Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.
Patricia Hill CollinsRead
To maintain their power, dominant groups create and maintain a popular system of 'commonsense' ideas that support their right to rule. In the United States, hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are often so pervasive that it is difficult to conceptualize alternatives to them, let alone ways of resisting the social practices that they justify.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote discusses how dominant groups impose their belief systems to legitimize their power and hinder alternative viewpoints.
Patricia Hill Collins highlights the mechanisms by which powerful groups maintain their dominance through the establishment of widely accepted 'commonsense' ideas that reinforce their authority. These ideologies, which encompass race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, are so ingrained in the social fabric of the United States that they often go unquestioned, making it challenging for people to envision alternative ways of thinking or to resist the social norms that these beliefs perpetuate.
Themes
PowerDominanceIdeologyCommonsenseHegemonyResistance
In practice
Example use cases
During a seminar on social justice, this quote can be used to illustrate how systemic beliefs shape societal views.
More from Patricia Hill Collins
All quotes →Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups.
Patricia Hill CollinsRead
The role model approach to social change is no substitute for challenging unjust employment practices, educational policies and housing.
Patricia Hill CollinsRead
Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly.
Patricia Hill CollinsRead
Under the color-blind ideology of the new racism, Blackness must be SEEN as evidence for the alleged color blindness that seemingly characterizes contemporary economic opportunity.
Patricia Hill CollinsRead
Similar quotes
A fly is as untamable as a hyena.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.
Joseph CampbellRead
Men trust their ears less than their eyes.
HerodotusRead
First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynRead
[H]owever weak our country may be, I hope we shall never sacrifice our liberties.
Alexander HamiltonRead
I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up — many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.
Neil Degrasse TysonRead