Lifting the veil: African American images and the European American gaze: Commentary on Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins

Patricia Hill Collins presents and discusses gender and gender role norms, behaviors, and ideologies among African Americans in an interdisciplinary diagnostic endeavor that calls attention to health, economic, behavioral, and psychosocial patterns related to social injustice and inequality. Collins presents several popular culture, mass media, and social science literature topics that call for a progressive Black sexual politics necessary for African American empowerment. A most crucial and apparent point of Collins\u27s discussion is that improvement in the lives of African Americans requires inspection and analysis of gender and sexuality related intragroup variation and diversity. I situate this discussion primarily within a post-civil rights ideological revolution related to the European American gaze, multiculturalism, and European American emotional ambivalence toward the Black body. It is proposed that Collins\u27s analysis of the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality among African Americans occurs within an American context that reciprocally impacts African American intragroup dynamics. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC