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truth-telling and intellectual activism

by patricia hill collins

Speak the truth to the people

Talk sense to the people

Free them with reason

Free them with honesty

Free the people with Love and Courage

and Care for their-Being Mari Evans, from I Am a Black Woman (1970)

Mari Evans’ poem invokes the social and political upheaval of the

Civil Rights and Black Power movements in this country. Like others

of her generation, Evans rejected the separation between scholar-

ship and activism, school and society, thinking and doing. She wrote

poems, plays, children’s books, and a musical adaptation of Zora Neale

Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Along with other artists,

intellectuals, and activists at the time, she engaged in multiple forms

of intellectual activism.

37WINTER 2013 contexts

I wonder how effec-

tively today’s scholars

and public intellectuals

speak the truth about

contemporary social

issues. New technolo-

gies have opened up

formerly unimaginable

ways for us to talk to

one another. We are swimming in information, but how much

of that information moves us closer to the truths that will sustain

us? Individuals can now see themselves on YouTube and post

their ideas on blogs with blinding speed. Yet for all this talk

and noise, what are we saying that is of value? Where are the

conversations that will spur contemporary intellectual activism?

Breathing life into ideas requires working across differences and

building communities in which dialogue is possible.

Today, in our increasingly corporate colleges and universities

and monopolistic mainstream media, we confront a contradic-

tory politics of inclusion and exclusion. Some of those from

formerly excluded groups now occupy positions of power and

authority inside the social institutions that once excluded them.

Many of these insiders engage in intellectual work. At the same

time, as the lyrics of global hip-hop remind us, far too many

people remain excluded.

As an American citizen, an African American woman from

a working-class background, and an academic who has expe-

rienced considerable upward social mobility, I am both an

insider and an outsider. Throughout my professional career, I

have struggled to gain clarity about how ever-shifting patterns

of belonging and exclusion have shaped the

contours of my intellectual activism.

Negotiating the contemporary politics of

knowledge production as an “outsider within”

raises some fundamental dilemmas. In a mis-

guided effort to protect standards, many of my

academic colleagues at different colleges and

universities derogate any work that is “popu-

lar” as less rigorous or scholarly. They see such

“political” work as nonacademic. Such norms

suppress the kind of engaged scholarship

that interests me and that is fundamental for

intellectual activism. But because ideas and politics are every-

where, the potential for intellectual activism is also everywhere.

speaking truth to power There are two primary strategies of intellectual activism.

One tries to speak the truth to power. This form of truth telling

uses the power of ideas to confront existing power relations.

On a metaphorical level, speaking the truth to power invokes

images of changing the very foundations of social hierarchy

where the less powerful take on the ideas and practices of the

powerful, often armed solely with their ideas. One can imagine

this process through the David and Goliath story of the weak

standing up to the strong, armed only with a slingshot (as relying

solely on the power of one’s ideas seems to be). A Google search

of the phrase “speak the truth to power” uncovers numerous

hits seemingly focused on confronting those who wield power

within existing social institutions.

My lengthy educational training was designed to equip

me to wield the language of power to serve the interests of

the gatekeepers who granted me legitimacy. My teachers did

not consider that I might choose to use those same weapons

to challenge much of what I learned, at least not as deeply as

I have actually done. While we may think of our educations

as our individual intellectual property, we quickly fi nd out that

powerful groups expect us to place our fancy degrees in service

to conservative political agendas. Power routinely claims that it

has a monopoly on the truth. Yet my education revealed multiple

truths, most of which were co-opted and repackaged to suit the

vested interests of the more powerful. The richness of alternative

points of view remained ignored, neglected, ridiculed, and/or

persecuted out of existence.

Much of my academic writing strives to

speak the truth to power, namely, to develop

alternative analyses of social injustices that

scholarly audiences will fi nd credible. Much

of my career as a sociologist has been spent

speaking the truth to power about race, class,

gender, and sexuality, yet race has been central.

