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
Those of us raised in the Christian tradition need to choose to either see God in Jesus or to continue to let the Bible define God. Our tradition says that Jesus is God. Maybe we should act as if we think he is instead of worshipping a book. Maybe we should be brave enough to admit that we are compelled to either become blinded ideologues or we need to forthrightly pick and choose what we follow in the Bible. Most Christians do that anyway, many just don’t admit it.
Frank SchaefferRead
When you give, give from the place of the heart because it is the right thing to do, not the easy thing to do.
Suze OrmanRead
But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and polish ever more exotic surfaces, hyperboloidial and even stranger, eventually including what we must term ‘imaginary’ shapes (which some preferred to term invisible).
Thomas PynchonRead
The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.
Michael MooreRead
I have made myself what I am. And I would that I could make the red people as great as the conceptions of my own mind, when I think of the Great Spirit that rules over us all.
TecumsehRead
A saint is a person who behaves decently in a shockingly indecent society.
Kurt VonnegutRead