“How do we learn patriarchy?” Said authors Phillip Agnew and Marcus Littles for Nonprofit Quarterly. “That’s like asking how we learn to breathe. In our memories of Black boyhood, we can sense it everywhere. It was all around us all the time—sometimes overt, sometimes just below the surface. Our families were different in many ways, and our experiences unique. But there are patterns.”
The article analyzes the ways in which, “patriarchy is so ubiquitous and so devious that even people and organizations who oppose it in theory can end up colluding with it,” providing a framework for what dismantlement looks like.
“What does that look like? It looks like going to therapy and encouraging and supporting our colleagues in doing the same. It looks like reading Black feminist texts, discussing them with the people we work and organize with, and doing the hard work of making the words live and breathe in our work.”