I have focused on anti-racist discourse and prac-

tice that might catalyze people to think about

their worlds differently and, as a result, act

differently within them. My work constitutes

theoretical interventions in what counts as truth

about race and racism.

Contexts, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 36-39, 41. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2013 Temple University Press. Used by permission of Temple University Press. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504213476244

Illustrations by Corey Fields

38 contexts.org

This is a difficult time to talk overtly about race; many

American citizens believe that we are living in a post-racial world.

The election of Barack Obama has simultaneously highlighted

the visibility of race and the difficulties of talking about it. In this

context, terms like “family,” “community,” “post-racial society,”

and “color blindness” are invoked by thinkers on both the left

and the right sides of the political spectrum, with racial subtexts

carried within what appears to be a newfound unity across the

historically divisive categories of race and gender. I think that if

we can change our thinking about race, we can do so about

gender, class, sexuality, religion, and citizenship too.

Speaking the truth to power in ways that undermine and

challenge that power is often best done as an insider. Some

changes are best initiated from within the belly of the beast.

Standing outside, throwing stones at the beast, and calling it

names won’t change much, except perhaps, to make the beast

more dangerous because now it no longer believes that its

underlings love it. Challenging power structures from the inside,

and working cracks in the system, requires learning to speak

multiple languages of power convincingly.

speaking truth to the people A second strategy of intellectual activism aims to speak the

truth directly to the people. In contrast to directing energy to

those in power, a focus that inadvertently bolsters the belief that

elites are the only social actors who count,

those who speak the truth to the people

talk directly to the masses. The distinction

here is critical. It’s the difference between

producing a memo that documents the

many cases of a boss’s bad behavior and

beseeches him or her to change his or her

ways and having a meeting with the staff to strategize ways

that they, individually and collectively, might deal with the boss

and the lines of authority that put them in the situation to begin

with. The former strategy speaks the truth to power—the latter

strategy speaks the truth to the people.

Mari Evans’ poem exemplifies this second form of truth tell-

ing. Evans demands much from intellectual activists by arguing

that ordinary, everyday people need truthful ideas that will assist

them in their everyday lives. Such truth-telling requires talking,

reason, honesty, love, courage, and care. For academics whose

horizons have been narrowed to preparing for the next reap-

pointment, promotion, and tenure committee meeting, or their

lecture for the huge introductory sociology class that meets at

9:00 a.m. three days a week like clockwork, this conception of

truth-telling constitutes a luxury that may be reserved for only

the most privileged faculty members. Who has time to talk with

every student, reason with the students, give them an honest

assessment of the required textbook, love them in ways that

empower and not demean, show the courage to try something

radically different, and express a level of basic care?

Intellectual activists who devote their attention to the public

can pay a high price. In the United States, scholars and activists

who place their education in service to their local publics are

routinely passed over for cushy jobs, fat salaries, and the chance

to appear on National Public Radio. In some areas of the globe,

speaking the truth to the people lands you not on cable television

but under house arrest, in jail, or killed. Contemporary American

intellectuals must remember that, when it comes to our ability

to claim the power of ideas, we are the fortunate ones. For

our parents, friends, relatives, and neighbors who lack literacy,

work long hours, and/or consume seemingly endless doses of

so-called reality television, the excitement of hearing new ideas

Because ideas and politics are everywhere, the potential for intellectual activism is also everywhere.

39WINTER 2013 contexts

that challenge social inequalities can be a rarity.

