From 1976 to 1980 she was the director of the Africana Center at
Tufts University. As such Collins worked on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion through bringing the research, ideas, and culture Black communities to the campus. Additionally, she had aimed to bring attention to issues surrounding Black women. In 1990, Collins published her first book,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. A revised 10th-anniversary edition of the book was published in 2000 and a 30th-anniversary edition in 2023. The book was translated into Korean in 2009, French in 2016, and Portuguese in 2019. In 2005, Collins joined the
University of Maryland's department of sociology as a distinguished university professor. Working closely with graduate students on issues such as
critical race theory,
intersectionality, and
feminist theory, she maintains an active research agenda and continues to write books and articles in relation to social, racial, and gender issues. Her work has achieved international recognition.
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment In 1990, Collins published
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, whose approach to the title topic was influenced by such figures as
Angela Davis,
Alice Walker and
Audre Lorde. The analysis drew on a wide range of sources, including fiction, poetry, music, and oral history. Collins's work concluded with three central claims: • Oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are intersecting, mutually constructing systems of power. Collins utilizes the term
intersectionality, coined by
Kimberlé Crenshaw, to refer to this simultaneous overlapping of multiple forms of oppression as a
matrix of domination. • Because black women have unique histories at the intersections of systems of power, they have created world views out of a need for self-definition and to work on behalf of social justice. Black women's specific experiences with intersecting systems of oppression provide a window into these same processes for other individuals and social groups. Systems of oppression that Collins mentions are government agencies, schools, and the news. • Black feminist thought on race and gender came from Black communities rather than in opposition to white feminism. In
Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits how
Black feminist inquiry highlights two very important themes. One is "how Black women's paid work is organized within intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender." Moreover, she continues, the theme that "concerns how Black women's unpaid family labor is simultaneously confining and empowering" for them is also extremely important. These controlling images are utilized mainly to make black women's subjugated state of being harassed and silenced appear standard and natural. In an interview with Oklahoma's
KGOU radio station in 2017, Collins' discussed her careful process while writing the book: "I think it was very difficult for me to come to voice around the types of work that I do because there was no space for this work," Collins says. "We had to create the space to write black feminist thought, to talk about race, class, gender, to talk about
intersectionality. And that was all part of the process of being seen as legitimate, being listened to, being clear, being respected"
Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology Published in 1992,
Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology was a collaboration with Margaret L. Andersen, in which Collins edited a compilation of essays on race, class, and gender. The book is widely recognized for shaping the field of race, class, and gender studies, as well as its related concept of intersectionality. The essays cover a variety of topics, from historical trends and their effects today, to the current media portrayal of minority groups. The tenth edition was published in 2020.
Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice Collins' third book
Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice was published in 1998.
Fighting Words focused on how Black women's knowledge examines social injustices within Black communities and wider society. Expanding on the idea of "outsiders within" from her previous book, she examines how outsiders resist the majority's perspective, while simultaneously pushing for and creating new insight into the social injustices that exist. Collins also notes how acknowledging the social theories of oppressed groups are important because their different experiences have created new angles of looking at human rights and injustice. This has not always been the case because, as she points out, "elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal". In 2021, Collins was interviewed by the
Oprah Winfrey Network, "Finding the Full-Range of Your Voice," where she reflected on her quote, "publicly articulating rage typically constitutes less a revelation about oppression than a discovery of voice." She says that the terminology now would be "speaking your own truth, claiming all parts of yourself, including the rage." She asserts, "Why would we reject anger, when there's so much to be angry about that affects us, that affect our children, that affects our communities, that affects our loved ones? Why would we want to tamp that down to become a good girl?" This work argued that racism and heterosexism were intertwined in multiple areas of life. For example, how ideals of beauty work to oppress African-Americans males and females, whether homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. Collins asserts that people must examine the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality because looking at each issue separately can cause one to miss a large part of the problem. Her argument for resisting the creation of such narrow gender roles requires action on individual and community levels as well as recognizing success in areas other than those typically respected by Americans, such as money or beauty. Collins also contends that the oppression of African Americans cannot be successfully resisted without analyzing how intersecting oppressions influence their own group, such as the treatment of women or LGBTQ people.
From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism In 2006, Collins published
From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism, which examines the relationship between
black nationalism, feminism and women in the hip-hop generation. The book is a collection of essays by her, written over multiple years, compiled into one cohesive examination of the current situation of African Americans. Collins examines contemporary structural racism, which she calls "new racism", and explores how old ideas about what racism is prevent society from recognizing and fixing the wrongdoings that persist. The author explores a range of examples, from American national identity, to motherhood, to feminine portrayal in hip-hop. Following the
Civil Rights Movement, she argues, there was a "shift from color-conscious racism that relied on strict racial segregation to a seemingly colorblind racism that promised equal opportunities yet provided no lasting avenues for African American advancement".
Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media and Democratic Possibilities In 2009, Collins published
Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media and Democratic Possibilities, in which she encourages the public to be more aware of and prevent the institutional discrimination that African-American children are experiencing today in the public education system. Collins explains that teachers have a great deal of power to be the facilitators of either discriminatory attitudes or tolerant attitudes; they are the "frontline actors negotiating the social issues of our time." Claiming that the education system is greatly influenced by the media, Collins examines racism as a system of power preventing education and democracy to reach its full potential. Within the text, she provides examples of how people, specifically teachers in the education system, can resist colorblind racism to ensure children are provided with safe classroom environments and where they can be guaranteed freedom of expression. One of the primary concerns in her book is the importance education has in producing citizens and making sure the disenfranchised feel empowered. Within the book, Collins includes personal stories about her position as an African-American child who felt "silenced in Philadelphia's public schools" in order to further elaborate on the important role the education institution has in establishing democracy.
Other books Collins co-edited with John Solomos
The Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies (2010), a book on racial and ethnic stratification through an intersectional lens. In 2012, she published
On Intellectual Activism, a collection of personal essays and interviews where she explains how ideas play an important part in bringing about social change. In 2016 and revised in 2020, Collins also published the book
Intersectionality, with co-author Sirma Bilge, which discusses, in depth, the intertwined nature of social categorizations such as race, class and gender, sexuality and nation, and how these ideas create a complex web of discrimination and disadvantage in society. Taking a global perspective, topics covered include the history of intersectionality, critical education, human rights, violence, global social protest, identity politics, and women of color feminism in the United States and Brazil. In 2023, she published the book
Lethal Intersections: Race, Gender, and Violence, which explores how violence differentially affects people according to their class, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity. ==Career honors==