Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015

Vol. 38, No. 13, 2341–2348, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1058505

Ruminations on twenty-five years of Patricia Hill

Collins’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment
Kathryn T. Gines
(Received 12 May 2015; accepted 22 May 2015)

My review focuses on the impact that Black Feminist Thought has had on my personal and
professional life. I weave together lessons I have learned from Patricia Hill Collins with
reflections on my own lived experience – from my family of origin to college experiences to
my work as the founding director of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers.

Keywords: Black Feminist Thought; controlling images; self-definition; Black women

philosophers

In this year of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication, I am honoured to offer

reflections on Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990) Black Feminist Thought, a pioneering book
that continues to be a central text in the development of scholarship, teaching and
activism across many disciplines – including the overwhelmingly white male discipline
of philosophy in which I am situated academically. I often hear white women of
generations that came before me talk about the transformative impact of books like
Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949, 2010) The Second Sex or Betty Friedan’s (1963) The
Feminine Mystique. Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought is one of my transformative,
eye-opening, earth-shattering, life-changing books. Having read a plethora of white
feminist thought without recognizing myself and my lived experience (or the lived
experiences of my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and countless godmothers,
aunties and big sister-mentors), I celebrate and appreciate the ways that Black Feminist
Thought speaks to us. I understand that Collins did not know me at the time that she
wrote it, but Black Feminist Thought has always felt like a book written especially for
me, as if she said:

Kathryn … I acknowledge you. I believe in you. I affirm you. I celebrate you. You are a
part of a legacy of Black women laborers, activists, intellectuals, writers, and teachers.
You are drawing from a wellspring of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. You will
not face any challenges that have not already been faced and overcome. You can do this!

With this in mind, my comments will focus on the personal and professional impact
that this book has had on my life. My commentary weaves together lessons I have
learned from Collins with reflections on my own lived experience – from my college
experiences to my family of origin to my work as the director of the Collegium of

