Patricia Hill Collins Quotes

I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.

The potential significance of Black feminist thought goes far beyond demonstrating that African-American women can be theorists. Like Black feminist practice, which it reflects and which it seeks to foster, Black feminist thought can create a collective identity among African-American women about the dimensions of a Black women's standpoint. Through the process of rearticulating, Black feminist thought can offer African-American women a different view of ourselves and our worlds

The personal is political for so many.

In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race.

Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions.

Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I define my work as a feminist act and a political act because I'm black and a woman. You don't necessarily have to claim that, but the act of making art itself is a political and feminist act when you're a woman.

I am for feminism. I stand up for women standing up for themselves in the same way I stand up for being black.

We must begin to tell black women's stories because, without them, we cannot tell the story of black men, white men, white women, or anyone else in this country. The story of black women is critical because those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.

Black women are the touchstone by which all that is human can be measured.

Feminism involves so much more than gender equality and it involves so much more than gender. Feminism must involve consciousness of capitalism (I mean the feminism that I relate to, and there are multiple feminisms, right). So it has to involve a consciousness of capitalism and racism and colonialism and post-colonialities, and ability and more genders than we can even imagine and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name.

When you are a marginalized person or a woman of color and/or someone who's a part of the LGBTQ community, your acts become politicized, just by being yourself. Because we're not completely accepting of all different kinds of human beings. By being myself, I'm doing something political.

Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase "Black feminism".

... not all black women have silently acquiesced in sexism and misogyny within the African-American community. Indeed, many writers, activists, and other women have voiced their opposition and paid the price: they have been ostracized and branded as either man- haters or pawns of white feminists, two of the more predictable modes of disciplining and discrediting black feminists.

Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.

The black woman had had to struggle against being a person of great strength.

If I had to characterize one quality as the genius of feminist thought, culture, and action, it would be the connectivity.

I was born black and female.

If you are a black woman, you get two history months in a row.

I feel the feminist movement has excluded black women. You cannot talk about being black and a woman within traditional feminist dialogue.

I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.

The personal is political, but only to a point.

Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.