I am an intellectual whose scholarly work aspires to speak

the truth to power. Yet a sizable portion of my intellectual work

has also aimed to speak the truth to the people. Both forms of

truth telling are intertwined throughout my intellectual career,

with my books, journal articles, and essays arrayed along a

continuum with speaking the truth to power and speaking the

truth to the people on either end. Engaging these two forms of

truth telling within a singular work is challenging.

speaking in multiple registers My book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Conscious-

ness and the Politics of Empowerment is written in multiple

registers, for scholarly audiences as well as non-academic Afri-

can American women. I faced a difficult challenge in crafting

this book. How could I write a book about African American

women’s intellectual production that would be accepted by

scholarly audiences that had long excluded and derogated this

group? How might I write a book that spoke directly to African

American women that they would find truthful, yet avoid the

risk of being dismissed by scholarly audiences (who controlled

publishing resources)? I had to find ways to examine the everyday

creativity and resistance of African American women within the

constraints of an academic discourse that

would not be seen by scholars as being too

popular or political. I also had to consider

how my arguments would be recogniz-

able to and useful for African American

women. And I had to sharpen my skills of

translation.

Because the material at that time was so new and I was

an unknown scholar, I knew that my publisher would recruit

scholarly reviewers to give my manuscript a thorough assess-

ment. Yet to shield my book from the power relations that

made African American women objects of scholarly knowledge,

I also developed ways of including African American women as

reviewers of my material.

I invited a few Afri-

can American women

undergraduates from

my University of Cin-

cinnati Africana Studies

courses to serve as

readers for chapters of

my manuscript. They

were bright, energetic,

primari ly working-

class students whose

childhoods in the Cincinnati metropolitan area had provided

them broad, heterogeneous networks of African American

friends, neighbors, and relatives. I was not interested in my stu-

dents’ ability to correct my English or inform me of how my book

might benefit from additional citations from the top scholarly

journals. Instead, I asked them to tell me what thoughts and

emotions the ideas in my book raised for them. Did the ideas

in Black Feminist Thought ring true for them? Could they think

of examples from their own experiences that illustrated and/or

contradicted the book’s main ideas? As I wrote and revised my

manuscript, I tried to incorporate both forms of truth-telling into

this one volume.

Black Feminist

Thought became

an award-winning

book. A fundamen-

tal reason for its

success has been its

ability to engage in

dual forms of truth

telling. The format

of the book enables

In heterogeneous democratic societies, finding ways to share important ideas with diverse groups of people is important.

40 contexts.org

the maquiladora syndrome by gloria gonzález-lópez

“So are you like all the

other researchers who

have been here, people

we have helped, who

collected their data and

then left, disappeared,

and never came back?

Are you like that?” The

director of a community-

based agency in Mexico

City confronted me with

this question when I

approached her about my recent research project.

“No, no!” I wanted to shout in response. “I am not that

kind of researcher, I am a feminist sociologist, an intellectual

activist!” But even as I heard myself refuting her accusations, I

knew that I would have to work hard to convince her that I was

not just another knowledge invader who was visiting Mexico

to interview people, extract their histories and collect a wealth

of rich data, all for her own professional benefit, and that of a

small intellectual elite.

This conversation haunted me as I traveled and lived in

four large Mexican urban centers (Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara,

Mexico City, and Monterrey). Well endowed with prestigious

research grants, I was conducting ethnographic research on

incestuous relationships in Mexican families. In recent volunteer

work, I had learned from activists and mental-health profession-

als in Ciudad Juárez that research on sexual violence within the

family was completely invisible. This also validated my preliminary

research on this theme, led by my original interest in studying

this topic with immigrants.

With that research, I hoped to make good on my commit-

ments as a feminist and intellectual activist; I wanted to conduct

research that was urgently needed and useful. But I had heard

many complaints from local community workers about research-

ers from the north (as well as some Mexican institutions) who

make careers out of research on local communities in the global

south without giving anything back. The situation sounded

like the academic equivalent of the renowned maquiladoras,

or Mexican assembly plants that exploit cheap local labor to

produce goods for northern markets.

