Patricia Hill Collins was awarded the 2023 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture
or centuries, when nations prepared those destined for leadership, philosophy – the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence – ranked among the subjects in which instruction was not optional.
I think you have to invent yourself. That's what I had to do from an early age because the life of the mind was not in the community around me or in the family around me. But seeds were planted there in terms of how to have confidence about what you love and what you think is right. And in my case, it had to do with reading.
I am not going to say that it is easy to do. It's really labor-intensive to do intellectual work. But you have to be focused about why you're doing it. I'm the first person in my family to graduate from college. I’ve always believed that you might be the first but you don't need to be the last. And in my own family I have landed first but I have not been the last. In a lot of ways that is how I looked at my work.
This is all very much tied to the book I just finished. I didn't just look at it as in the life of the mind, I looked at how people manipulated and used ideas in public. There are people who will always bristle at the work of ideas, at generating philosophy because it is to them esoteric and only concerned with theory and inspiring additional thought. Why were you drawn to it?
So I'm saying we just need to diagnose this moment. And we need to think strategically, get all the emotions out of it, because after a while shock value no longer has the same resonance. Maybe five years from now, people will say, “What was that word again? Intersection, intersectionality?” The same is true for.
The book I just finished is about this. I'm looking at violence that really occurs at an intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc., people who are vulnerable to death or dying because they live in those intersections. But the issue is, what do they do when they are encountering that kind of violence? An example exists in a place that’s grim: mothers of murdered children.
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