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

2342 K.T. Gines
Black Women Philosophers (an organization that I founded in 2007 in order to build
community and a safe space among the grossly under-represented Black women in the
discipline of philosophy). Collins has touched all of these parts of my life. When I read
her preface to the first edition of Black Feminist Thought, I connect to her seeking a
voice that is ‘both individual and collective, personal and political, one reflecting the
intersection of my own unique biography with the larger meaning of my historical time’
as well as her expressed desire to write in a way that is accessible and that centres Black
women’s experiences and ideas (BFT vi–vii). I appreciate Collins’s honesty when she
contrasts her experience writing the first edition of the book without ‘grants,
fellowships, release time, or other benefits that allow scholars to remove themselves
from everyday life’ and her experience writing the second edition where she offers
acknowledgements of the multiple sources of institutional support, including her
research budget from her named chair. There is an intermeshed coexistence of the
personal and professional that resonates with me. I am constantly aware of and tirelessly
(or tiredly?) resisting controlling images and defining (and redefining) myself with and
against stifling, intersecting, racialized-gendered-classed expectations.
I am writing from the standpoint of a thirty-six-year-old heterosexual Black
woman, married for fifteen years with four children aged fourteen, twelve, six and
three. I am also writing from the standpoint of a Black woman philosopher whose
philosophical training began at Spelman College at a time when there were only
sixteen Black women holding a PhD in philosophy in the USA. This statistic
motivated me to earn a PhD in philosophy to increase our representation in the
discipline. Having just earned tenure and promotion to associate professor in
philosophy at a major research institution (I received the tenure news while working
on this commentary), I am feeling especially sentimental, reflective and filled with
gratitude for how amazing my life’s journey has been and the many gifts along the
way – including Collins’s Black Feminist Thought.
As I revisit the book, I am having a full-circle moment. I think back to the first time I
read it (as a teenage college student majoring in philosophy) to this moment (in which I
am a newly tenured associate professor of philosophy). I am thinking about all of the
books and articles (read and written), papers (written, edited, published, graded), classes
(taken and taught), conferences (organized or presented at), joys and pains, moments of
excitement and disappointment, great expectations and necessary disillusionments.
Also, as I reread Black Feminist Thought I love the meticulous references and footnotes
in which Black women’s intellectual traditions not only receive epistemic uptake, but
also are unapologetically centred. At this point in my life I have not only had the
privilege to read most of the amazing array books and articles cited, but I have also had
opportunities to write about, meet and even work with so many of the sister-scholars
represented in these pages.
I was introduced to Black feminist theory as a student at Spelman College (a
historically black liberal arts college for women) – at that time under the leadership of
its first Black woman president, Jonetta B. Cole. Thus, I received an undergraduate
education in which Black women theorists were intentionally and systematically placed
at the centre rather than on the margins of course syllabuses. Positive exposure to Black
feminism began during my freshman year in courses like African Diaspora and the
World and continued in a feminist theory course with Beverly Guy-Sheftall in which we
 Ethnic and Racial Studies 2343
read her powerful anthology Words of Fire (1995). Black feminism was even present in
my philosophy courses (not typical in the discipline of philosophy). I recall a feminist
philosophy course taught by James Winchester (a white male philosopher) in which
we read Jessica Benjamin’s (1988) The Bonds of Love, the edited collection Feminist
Contentions: Philosophical Exchange, Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble, Eliza-
beth Spelman’s (1988) Inessential Woman, and Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought.
I did not think of myself as a ‘feminist’ before coming to Spelman and reading books
like these. However, once I became immersed in Black feminist theory, I soon realized
that I had been raised in a family of Black feminists.
As a philosophy major, I would go on to write an undergraduate thesis on the
philosophical underpinnings of ‘self-definition’ in which I examined Judith Butler’s
notion of gender performativity, Collins’s analysis of Black women’s use of self-
definition against prevailing controlling images, and Elaine Brown’s A Taste of Power
as an example of the coming together of these two frameworks (performativity and
self-definition). These theoretical frameworks have continued to influence my
scholarship far beyond my college years as evidenced by how often I cite Collins
in publications on topics ranging from race, racism and post-racialism, to sex and
sexuality in hip hop, to articulations and interrogations of intersectionality.1
What I find so appealing in Collins’s scholarship is her emphases on the vital need
and incredible power of Black women’s voices as well as our agency. She juxtaposes
negative controlling images of Black women imposed from the outside with our own
agency for self-definition to make the case for a distinct Black feminist epistemology.
I have always been especially struck by this analysis of controlling images and the
power of self-definition. I recognized the pervasiveness of controlling images like the
mammy (the Black mother figure in white homes), the matriarch (the Black mother
figure in Black homes), the welfare mother (poor, working-class Black women) and
the Black Lady (a middle-class image informed by Black respectability), and finally
the jezebel (the hypersexualized Black woman). I walk out into the world, I have
various interactions on campus, I go to parent-teacher conferences, I listen to music, I
watch television dramas and films, and I see representations of the Obama family. In
all of these contexts I think about controlling images and the power of self-definition.
I often ask myself – almost automatically – to what controlling image is society
expecting this Black woman to conform and in what way is this Black woman
resisting and/or defining herself because of (or despite) those controlling images?
When reflecting on Collins’s descriptions of these controlling images, I have often
considered the impact that these images have had on the Black women in my life.
I think about my maternal great-grandmother who worked many years as a domestic
labourer. My mother could not have completed law school while raising my sister and
I along with a stepson (my brother), two nephews and one niece, without the help of
my great-grandmother who ensured that we were all under constant adult supervision,
lived in a clean house, wore clean clothes, and ate home-cooked meals. I think about
my maternal grandmother for whom I am named. She appeared in Jet magazine
several times (including on the cover of the 5 January 1956 issue with the caption
‘Katherine Bell: She is one of Jet’s pretty calendar pin-ups’). I think about my mother,
who raised me and my sister with the support of so many village mothers – conscious,
2344 K.T. Gines
centred, powerful women of colour who walked tall and proud with dignity, self-
respect and self-determination.
Living in the social media age, my mother often posts her own reflections on the
legacies of Black women within our family. She recently posted comments about my
grandmother and great-grandmother. Of my grandmother, she writes:

