In the fall, when some members returned, we experienced several months of comparative inactivity and internal disagreements which were first conceptualized as a Lesbian-straight split but which were also the result of class and political differences. Evictions and foreclosures in the U.S. could trigger a new wave of infection and illnessbut its not too late to act. Identity politics has become so untethered from its original usage that it has lost much of its original explanatory power. We began functioning as a study group and also began discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication. The fact that individual Black feminists are living in isolation all over the country, that our own numbers are small, and that we have some skills in writing, printing, and publishing makes us want to carry out these kinds of projects as a means of organizing Black feminists as we continue to do political work in coalition with other groups. Eliminating racism in the white womens movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue. My mother died at fifty-two, fifteen years after she filed for bankruptcy; the chronic exhaustion she felt from work was masking the symptoms of an untreated and ultimately deadly case of lupus. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Flashcards. Rr_||2=?|,f]a]IWrYWs~qH(OSn4b$ yV_IU{L]HJ>l#)r<1-a/ %}:f4&-4qIQ >zx /w\p @0P' Teaching with Reveal Digitals American Prison Newspapers Collection, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, As Angela Davis points out in Reflections on the Black Womans Role in the Community of Slaves,. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.) Black feminists and many more Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. Currently we are planning to gather together a collectIon of Black feminist writing. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving correct political goals. The reaction of Black men to feminism has been notoriously negative. hTmO0+i%T/tEFCh)4U{Pl0Y%sXjbI-*FAb5LK k1iQ"oe##xIiIsNeQv~6_cq= 2J#VDsY. We have also done many workshops and educationals on Black feminism on college campuses, at womens conferences, and most recently for high school women. Eliminating racism in the white womens movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue. When, in the early eighties, my mother got burned out from haggling with less qualified white male administrators and a fancy career that was going nowhere fast, she started a house-cleaning business. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like interlocking, manifold, inroads and more. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. Module 2.docx - Respond to the following prompts in 300 Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective. Black Feminist Issues and Projects Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. 11, No. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per sei.e., their biological malenessthat makes them what they are. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. hb```f``e`a` @V8OCH'2 19Qiq.&)L)Sa\@>s L95 J:pj]gkivud|8:8:GsGGCi$& y@g00* @, Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters. My father left when I was two, and my mother took us to Dallas, where she worked as a reading specialist for the Dallas Independent School District. When I came back to the Combahee Statement, in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, I saw that its politics had the potential to make a way out of what felt like no way. The CRC made two key observations in their use of identity politics. It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt . [3] Mumininas of Committee for Unified Newark, Mwanamke Mwananchi (The Nationalist Woman), Newark, N.J., 1971, pp. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. 27, No. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. 730-734, The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of African American Review (St. Louis University), Massachusetts Historical Review (MHR), Vol. Illustration by Palesa Monareng; Source photograph by Vivien Killilea / MAKERS / Getty. Three of her brothers followed her to Dallas, and one, a Vietnam veteran, lived in our garage for a time, as he tried to jump-start his life. 38, No. The group broke from the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization, and named themselves after a daring Union Army raid, led by Harriet Tubman, to liberate seven hundred and fifty enslaved people in South Carolina. The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most Black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression. I had seen the everyday variety of racism in the U.S. that left most Black people with a bitter edge, at least those in my family. 113, No. In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. It made sense of her senseless death, just shy of the twenty-first century. For this months Annotations series, we chose the Combahee River Collective Statement, written in 1977 and first published in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, 1979. In her introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful Robin Morgan writes: drew on their experiences in Black, male-dominated organizations. To Jeanne Manford, it was just part of being a parent. Stemming out of growing disillusionments with mainstream feminism, the Collective was a Boston-based organisation of Black queer socialist activists. JSTOR, the JSTOR logo, and ITHAKA are registered trademarks of ITHAKA. ITHAKA. We discovered that all of us, because we were smart had also been considered ugly, i.e., smart-ugly. Smart-ugly crystallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop our intellects at great cost to our social lives. A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. 14, No. During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. In the 1970's African American women created the Combahee River Collective to address the unique struggles that African American women face in their day-to-day lives. As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us. They were also inspired by the national liberation and anti-colonial movements, from the Algerian struggle against the French occupation to the Vietnamese resistance to the American war. Smith told me, Many of the people in the Movement for Black Lives absolutely acknowledge that they are inspired by the politics of the Combahee River Collective and by the feminism of women of color, not just Black women. She was thinking of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Cheryl Clarke, and of the pioneering Chicana activists Cherre Moraga and Gloria Anzalda. It was mind-blowing! 43, No. the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women. Instead, popular culture and mainstream media outlets are fixated on Oprah Winfrey, Beyonc Knowles, and Michelle Obama, to whom they turn for insights into the experiences of Black women. Equally dismayed by the direction of the feminist movement, which they believed to be dominated by middle-class white women, and the suffocating masculinity in Black-nationalist organizations, they set out to formulate their own politics and strategies in response to their distinct experiences as Black women. Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. She founded the legendary Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, with Audre Lorde, in 1980. The sanctions In the Black and white communities against Black women thinkers is comparatively much higher than for white women, particularly ones from the educated middle and upper classes. Above all else, Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody elses may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters has ever been looked at before. The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. [1] [2] The Collective was instrumental in highlighting that the white feminist movement was not addressing their particular needs. 239-249, Meridians, Vol. Your donation is fully tax-deductible. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. We had a retreat in the late spring which provided a time for both political discussion and working out interpersonal issues. 3, Why We Cant Wait: (Re)Examining the Opportunities and Challenges for Black Women and Girls in Education (Summer 2016), pp. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice. When we first started meeting early in 1974 after the NBFO first eastern regional conference, we did not have a strategy for organizing, or even a focus. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody elses oppression. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression. 155-191, Race, Gender & Class, Vol. Much of what is meant by identity politics in its contemporary idiom is simply representationthe presence of Black, queer, gendered, and classed bodies with almost no attention paid to their political commitments. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). The first was that oppression on the basis of identity . There are no maps or predetermined paths that guarantee the success or failure of a movement. May 28-29, 1851 The Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement. 1-8, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. And, trust me, very few people agreed that we did have that right in the nineteen-seventies. Key concepts addressed in assigned readings. The post World War II generation of Black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of certain educational and employment options, previously closed completely to Black people. Both are essential to the development of any life. [3]. While my father believed that a revolution was within the grasp of those who fought hard enough to make it happen, my mother, who had studied English, French, and Spanish in college, was finishing her doctorate and raising me and my brother. 384-401. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. I was still annoyed by her absence and neglect when I was younger. document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. Their centering of Black women was not an exclusion of others with . Most important, the C.R.C. Although our economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalistic economy, a handful of us have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression. Because Black women were among the most marginalized people in this country, their political struggles brought them into direct conflict with the intertwined malignancies of capitalismracism, sexism, and poverty. If lynchings, police brutality, and rat-infested housing were the best that American democracy could offer Black Americans, then how bad could communism or socialism really be? We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess anyone of these types of privilege have. Although we were not doing political work as a group, individuals continued their involvement in Lesbian politics, sterilization abuse and abortion rights work, Third World Womens International Womens Day activities, and support activity for the trials of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, Joan Little, and Inz Garca. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). Terms in this set (20) interlocking. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. During our years together as a Black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. PDF The Combahee River Collective Statement - Yale University The Combahee River Collective Statement: Annotated To clarify, the woman said she was as much in solidarity with the women who cleaned her home as she was with white middle-class women like herself, who had also been trained to lower their horizons and expect less out of life. Identity Politics: Friend or Foe? | Othering & Belonging Institute Everything about themfrom whom you traveled with to what you atewas state determined. The Combahee River Collective was a Black Feminist Lesbian organization that was active between 1974 and 1980. Apparently, the sisterhood was powerful. [1] During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. As an early group member once said, We are all damaged people merely by virtue of being Black women. We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all Black women. It was so unlike anything I had ever read before in politics, and it clashed so violently with what I had come to believe about feminism and identity politics that I did not know how to integrate it into my activism. Thats right out of the Black feminist playbook.. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Some images used in this set are licensed under the Creative Commons through Flickr.com.Click to see the original works with their full license. Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. Solidarity was the bridge by which different groups of people could connect on the basis of mutual understanding, respect, and the old socialist edict that an injury to one was an injury to all. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice. We feel that it is absolutely essential to demonstrate the reality of our politics to other Black women and believe that we can do this through writing and distributing our work. We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows: (1) the genesis of contemporary Black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics; (3) the problems in organizing Black feminists, including a brief herstory of our collective; and (4) Black feminist issues and practice. Learn. | Columbia Journal of Race and Law But the civil-rights revolution and concerted efforts by the political establishment created a different reality for a small number of African-Americans. No one had the right to strip socialism and its rootedness in collectivity, democracy, and human fulfillment from Black women, or the Black radical tradition. He is the leader of the house/nation because his knowledge of the world is broader, his awareness is greater, his understanding is fuller and his application of this information is wiser After all, it is only reasonable that the man be the head of the house because he is able to defend and protect the development of his home Women cannot do the same things as menthey are made by nature to function differently. It was not until long after her death that I saw the composite portrait of a single Black mother, raising two kids with a bankruptcy scuttling her credit, a perpetually faulty car draining her bank account, and a broad network of family members to care for. