Controlling images are powerful stereotypes about marginalized groups that are created and reinforced by systems of oppression. These perceptions of self and others limit authentic expression and help maintain existing hierarchies. 

The concept of controlling images originated in Patricia Hill Collins's Black feminist scholarship. In *Black Feminist Thought*, Collins examined images imposed on Black women, including the mammy, Jezebel, and welfare queen, as part of a larger system that naturalizes racialized and gendered domination. The concept connects cultural representation to material power: a devaluing story helps legitimize unequal treatment.

An early bridge into RCT appears in Maureen Walker and Jean Baker Miller's 2000 paper "Racial Images and Relational Possibilities". Jean Baker Miller then made controlling images central to her 2002 Work in Progress, "How Change Happens: Controlling Images, Mutuality, and Power". Miller credited Collins and described the concept as a valuable link between the social and the psychological.

Miller extended the lens to the social groupings a society creates and ranks. She argued that controlling images define what people are permitted to be and do, constrain the relationships available to them, and shape the relational images people form through experience. In her account, controlling images and relational images interact, but they are not the same: controlling images are culturally organized messages about groups, while relational images are the expectations and meanings people carry from relationships. Because controlling images narrow what seems possible, they can hold both privileged and marginalized people in prescribed places and make change feel impossible or forbidden.

Miller also brought the concept into the therapy room. She showed how controlling images can shape a client's view of the therapist, a therapist's view of the client, and therapists' expectations of themselves. She emphasized that people and communities hold truths that resist these falsities, and that telling the truth of marginalized experience reveals not only the lives of the people targeted but also the workings of the dominant group and the larger system.

In her newest Work in Progress, Harriet Schwartz returns to the role of dominant-group narratives in devaluing people and justifying exclusion. She identifies rhetoric about immigrants and related ICE raids under the current U.S. administration as a painful contemporary example. Schwartz explicitly situates Collins outside the RCT tradition while showing how her work strengthens RCT's longstanding insistence that human experience, relationship, and change cannot be understood apart from culture and power.

Choose one repeated label, story, or representation about a social group that you encounter. Work with an example where reflection is safe enough and where you can take responsibility for your own learning.

1. Name the image: What does the story claim or imply members of this group are like?
2. Trace the power: Who circulates the story, and what unequal treatment does it excuse or enable?
3. Notice the relationship: How might the image shape attention, empathy, credibility, fear, or distance?
4. Choose an interruption: Correct a claim, change your language, seek knowledge from accountable sources, challenge a policy, or support work led by the people most affected.

You can find some helpful ideas in Interrupting Whiteness in Social Justice Work: RCT Offers Us a Path