Introduction

Beginning with Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) and the series of studies leading up to it, Patricia Hill Collins has developed a highly original and distinctive position in Black feminist theorizing in particular and the critical study of race and racism more generally. As the participants in this roundtable indicate, Black Sexual Politics (2005) both builds upon this body of work and extends it in new directions. It also reflects the changing circumstances of African American life over the past score of years. With these matters in mind, I attempt to set a context for the discussion that follows by providing a sketch of our difficult times; by bringing forward certain of Collins's major themes, as they reflect these historical circumstances; and by offering a brief analysis of the ways in which racialized preoedipal and oedipal dynamics help to anchor the stereotypes and social roles that Collins so helpfully elucidates.

Shanette Harris begins her contribution to the roundtable by invoking W. E. B. Du Bois's conception of double-consciousness, the splitting of African American selfhood that results from seeing oneself reflected in and refracted through the veil of White prejudice and misperception. The veil in turn signifies the color line that Du

Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), famously characterized as the problem of the 20th century.

There are those who believe, or at least would have us believe, that problem has been solved. The color line is no longer clearly demarcated, as it once was, by segregationist law and Jim Crow practice, and the preachers of outright White supremacy have been pushed from the center to the margins of American public discourse. If we characterize the previously existing situation as one of colonialism and internal colonialism, then the present period is post-colonial; or if we focus on the emancipatory struggles that came to fruition in Brown v. Board of Educ