As I reflect on the journey of my life, I come to where life began for me … my beautiful
mother – Kathryn Marie Bell/Smallwood/Harris. She was a beautiful and brilliant
woman who lived life to her own drum beat. She was indeed a Jet Beauty several times
way back in the day. Now you know where my beautiful daughters get their great looks
… its in the DNA from MY MAMA. Love you and Miss you Mommy. RIP as your
grandchildren and yes great-grand children continue your legacy of brilliance and
beauty. You left too soon at the age of 37, but you gave me a wealth of wisdom to
sustain life in good and bad times. I thank God you are my mother. I honor you then,
now, and always. Love Kathy …

And of my great-grandmother, she writes:

Today I celebrate my beloved grandmother – Nana! She was a force of nature and a trip
on a good day. Her life was full of pain, sorrow, and grief over the death of her beloved
daughter. Yet through it all – she loved my sisters and I. Then continued with our
children. Her tongue was a two edge sword- yes that is where I get it from. Her favorite
movie was the Color Purple. She read the Psalms everyday. She had a PhD in profanity.
And for her a good day was arguing and telling somebody about themselves … I think
she really was the first lawyer in the family. Highly opinionated Black Woman. She
loved to garden and had a minifarm in the back yard … And she fried chicken that put
Kentucky Fried and PopEyes to shame. She loved my children and knowingly told them
things at too early age – but yet prepared them for life. I smile as they quote her various
sayings. She was the Bible of our family – non-traditional, more old testament – hell fire
and brimstone, full of very colorful language. And yet she was there – from the time of
my birth to the time of her death, she was there. Nana was my Childhood Avenger when
folks wanted to make fun of my color and called me a white girl. Lord she even did that
when I was grown. She and my mother made me watch Imitation of Life and Pinky so I
would not be confused – that I would know that I was a child of Color! Then when I
became a militant in High School she said they did too good a job. When Mommy died,
she was there. When I received my Master’s of Education – she was there. When I went
to law school, in Bridgeport Conn, she was there. When I first came to Trenton, she was
there. She said I would drag her all over tarnation while pursuing my dreams …
Through all my joys, pains, and sorrows, when I fell down, she picked me up. Nana’s
love was old school – she didn’t always say it with words. She said it with her actions.
She provided comfort and encouragement. She always said you are going to miss me
when I’m gone. And she was right. I do miss her. Love to you Nana – oh and her birth
name … Serena Smallwood = Nana. And so in celebration of My Nana I leave you with
one her most favorite sayings … Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil …

