Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Chapter 10 places Black feminist thought in the US in a transnational context, an approach new to the 2002 edition of Black Feminist Thought (xi). Collins argues that Black women’s experiences show marked similarities across national borders and that these similarities relate to the legacy of colonialism and its attending racial, ethnic, sexist, and class biases. Colonialism created a gendered apartheid system defined by the exploitation of Black women’s labor. Placing Black American women’s experiences in a transnational context highlights the interconnectedness of Black women’s experiences and provides new insights into US Black feminism as a social justice project.

White American women and Black American men have influenced the construction of Black feminism in the US, the former taking a maternalistic stance toward Black women, the latter a paternalistic one. Collins eschews the concerns of these groups and urges Black feminists to address the shared concerns of Black women around the world. African women participated in anticolonial struggles to create Black-run nation-states in Africa. Collins considers these movements analogous to the work Black women did in the US worked to demand equal rights during the civil rights movement. New concerns have since come to the fore, notably, Black women’s poverty and its relation to neocolonialism (in a global context) and racial segregation (in a US context).