Patricia Hill Collins Relationship

Patricia Hill Collins, an active African American sociologist, is best known for her groundbreaking research in the areas of Black feminism and the extensive development of the concept of intersectionality, a term first popularized in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams. Patricia Hill Collins’ main goals are to better the black community through community work, and with her gift as a sociologist/ author. “Throughout her career Collins has advocated for the power of people, the importance of community building, and the necessity of collective efforts to achieving change…an activist-scholar” (Cole).

Born in Philadelphia in 1948, Patricia Hill Collins was the daughter of her secretary mother Eunice Randolph Hill and factory worker/ WWII veteran father Albert

Wright Mills Award, and more from organizations such as the Association of Women in Psychology and Black Women Historians with the publication of her first book: “Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment”. It is a piece in which she expressed how it is a necessity for groups to create and have a separate space where they can deal with their specific forms of oppressions (based on race, class, and gender) that only apply to them. This concept of intersectionality was introduced and coined first by a fellow feminist Kimberlé Williams, but Patricia Hill Collins was able to further explore the implications and factors of the term. “Patricia Hill Collins built on the work of other fellow travelers and opened new doors that not only expanded our work but influenced younger scholars” (Higginbotham).The researching and popularizing of this concept or theory of intersectionality is what put Patricia Hill Collins on the map as one of the well-known sociologist in this day and

It was titled “Fighting Words: Black Woman and The Search for Justice”. In this book she visited old ideas and concepts presented in her 1986 article “Learning from the Outsider Within”, and would expand on those concepts and further flourish those ideas and theories. In 2004 Patricia Hill Collins would pen yet another award winning book titled “Black Sexual Politics”. In this book she does once again to focus on intersectionality however, she chose to make the main focus of the book heterosexism and racism and explained how they intersect in the black community. “She contends in this book that society will not be able to move beyond inequality and oppression until we stop oppressing each other on the basis of race, sexuality, and class,” (Cole). In this book she basically argues that race, sex and class discrimination play large roles in keeping society from further