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Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Contradictions of Modernity)

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Patricia Hill Collins builds off of her equally enlightening and well-written Black Feminist Thought to create fighting words. She proposes a "critical social theory" to combine both theory and action for black feminism, stressing that thought is useless without these actions. She analyzes the need for such a theory as well as the reasons for black feminism's unique ability to serve as that theory. Using sociology, postmodernism, and Afrocentrism as her examples, Collins examines the history of black women within the areas and how her critical social theory could impact them. The overall point of such critical social theory is to achieve empowerment for black women, and Collins ties everything together into her vision of how that is possible. An excellent book, though anyone who wants a complete picture should also read her Black Feminist Thought.

In Fighting Words, Hill Collins uses the initial theorizing of her first book to further investigate several issues that emerged in Black Feminist Thought. In examining Black women's search for justice in the U.S., she looks at their status of `outsiders within': privy to the thoughts of white folks in general and white feminists in particular, as well as to those of black men--yet never seen as the focal point of either the women's movement or the civil rights movement; erased from White history, women's history, and Afro-American history; and denied the privileges that Black men experience from being male and White women experience from being White, Black women are in a unique (and largely invisible) position in our society. Because they have been so invisible in our various histories, they know things about the Whites they worked for, the Black men in whose congregations they served, and the integrated groups that they were "allowed" to join, that few others in this society are aware of. In this book, Hill Collins moves beyond Black Feminist Thought to examine the unique contributions of Black women, and to theorize the similarities faced by all oppressed people--whether these are based on nation, race, class, gender, age, sexuality or ability. Honest and informative, this book should be required reading for those who call themselves Africanists, womanists, or feminists.