The ever-present issues of racism and sexism were the main focus of a speech by Patricia Hill-Collins on Monday night in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union.

Hill-Collins is a professor of African-American studies at the University of Cincinnati and author of “Black Feminist Thought.” She also has another book out and currently is writing a third.

Hill-Collins spoke to about 75 people, primarily women, about “Unnatural Hierarchies: Race, Class and American National Identity.”

She began by recognizing periods when social formations change and present a fundamental paradox.

Although America is the symbol of freedom in individual rights, she said group-based treatments lead to hierarchies.

Supporting her argument, she cited the popular role for today’s women, which includes balancing work and family. She also said even though the United States often is classified as the country of religious freedom, Christianity is presumed the “unwritten national religion.”

Hill-Collins also mentioned differential education in public schools. All children in public schools are supposed to receive the same education, yet the quality of education depends on the community, she said.

One of the most profound examples is race, she said.

“Unless the national identity can find a way to resolve the paradox, it will replicate past patterns,” she said.

Hill-Collins said the 1960s and ’70s were an era of optimism, but a backlash occurred in the ’80s and ’90s.

“We need to think about another way to talk about race,” she said. “In the ’80s we couldn’t talk about it because if we did, we would be racist.”

Although a lot of talk involving race has erupted in the past few years, people tend to avoid discussing systems of power, Hill-Collins said.

“I am very interested in the question of race and nation and how they construct each other,” she said. “I see race and nation working together in some very interesting ways.”

Collins said race and nation mutually construct on each other.

“Race is a system of hierarchy … We need to focus on race as a system of power,” she said.

She cited institutional power as the “new” racial segregation.

“Racial segregation is very deeply embedded in how we think about use of space in the U.S.,” she said. “It’s a general model of classifying things.”

Hill-Collins said an illusion of desegregation does exist, but as a difference of perception in the same social setting.

“It appears that there is much more mixing, but there is still a lot of segregation,” she said.

To support her theory, Hill-Collins referred to housing, education and employment.

She said an association of greatness with the white race is rampant in the education arena, and racially segregated labor markets continue to exist in the work force.

Hill-Collins also attributed racial segregation to disciplinary power, adding that social control exists through making a spectacle of someone to scare others and through surveillance.

“If you know you’re under surveillance you can really adjust your behavior,” she said. “To make it work, you can’t know when you’re being watched.”

Hill-Collins said the spectacle method is used more frequently in segregated settings, and surveillance is applied in integrated settings.

Hegemonic power involves “ideas that become so taken for granted, they are rarely questioned and come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time and operate through homogenous power,” Hill-Collins said.

She added that aside from race, hegemonic power is evident in store chains, on television and in families.

“There are certain conceptions of family with hegemonic power,” she said.

The typical family consists of a heterosexual married couple with children. People don’t classify other relationships, like homosexuals or single parents, as families, she said.

Hill-Collins’ last point involved everyday strategies of control, including marginalization, or when white people disregard black women.

She said whites “see race relations as a black responsibility.”