Education from Harvard University in 1970. Collins is currently a university professor at the University of Maryland and is recognized as a social theorist who has focused on exposing the gender and race interlocking systems of oppression. The move from her hometown of Philadelphia to Boston granted her a new perspective on new communities and their interactions. Collins recognized that students came into her classroom were heavily influenced by what the nation has framed about races, especially those of black descent. Although, they enter without a true “understanding of families within the wider context of oppression and resistance” (American Sociological Association). Students entered believing the false stereotypes and Collins wanted to reframe these major assumptions and inform students that intersectionality is a form of racism that has not been majorly discussed. Throughout her career, Collins not only wanted to break stereotypes and expose intersectionality to her students but also the rest of the
She is famous for developing the idea of multiple oppressions and its impact on her books Black Feminist Thought and Black Sexual Politics. Her first books and other writing pieces were so impactful that now she has over 40 articles and essays published in a wide range of fields, including philosophy, history, psychology, and sociology. Collins continues to analyze the impact of intersectionality and “today's sociologists, thanks to Collins, take for granted that one cannot understand or address forms of oppression without tackling the entire system of oppression” (ThoughtCo). Collins has provided key intellectual contributions that show that oppression does not occur because of one state but a combination of oppression on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the simultaneity of their occurrence. She has influenced many including sociologists to analyze the impact of intersectionality and see how much of a negative impact it can