A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American womens movement beginning in the late 1960s. 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. 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. 12, No. Even our Black womens style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political. We decided at that time, with the addition of new members, to become a study group. We decided at that time, with the addition of new members, to become a study group. The work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our oppression. During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. 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. Feminism is, nevertheless, very threatening to the majority of Black people because it calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about our existence, i.e., that sex should be a determinant of power relationships. At an event in late April, 1979, Barbara Smith, with megaphone, protests nine murders of women of color that took place in the first months of the year. The first was that oppression on the basis of identity . We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. A combined anti-racist and anti-sexist position drew us together initially, and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capItalism. We must also question whether Lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of womens oppression, negating the facts of class and race. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE: The Combahee River Collective Statement, copyright 1978 by Zillah Eisenstein. 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. 20 (2018), pp. 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. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like interlocking, manifold, inroads and more. ITHAKA. 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 present it here, along with related scholarship from both the time period in which it was written, as well as current discussions. 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. 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. I had seen my father harassed by police, in Cincinnati, Ohio, for jaywalking. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. 239-249, Meridians, Vol. During our years together as a Black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. As the statement read: 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. 4. drew on their experiences in Black, male-dominated organizations. As they explained, 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. And they were doing even more than that: the Combahee Statement was also written to describe how race, gender, and sexual orientation were woven together in the lives of queer Black women. 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. Get your fix of JSTOR Dailys best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Identity politics originated from the need to reshape movements that had until then prioritized the monotony of sameness over the strategic value of difference. http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. How do we mobilize all of this energy and actually bring about fundamental political, social, and economic change?. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. Identity politics has become so untethered from its original usage that it has lost much of its original explanatory power. 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. Smith is skeptical about the longevity of this particular moment, as she has earned the right to be. Learn. We began functioning as a study group and also began discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication. Before looking at the recent development of Black feminism we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American womens continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. We had been reading about divisions within the feminist movement in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, and the emergence of a body of thought captured in the framework of Black feminism. The Combahee River Collective was a small organization, but it involved some of the luminaries of Black feminism: Barbara Smith and her twin sister, Beverly Smith, as well as Demita Frazier, Cheryl Clarke, Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Chirlane McCray, and Audre Lorde. Match. But her caution also betrays the hope and deep desire for radical change that all revolutionaries harbor. All rights reserved. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. Theoretically rich and strategically nimble, it imagined a course of politics that could take Black women from the margins of society to the center of a revolution. Still, hundreds of women have been active at different times during the three-year existence of our group. They are, of course, even more threatened than Black women by the possibility that Black feminists might organize around our own needs. 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. My mothers advanced degrees could not protect her from bankruptcy in 1982. Today, in the midst of the greatest wave of protest and social upheaval in more than a generation, books about racism, policing, and the Black Lives Matter movement top best-seller lists. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective. The Combahee Collective's 1977 "A Black Feminist Statement" was, and still is, a crucial statement of black feminism. hb```f``e`a` @V8OCH'2 19Qiq.&)L)Sa\@>s L95 J:pj]gkivud|8:8:GsGGCi$& y@g00* @, We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. Instead, they argued that Black womenand all oppressed peoplehad the right to form their own political agendas, because no one else would. Equality of men and women is something that cannot happen even in the abstract world. 350-354, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Meridians, Vol. Both are essential to the development of any life. 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. In her introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful Robin Morgan writes: In 2016, black activists founded The Movement of Black Lives to advocate for all black people more generally. Although we are in essential agreement with Marxs theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women. 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. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. connecting together (qui s'imbrique) manifold. saw themselves as socialists and as part of the broader left, but they understood that no mass movement for socialism could be organized without responding to the particular forms of oppression experienced by Black women, Chicana women, lesbians, single mothers, and so many other groups. The women of the C.R.C. 3, Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice System (Summer 2015), pp. More than a fifth of Black women live below the poverty line, but their lives are largely invisible. Those were fine things to act against and struggle for, but they felt like lightweight politics in contrast to the things that my nineteen-year-old self was concerned about: the U.S. presence in the Middle East, police brutality and racism, poverty and inequality. Protests of George Floyds Killing Transform Into a Global Movement. saw themselves as revolutionaries whose aspirations far exceeded womens rights: they aspired to the overthrow of capitalism. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever consIdered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that 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. Feminism is, nevertheless, very threatening to the majority of Black people because it calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about our existence, i.e., that sex should be a determinant of power relationships. Flashcards. The Combahee River Collective started its activities in 1974 and was committed to a non-hierarchical structure. 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. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. The Combahee River Collective Statement conceptualized the notion of intersectionalitythe idea that marginalization and oppression are experienced simultaneously in different, interlocking ways as a result of how systems of domination interact with people's identities. I had been a socialist since I was fourteen, and, in the groups that I had become active with, feminism was always painted as hostile to socialism. 3 (February 1974), pp. . Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters. They envisioned coalition politics on the basis of mutual solidarity, including a commitment to the struggles against sexism, heterosexism, racism, class oppression, exploitation, and imperialism. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 2023 Cond Nast. In A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion: One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white womens movement. ability, experience or even understanding. 