This “maquiladora syndrome,” as I came to think of it,

troubled me deeply and motivated me to explore ways to engage

in some form of professional reciprocity. I asked the director

how I could return the generous support her agency had given

me in identifying potential informants for my project. I was

startled when she responded, “Teach me what you know.” “But

what do I have to offer you?” I wondered. I thought about all

the knowledge I have accu-

mulated through years of

studying, teaching, and

writing in top-ranked U.S.

universities. Though I am

a tenured professor with a

hefty record of accomplish-

ment, when confronted

with the question of how to

genuinely give back to the

communities from which

I was “extracting” data, I

found myself speechless.

This humbling experience compelled me to rethink what

I know, and what I teach, and how knowledge circulating in

our intellectual communities might be of use to those situated

outside of them. I thought about all the work I have done on

Mexican immigrants and their sex lives, men and masculinity,

sexuality and violence, and feminist research methods. I shared

this list with the agency director, and together we designed

seminars and workshops for the professionals, activists, and

other women and men who were working in the trenches of

Mexico City.

In preparing for and participating in these seminars, I felt

deeply vulnerable. Rather than simply impose “northern know-

ing,” I struggled to figure out how to share ideas in ways that

would resonate with the complex social realities of these profes-

sional activists. I realized that if I really wanted to be a feminist

intellectual activist, I had to allow myself be transformed by the

ways of knowing that emerged from my conversations with

these people. As a Mexican immigrant myself, I have frequently

felt marginalized in intellectual circles located on the north side

of the border; now I was in a situation of privilege vis-à-vis these

community workers in the global south. For many of them, I

was “la doctora de Texas,” the Mexican who had made it in

the United States. I was the borderless immigrant, una feminista

without fronteras going back and forth both intellectually, and

in my own heart.

In refusing to participate in the intellectual maquiladora

syndrome, I learned that creativity and collaborative knowledge

production is rooted in vulnerability and openness. The con-

frontational woman who later became a supportive and loving

friend, the woman who moved me deeply when she said, “teach

me what you know” taught me many valuable lessons about

the politics of intellectual reciprocity and engaged research.

Gloria González-López is in the sociology department at the University of Texas at

Austin. She is the author of Erotic Journeys: Mexican Immigrants and Their Sex Lives.

Contexts, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 40. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2013 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504213476245

41WINTER 2013 contexts

undergraduate and entering graduate students to access the

challenging concepts that they need to speak the truth to

power in the academy. To assist them in translating social theory,

I chose to use theoretical language in volume, and included a

glossary of terms that would encourage my readers to tackle

difficult ideas. Graduate students and scholars can access more

theoretical arguments about how oppressed groups can produce

oppositional knowledge that assists in their survival. The book

also serves as a point of entry for readers who are interested in

intersectional scholarship on race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate how people

apply the general arguments raised by the experiences of Afri-

can American women to their own situations. Black Feminist

Thought provides its readers with a shared space that validates

what each one brings to the table, yet enables them to gain

access to the knowledge of the other. It shows that, via pro-

cesses of translation, it is possible to bring these two seemingly

antithetical traditions of truth-telling closer together.

The recent rediscovery of public sociology in the United

States has provided institutional support, or at least a vocabulary,

for talking about issues of intellectual activism. In the current

climate of academic sociology, this idea of public sociology has

been elevated to a level of increased visibility that has given it

some legitimacy. Public sociology speaks to the desire that many

sociologists have to talk with and educate the public.

In heterogeneous democratic societies, finding ways to

share important ideas with diverse groups of people is impor-

tant. I have tried to make the main ideas of my intellectual

work accessible to broad, nontechnical audiences both inside

and outside of academia, combining academic rigor with acces-

sibility. I believe that our analyses of important social issues are

strengthened when we engage in dialogues, and speak with

people and not at them.

Those of us who participate in intellectual activism must

do a better job of engaging the public. How different our ideas

about families, schooling, immigration, and government would

be if we presented them not simply at academic conferences

but also at neighborhood public libraries, to groups of college

students, returning students, at parent education classes—and

even to our own families.

Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the Uni-

versity of Maryland. The preceding is adapted from her book, On Intellectual Activism

(Temple University Press, 2012).

AD