On Intellectual Activism

In the current political moment of economic crisis, state repression and war, and social and ecological destruction, On Intellectual Activism is a welcome addition to the conversation about the deeply contradictory relationship between the academy and the street, between scholars and the movement, and what progressive and revolutionary intellectuals must do. Patricia Hill Collins speaks truth to the people and truth to power in the voice of black feminism and a politically engaged intellectual activism in the service of twenty-first century social justice, a project she envisions to confront today’s gender, race, sexual, and class oppression, exploitation, and injustice in the United States and global society.

Collins contextualizes this oppositional intellectual and political project within the power and knowledge relations of sociology, the university, and society, and within the historic and contemporary structures, institutions, practices, ideologies, and daily realities of intersectional oppression and inequality—including genocide of indigenous peoples, enslavement of African peoples, colonial and imperial conquest, anti-immigrant policies, patriarchy, and class inequality. This collection of essays reprises three decades of Collins’ scholarship and political intervention: writings, lectures, teaching, interviews, and conversations reframed to address today’s urgent realities. It is an invitation to veteran intellectual activists and new generations to commit to resolving the critical questions of equality, justice, and democratic participation. It embraces key themes of black feminism, knowledge production and power relations, critical pedagogy, new racial theorizing in today’s so-called (mistakenly) “post-racial” and “colorblind” society, and, of course, intellectual activism.

Collins reimagines the sociological imagination from the standpoint of black working-class women, at the intersection of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality, and as an “outsider within,” located at the boundaries of the discipline, the academy and the community, especially the black feminist activist community. Black feminism as a standpoint is rooted in an historically activist impulse and is foundational for intersectionality, which seeks to understand all oppressions (race, gender, class, sexuality, age, ability, religion, ethnicity, citizenship status), and to fight back against oppression, inequality, and injustice.

Knowledge production and sociological knowledge, Collins reminds us, exist within and are shaped by the dominant power relations of history and society, and by resistance movements. They are catalyzed by breaks in continuity—disruptive and sometimes violent change that must be understood. Knowledge and power play out on many levels, structural, institutional, social, cultural, and interpersonal. While hegemonic power and knowledge oppress and dispossess, oppositional power and knowledge are at the core of intellectual activism and social struggle. The intellectual activist project must speak truth to the hegemonic powers and, at the same time, tell truth to the people, standing in unity with their realities and social change praxis. This is not an easy task for academics.

The intellectual aspect of the social justice project requires critical pedagogy and consciousness raising. Collins lifts up education and teaching, whatever the institutional site, at the intersection of intellectual production and power relations, recognizing teaching as a profoundly political act. Public education, higher education, and community education are expressions of intellectual activism and critical pedagogy for social change. They are necessary for knowledge production that validates the lived experience of the oppressed and envisions a social justice path.

The post-Civil Rights era is fraught with illusion, distortion, and lies about racial America, with talk and even scholarship about a “post-racial” and “colorblind” society. Collins takes on the racialized nature of “threat” and the deep-rooted and ongoing systemic violence against the racialized other (indigenous, black, Latino, Asian, and in the post-9/11 world, Muslim and Arab) embedded in a long history of white supremacy. In the post-9/11 world “terrorism and security” have largely replaced the communism of the 1950s and the long Cold War as the enemy within, yet the “racialized threat” continues ideologically and politically.

In this new moment, Collins calls for racial theorizing to make sense of the shifting forms of racialism and racial formation in the United States. The reforms ending legalized racial apartheid, along with waves of immigration of racially, nationally, and religiously oppressed non-European peoples, have given rise to multiracialism and biracialism within the racial formation. But the persistence of the system in which white supremacy is embedded means that new forms of racial oppression are being reproduced and that the United States remains a highly racialized, gendered, and classed society with new meanings, power relations, and racial hierarchies.

On Intellectual Activism is an accessible and rich toolbox. Collins uses storytelling, translates the language of academic theory into the language of people’s lives, and clarifies new forms of racism and oppression. Her voice resonates with multiple publics—students, scholars, and communities. She offers a reality check and a refreshing critique of dominant and mainstream voices and forces in sociology and society. She validates the experience of sociological rebels and intellectual activists who are marginalized within the discipline, the profession, and the university where many of us practice our craft and juggle the contradictions of academic survival and social justice demands.

And yet, Collins leaves much that is radical and revolutionary unsaid, under-theorized, and outside of the intellectual activism she envisions. She discusses power throughout the volume, but whole theories of power and systemic transformation are off the grid. And she steps back from a holistic analysis of twenty-first century global capitalism within which white supremacy is produced and reproduced under changing conditions in relation to the ongoing production and reproduction of forms of class exploitation and commodification, patriarchy, colonialism, and empire.

For those of us located to the left—warriors at the boundaries and intersections of the revolutionary movement and social struggle, and also within academe—the questions and conversations of this volume are a useful starting point, though more is needed at this historical juncture.

Critical questions of the dialectical interrelationality of social reform and the revolutionary process of anti-systemic struggles and political strategy are largely unasked and uninvestigated. Is the strategic direction of today’s struggle toward greater activism and policy resolutions within the contradictions of society fighting to take back what has already been eliminated and rolled back? How is that connected to social and political struggle in relation to the deepening polarization and antagonism at the foundation of society, and toward systemic rupture and transformation?

What is the nature of social change and what is the dynamic between the current catastrophic crisis of capitalism—economically, socially, politically, and ecologically, for women, oppressed races, nationalities, religions, classes, genders, ages, abilities—and the social and political path toward the resolution of these centuries-old problems by those living the crisis? How do intellectuals today engage in developing revolutionary consciousness and organized forms of ideological and political struggle on the side of and along with the oppressed and dispossessed as part of a transformative movement?

These questions may not be on Collins’ radar, but they should be on ours. The future of humanity and the earth hang in the balance.