Mapping the Geographies of Social Inequality: Patricia Hill Collins’s Intersectional Critical Theory

Among the many virtues of Patricia Hill Collins’s work there are three that are particularly significant for me, as someone who also identifies himself as a “critical theorist.” First, there is the way Collins defines “critical social theory,” namely, as “theorizing about the social in defense of economic and social justice.”¹ Already in this succinct but pregnant formulation is articulated the next virtue that is significant for my work: theory, whether avowedly or covertly, has practical consequences because it is itself a practice. As Collins puts it: “Critical social theory encompasses bodies of knowledge and sets of institutional practices” (xiv; emphasis added). I italicize institutional practices because we only seem to theorize alone, in a kind of silent soliloquy, when in fact every bit of theoretical furniture and apparatus is but a muted collective endeavor. To theorize is to engage in certain habitus within certain material and immaterial spaces: to theorize as a Marxist, for instance, means to be habituated to ask certain kinds of questions, from within a turning toward certain social loci. We can thus talk about the materiality of theory, a materiality that is both “constitutive” and “regulative.” These material presuppositions and effects, however, have effects on real social agents, which is why Collins adds to her definition of “critical social theory” the following: “institutional practices that actively grapple with central questions facing groups of people differently placed in specific political, social, and historical contexts characterized by injustice” (xiv). Theory is always partisan, especially when it avows that it is not. Critical theory, however, acquires its critical potency from its explicit and declared partisanship, advocacy, and interest. Critical theory, then, in Collins’s view aims to analyze a given social reality so as to disclose and name the sources of social inequality and injustice.

Critical social theory always has a practical, transformative, generative telos that is guided by injustice in its time and social locus. One immediate consequence of this way of thinking about critical social theory is that it becomes clear that part of critical social theory is to have to continuously map the shifting geography of social inequality. To unmask and pinpoint contemporary social injustice demands that the critical theorist be attentive to his or her own locus within the society from which and about which he or she theorizes. Collins calls this vigilance and geographical honesty a “self-defined standpoint” (47). Avowing one’s advocacy and partisanship demands that one name the locus from which one maps social injustice.

In Collins’s spirit, I would like to attempt to offer a survey of the geography of social injustice, in our society, at the dawn of a new century. I would argue that there are at the very least five key points of reference for any kind of critical social cartography of contemporary forms of inequality, marginalization, and impoverishment. First, as the 2010 Census established, Latinos have become the largest minority in the United States, accounting for 16 percent of the population. The largest demographic growth, furthermore, was due to the growth in the Latino population, 9.7 percent of the total population, as opposed to 4.9 percent non-Latino growth. In some states, the growth amounted to more than half of the total growth. Additionally, most of this Latino demographic growth took place along the West Coast and in the Southwest and historic South. This growth took place alongside two other important trends in U.S. demographics: There was a shift of the African American population from the North toward the South, reversing the great migration at the dawn of the 1900s, while there was a depopulation of Midwest cities. What has been called the Hispanization of the United States, but which I would call instead the “Latinization,” raises a series of critical theoretical issues. Latinos, in general, have a complex relation to race, one that is certainly very different from that most U.S. citizens have experienced. This vexed relationship to race is partly reflected in the ways in which the new census has had to grapple with the...