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According to Collins in her essay “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Black women have decrease White power by working in the households of White families as domestic workers. Black women have made an ingenious use of their “marginality” by using their outsider within status to formulate their own standpoint. Collins points out three key points: Black women’s self-definition and self-valuation, the interlocking nature of oppression, and importance of African American culture.

Black feminist thought describes and explains different observations and understanding about Afro-American womanhood. Black women’s image is associated with many stereotypes, usually negative, which form part of their self-definition and self-evaluation work to replace that stereotypical image with authentic Black female images. Self-definition and self-valuation is very important for Black women can value their own standpoint and to break down the psychological oppression imposed by white people.

Black women suffer a double oppression: for being women and for being Black. Sojourner Truth explains that even when Black men get their freedom and their rights does not mean that Black women can enjoy the same privileges because they will be still oppressed by Black men. It is this oppression that makes their standpoint essential in creating Black Feminist theory and understanding their reality. Collins also speaks the sexist and racist ideologies that predominate in treating dominated groups (the “others”), when they compare or see Black women as obstinate mules, which make the harder work and get beat for their masters, and white women as obedient dogs, which are closer to the master and he let them stay in the house. Finally, studying Afro-American women’s culture result very interesting because there is a kind of sisterhood between them that reinforces their unit as a group that have suffered discriminations, abuses and oppression for a long time.