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. It was mind-blowing! My other revelation came out of their insistence that Black feminism was necessary to clearly articulate the experiences of Black women. 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. Before becoming leader of communist China, Mao was an ardent library patron and then worked as a library assistant. we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ladylike and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. Summary: The Combahee River Collective. 81-100, Meridians, Vol. The C.R.C. What are the similarities between Truth's and the Combahee Collective's concerns? The material conditions of most Black women would hardly lead them to upset both economic and sexual arrangements that seem to represent some stability in their lives. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. Evictions and foreclosures in the U.S. could trigger a new wave of infection and illnessbut its not too late to act. Respond to the following prompts in 300+ words (total), with reference to the Module 2 texts: Both "Ain't I a Woman?" and "A Black Feminist Statement: The Combahee River Collective" make statements in response to exclusionary aspects of feminist activism in the 19th and 20th centuries respectively. 14, No. 3. Join our new membership program on Patreon today. In its earliest iteration, Black feminism was assumed to be radical because the class position of Black women, overwhelmingly, was at the bottom of society. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. from those groups was the explanatory power of their statement, which was first collected in Zillah Eisensteins anthology Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, in 1978. When I reached college, in the nineties, these same debates could be found animating womens-studies classes. At that time, when I first thought of collecting an oral history of the Combahee River Collective, which became the book How We Get Free, Senator Bernie Sanders was in the thick of a contentious Democratic Presidential primary. 20072023 Blackpast.org. In the sixties and seventies, fighting for the rights of queer people was considered radical activism. But Black women who tried to utilize public welfare so that they could spend more time caring for their children were demonized as freeloaders, even as white women who chose to work at home were celebrated for prioritizing their families over personal ambition. 1, No. gave us the political tools to understand the difference between bottom-up and top-down politics, and their distorted manifestation in the identity politics of today. Barbara Smith at a National Gay Rights March, 1993. Their point was a simple one: you cannot expect people to join your movement by telling them to put their particular issues on hold for the sake of some ill-defined unity at a later date. In a political moment when futile arguments claimed to pit race against class, and identity politics against mass movements, the C.R.C. 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. The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. There have always been Black women activistssome known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. The view is decidedly different from the top. BlackPast.org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and our EIN is 26-1625373. The value of men and women can be seen as in the value of gold and silverthey are not equal but both have great value. Your donation is fully tax-deductible. 4-5. [2] Wallace, Michele. As Smith put it, These people were looking at the situation and saying, What we have here is not working. We can obviously create a politics that is absolutely aligned with our own experiences as Black womenin other words, with our identities. Organizing around welfare and daycare concerns might also be a focus. During our years together as a Black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. [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. It celebrated the possibilities of a political coalition born out of solidarity among groups who recognized the need to be engaged in struggle. 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. Forego a bottle of soda and donate its cost to us for the information you just learned, and feel good about helping to make it available to everyone. 38, No. y~ ;`bz*,f-Fu\i [3]. "w- d4bJeR|oEj ')IwLDc8="zJ 8X!. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. 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. 27, No. Flashcards. 196-212, Jean Ait Belkhir, Race, Gender & Class Journal, The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. The Combahee River Ferry, also called the Combahee River Raid, was a military operation that took place over the River Combahee, South Carolina, in 1863. They realize that they might not only lose valuable and hardworking allies in their struggles but that they might also be forced to change their habitually sexist ways of interacting with and oppressing Black women. The influential Combahee River Collective statement, co-authored by Barbara Smith, expressed a radical, queer black feminist platform still relevant to expressions of black feminism today. 1-8, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 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. Demita Frazier had been a member of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, right up until the Chicago police helped to assassinate the Panther leader Fred Hampton, in 1969. They could not help her relax, work less, or be more present. Black Americans have always been drawn to radical and revolutionary politics as a salve for the diseased wound of racial oppression and the poverty and misery it creates. 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. Stemming out of growing disillusionments with mainstream feminism, the Collective was a Boston-based organisation of Black queer socialist activists. The Black feminist collectives 1977 statement has been a bedrock document for academics, organizers and theorists for 45 years. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. We have tried to think about the reasons for our difficulties, particularly since the white womens movement continues to be strong and to grow in many directions. 8XXANaA{s*ZQe(GCCM|+J_mCmI^tiPrLs:YfZ/&`7?2I!KRODf!;EM$X Ghpo:A0r# 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. How One Mothers Love for Her Gay Son Started a Revolution. 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. The genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism The C.R.C. But my mothers experiences were altogether different. 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. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. The statement is an important piece of feminist theory and description of black feminism (Balliet, pg. 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. We also decided around that time to become an independent collective since we had serious disagreements with NBFOs bourgeois-feminist stance and their lack of a clear politIcal focus. 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. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. For this month's 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. Rr_||2=?|,f]a]IWrYWs~qH(OSn4b$ yV_IU{L]HJ>l#)r<1-a/ %}:f4&-4qIQ >zx /w\p @0P' Problems in Organizing Black Feminists 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. How do those who have been the objects of scientific study and medical experimentation become the agents or the producers of scientific knowledge? She didnt know about the Volcker Shock and the recession that would follow. 4-5. 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. It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt throughout US political life today. Have a correction or comment about this article? JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. If black women were free, everyone . Black feminism made sense of my mothers life of work, her compulsory caretaking and debt. 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. 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. We had been reading about divisions within the feminist . 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. 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. The Combahee River Collective is devoted to fighting race, sex, and class oppression. Organizing around welfare and daycare concerns might also be a focus. We also decided around that time to become an independent collective since we had serious disagreements with NBFOs bourgeois-feminist stance and their lack of a clear politIcal focus. We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. "$JP 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.
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