Commodity In Patricia Hill Collins's Another Kind Of Public Education

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In the book “Another Kind of Public Education,” Patricia Hill Collins discusses a concept that black men and women’s bodies are commodities. First we need to understand why she coins the term commodity to describe this concept. Commodity, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary is, “something that is bought and sold; something or someone that is useful or valued.” Therefore, when Collins uses the term commodity, she was not just writing about them “being bought and sold on a global market”, she was talking about social blackness and how it ties in with capitalism, consumerism, the prison industry, the mass incarceration rate of black men, the “lockdown” of black youth in popular culture, black culture, hypersexualization of African Americans, …show more content…

These products, these commodities, are placed in places where a majority of African American youth would be/see, “the placement of the product in small stores in African American neighborhoods, the ways in which the can of Pimp Juice looks like a can of beer, and the introduction of sports energy drinks in general all reflect the need to expand consumer markets,” (Collins 2009). Another piece of evidence she provides is the prison system. She details on how black men 's commodified bodies are used as “raw materials” for this industry, “It is very simple- no prisoners, no jobs for all the ancillary industries that service this growth industry. Because prisons express little interest in rehabilitating prisoners, they need a steady supply of bodies,” (Collins 2009). She also writes about how black men who have citizenship rights cannot be be coerced into a low pay job, so they have a limited amount of jobs they could do, so most get trapped into the system that was set up to help fail …show more content…

But, what Collins failed to realize is Latinx/Mexican people are put into this massive group/commodity that is “bought and sold on a global market” as well, especially Latina/Mexican women and girls. This book was focused on another type of public education, hence the title. She did not stay specific with African Americans, in fact she went back and forth. Therefore, when she discussed this commodity, I fully expected her to to include Latinx/Mexican people, but she did not. Especially since when you see anything from the Latinx/Mexican culture in our media, you see sexualized men and especially women, for instance, Sofia Vergara in the tv series Modern

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