As Collins explains: ‘Black women’s work and family experiences create the conditions
whereby the contradictions between everyday experiences and the controlling images
of Black womanhood become visible. Seeing the contradictions in the ideologies opens
 Ethnic and Racial Studies 2345
them up for demystification’ (BFT 109). I never thought of my great-grandmother as a
‘mammy’. I never thought of my grandmother as a ‘jezebel’. And I never thought of my
mother as an emasculating ‘matriarch’. Reading Black Feminist Thought provided a
practical and theoretical framework through which I could recognize the tensions
between demeaning and demoralizing controlling images on the one hand, and the
uplifting, life-giving, sustaining power of self-definition on the other. Collins asserts:
‘For U.S. Black women, constructed knowledge of self emerges from the struggle to
replace controlling images with self-defined knowledge deemed personally important,
usually knowledge essential to Black women’s survival’ (BFT 110–111). She also
underscores the importance of safe spaces for Black women to speak freely as a
necessary condition of resistance and empowerment through self-definition (BFT 111).
Collins identifies three safe spaces: (1) Black women’s relationships with one another;
(2) Black women’s blues tradition; and (3) the voice of Black women writers. I want to
focus on the first of these spaces – Black women’s relationships with one another. I have
already mentioned how this played out for me personally, in my own family. I will now
turn to what I have learned about the significance of Black women’s relationships as a
safe space for self-definition in a more professional context as a Black woman
philosopher.
The Collegium of Black Women Philosophers (CBWP) is a philosophical organiza-
tion launched in 2007 whose purpose is to encourage and foster a networking and
mentoring relationship between the under-represented Black women in philosophy,
including undergraduate and graduate students, as well as assistant, associate and full
professors in the Academy. The objective of the CBWP is to mentor and retain the
Black women who are currently professors or students in philosophy while
simultaneously recruiting more Black women into the discipline. Put another way,
I founded CBWP in an effort to create a safe space for Black women philosophers
where we could cultivate positive relationships to support, encourage and learn from
one another. At the 2007 inaugural conference, Anita L. Allen proclaimed: ‘It is
extraordinary to be here because it is an extraordinary event. I could not have imagined
it five years ago.’ Since that exciting beginning, the CBWP conference has brought
together Black women philosophers, from senior scholars to early-career faculty, to
graduate and undergraduate students, to present their work, exchange ideas and
participate in professional development workshops. The conference has helped to
redress the dismally low numbers of Black women in the discipline of philosophy.
Every year the CBWP conference is quite a phenomenal event. This is in part because
most Black women studying philosophy do so in isolation – typically the only Black
woman professor in a philosophy department, the only (or one of few) Black women
earning a doctorate in philosophy, and/or the only (or one of few) philosophy majors at
her undergraduate institution. These are also often spaces where she finds herself
alienated from Black men ‘race theorists’ and white women ‘feminists’ in philosophy.
I receive several emails from Black women students seeking to escape isolation to
connect to a welcoming, affirming philosophical community. One student writes:

I am a multi-cultural mature black woman and Canadian citizen currently residing in

Saudi Arabia, in pursuit of a PHD in Philosophy and I would like to know how I would
proceed with becoming a member of your organization CBWP.
2346 K.T. Gines
Another writes:

I am a sophomore and currently seeking degrees in Philosophy and Africana Studies.

However, my philosophy department fights to shut me up. I was hoping that you can
provide me with more info on the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers as I hope
to join.

A third student writes:

I simply feel as though I have no community or encouragement here, and it's beginning
to take a rather grave toll … You truly are a huge inspiration for me. I felt this incredible
surge of anxiety become lifted off my shoulders from just reading the contents on your
website!

In 2014, a first-generation recent college graduate wrote:

I love what you … have started, a place where black women can freely express their
passion for philosophy and its various branches. If only I had known of CBWP while I
was an undergrad, but thankfully I found a place where I will be encouraged to pursue
my love of philosophy all the while not denying the integral role that my ethnicity plays
in how I view the world around me.

Another student wrote:

I would like to start by first saying, I am so very happy to have found the CBWP
website. As an African American woman, 22 years of age, with a passion for
Philosophy, I don’t have anyone to turn to for guidance and advice.

