Quote by Patricia Hill Collins: “Silence is not the absence of power but its most effective exercise.”

Forcing others into silence — by making it too dangerous or costly for them to speak — is one of the most powerful things you can do. True power does not need to shout; it controls by making dissent impossible, invisible, or too costly to attempt.

Collins published her influential essay 'Learning from the Outsider Within' in Social Problems in 1986, theorizing Black women's position as simultaneously inside dominant institutions and outside their value systems. She was developing the framework that would become Black Feminist Thought, published four years later.

American sociologist and scholar whose 1990 work Black Feminist Thought synthesized intersectional theory and Black women's intellectual traditions. Her framework of the matrix of domination transformed feminist sociology and the study of race, class, and gender.