Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.
Patricia Hill CollinsRead
The role model approach to social change is no substitute for challenging unjust employment practices, educational policies and housing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Role models can inspire change, but real progress requires challenging systemic injustices directly.
Patricia Hill Collins emphasizes that while having role models can motivate individuals toward social change, it is not enough. True transformation in society necessitates directly confronting and addressing the unjust systems in employment, education, and housing that perpetuate inequality.
Themes
Social ChangeJusticeEqualityRole ModelsSystemic Injustice
In practice
Example use cases
During a community meeting about educational reform, highlighting this quote can inspire participants to look beyond symbolism and advocate for concrete changes.
More from Patricia Hill Collins
All quotes βOppressed 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
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.
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
We keep calling for accountability and reinvestment and a push for all of us to imagine a world where black people are not policed but instead supported and loved and cared for. Where our families can feel safe and inspired and protected.
Patrisse CullorsRead
Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.
Margaret SangerRead
In my own constituency, the benefit cap has had the effect of social cleansing: of people receiving benefit, but the benefit is capped; therefore, they can't meet the rent levels charged and are forced to move. It's devastating for children, devastating for the family and very bad for the community as a whole.
Jeremy CorbynRead
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
Co-operative enterprises provide the organisational means whereby a significant proportion of humanity is able to take into its own hands the tasks of creating productive employment, overcoming poverty and achieving social integration.
Boutros Boutros-GhaliRead
I began to realize that, in spite of great achievements in wealth and military prowess, the great powers of Europe have not yet succeeded in providing the greatest happiness of the vast majority of the people; and that the reformers in these European countries were working hard for a new social revolution.
Sun Yat-SenRead