Since the inaugural conference in 2007, we have kept the pipeline from undergraduate
through to full professor going and we have tried to minimize ‘leaks’ – that is, we have
tried to make progress with recruitment and retention. Each year we have between
fifteen and twenty-five faculty across ranks and about the same number of student
participants – including undergraduate students who leave excited about the possibil-
ities of pursuing graduate studies in philosophy and graduate students motivated to
complete their coursework, comprehensive exams and dissertations. Several graduate
students have finished their PhD and moved into postdoctoral fellowships or tenure
track positions, several assistant professors on the tenure track have been promoted to
the rank of associate professor, at least two professors at the associate rank have moved
to full professor rank, and one full professor is now a vice provost at an Ivy League
institution. We have interests within and across philosophical traditions and we are
creating new traditions. We have areas of specialization ranging from philosophy of
language, philosophy of mind, logic, metaphysics and epistemology, aesthetics and
ethics (including normative ethics, metaethics, health and bioethics), to philosophy of
law, social and political philosophy, critical philosophy of race, feminism and
existentialism, to Africana philosophy and Asian philosophy. And we have benefited
greatly from coming together regularly to create a safe space in which we can cast off
controlling images and participate in the process of self-definition. It was a wonderful
 Ethnic and Racial Studies 2347
honour for all of us in CBWP to have Collins as our keynote speaker for the 2012
conference.
In sum, Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought has played a major role in
my growth as a Black woman, a scholar, and the founding director of the Collegium
of Black Women Philosophers. Again, it has been a great honour for me to ruminate
on the tremendous impact that she and her scholarship have had on me in my personal
and professional development.

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

Note
1. For example, see Kathryn T. Gines: ‘A Critique of Postracialism: Conserving Race and
Complicating Blackness Beyond the Black-white Binary’ in Du Bois Review. Volume 11, Issue
1, Spring 2014a, pages 75–86; ‘Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-
Intersectionality, 1830s–1930s’ in Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional
Approach, pages 13–25 (Eds. Namita Goswami, Maeve M. O’Donovan and Lisa Yount.
Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto Publishers Limited, 2014b); ‘Reflections on the Legacy
and Future of Continental Philosophy With Regard to Critical Philosophy of Race’ in The
Southern Journal of Philosophy. Volume 50, Issue 2, June 2012, pages 329–344; ‘Black
Feminism and Intersectional Analyses: A Defense of Intersectionality’ in Philosophy Today.
Volume 55, SPEP Supplement 2011, pages 275–284; ‘Queen Bees and Big Pimps: Sex and
Sexuality in Contemporary Hip-Hop’ in Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason – a series
in Pop Culture and Philosophy, pages 92–104 (Eds. Tommie Shelby and Derrick Darby).

References
Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis Feminism, and the Problem of
Domination. New York: Pantheon Books.
Behabib, Seyla, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell. 1995. Feminist Contentions: Philosophical
Exchange. New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subnersion of Identity. New York:
Routledge.
de Beauvoir, Simone. 1949. Le Deuxième Sexe. Paris: Gallimard.
de Beauvoir, Simone. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Chevallier. 2010. The Second Sex.
New York: Knopf.
Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Gines, Kathryn T. Gines. 2014a. “A Critique of Postracialism: Conserving Race and
Complicating Blackness Beyond the Black-white Binary.” Du Bois Review 11 (1): 75–86.
Gines, Kathryn T. Gines. 2014b. “Race Women, Race Men and Early Expressions of Proto-
Intersectionality, 1830s-1930s.” In Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional
Approach, edited by Namita Goswami, Maeve M. O’Donovan, and Lisa Yount, 13–25.
Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto Publishers.
Gines, Kathryn T. Gines. 2005. “Queen Bees and Big Pimps: Sex and Sexuality in
Contemporary Hip-Hop.” In Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason – a Series in Pop
Culture and Philosophy, edited by Tommie Shelby and Derrick Darby, 92–104. Chicago:
Open Court.
2348 K.T. Gines
Gines, Kathryn T. Gines. 2011. “Black Feminism and Intersectional Analyses: A Defense of
Intersectionality.” Philosophy Today 55 (SPEP Supplement): 275–284.
Gines, Kathryn T. Gines. 2012. “Reflections on the Legacy and Future of Continental
Philosophy With Regard to Critical Philosophy of Race.” The Southern Journal of
Philosophy. 50 (2): 329–344.
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist
Thought. New York: The New Press.
Jet Magazine, January 5, 1956 issue cover.
Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought.
Boston: Beacon Press.

KATHRYN T. GINES is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at

The Pennsylvania State University.
ADDRESS: Department of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University, 242
Sparks Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Email: ktg3@psu.edu. Website: www.ktgphd.com.
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