Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.

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.

Thus, gender ideology no only creates ides about femininity but it also shapes conceptions of masculinity.

Black women's feelings of responsibility for nurturing the children in their own extended family networks have stimulated a more generalized ethic of care where black women feel accountable to all the black community's children.

Despite long-standing claims by elites that Blacks, women, Latinos, and other similarly derogated groups in the United States remain incapable of producing the type of interpretive, analytical thought that is labeled theory in the West, powerful knowledges of resistance that toppled former social structures of social inequality repudiate this view. Members of these groups do in fact theorize, and our critical social theory has been central to our political empowerment and search for justice.

Far too many black men who praise their own mother feel less accounted to the mothers of their own children.

That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.