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. Summary: The Combahee River Collective. There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black Feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black womens lives. During our first summer when membership had dropped off considerably, those of us remaining devoted serious discussion to the possibility of opening a refuge for battered women in a Black community. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) by Combahee River Collective. 159). Combahee River Collective Statement Flashcards | Quizlet [2]. 21-43, Meridians, Vol. We had always shared our reading with each other, and some of us had written papers on Black feminism for group discussion a few months before this decision was made. He is the leader of the house/nation because his knowledge of the world is broader, his awareness is greater, his understanding is fuller and his application of this information is wiser After all, it is only reasonable that the man be the head of the house because he is able to defend and protect the development of his home Women cannot do the same things as menthey are made by nature to function differently. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. Instead, they argued that Black womenand all oppressed peoplehad the right to form their own political agendas, because no one else would. Identity politics originated from the need to reshape movements that had until then prioritized the monotony of sameness over the strategic value of difference. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. It is a living thing. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. Learn. 50, No. believed that another world was possible, one in which Black women, and thus all of humanity, were freed from systems of oppression and exploitation, as the result of a collective struggle that reached down to the roots of the problems we face. Reading the statement for the first time, two things struck me. At the beginning of 1976, when some of the women who had not wanted to do political work and who also had voiced disagreements stopped attending of their own accord, we again looked for a focus. Organizing around welfare and daycare concerns might also be a focus. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. What was the Combahee River Collective and what were the politics and vision advanced by the group, The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. We feel that it is absolutely essential to demonstrate the reality of our politics to other Black women and believe that we can do this through writing and distributing our work. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression. They stand in contrast to the Black poor and working class, who live in veritable police states, with low-wage work, poor health care, substandard and expensive housing, and an acute sense of insecurity. We must realize that men and women are a complement to each other because there is no house/family without a man and his wife. As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. [3]. The overwhelming majority of Black women were working-class and were forced to labor both outside and inside their homes. Many of us were active in those movements (Civil Rights, Black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives Were greatly affected and changed by their ideologies, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. We also were contacted at that time by socialist feminists, with whom we had worked on abortion rights activities, who wanted to encourage us to attend the National Socialist Feminist Conference in Yellow Springs. Combahee was never separatist. This would, of course, have been a rejection of the solidarity at the heart of the C.R.C.s politics. 13, No. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknownwho have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. This document was one of the earliest explorations of the intersection of multiple oppressions, including racism and heterosexism. Heres some of what has happened since they began. The post World War II generation of Black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of certain educational and employment options, previously closed completely to Black people. In A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion: We exists as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our strugglebecause, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world. 571-582, By: Leslie Bow, Avtar Brah, Mishuana Goeman, Diane Harriford, Analouise Keating, Yi-Chun Tricia Lin, Laura Prez, Becky Thompson, Zenaida Peterson, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Kristen A. Kolenz, Krista L. Benson, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Shari M. Huhndorf, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. We just wanted to see what we had. We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We might, for example, become involved in workplace organizing at a factory that employs Third World women or picket a hospital that is cutting back on already inadequate heath care to a Third World community, or set up a rape crisis center in a Black neighborhood. We reprint that version here in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of its publication by Monthly Review Press. [1] During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. But they were not only reacting to the deficits they found in organizations led by white women and Black men. An example of this kind of revelation/conceptualization occurred at a meeting as we discussed the ways in which our early intellectual interests had been attacked by our peers, particularly Black males. As it was explained to me, feminists saw the world as divided between men and women and not between classes. March 24, 2022. All of this stood in stark contradiction to what, as a young person, I had understood feminism to be. The Revolutionary Practice of Black Feminisms 1, No. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. 4, Democratic Theory (Autumn, 2007), pp. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black womens lives. As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us. their name based off of the Combahee River raid of 1863 led by Harriet Tubman. 22, No. As Angela Davis points out in Reflections on the Black Womans Role in the Community of Slaves, Black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. It was years before I pulled those different strands of my mothers life together.
