Thats right out of the Black feminist playbook.. 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. What distinguished the C.R.C. In A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion: The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per sei.e., their biological malenessthat makes them what they are. Enter the Combahee River Collective. 38, No. 3, Why We Cant Wait: (Re)Examining the Opportunities and Challenges for Black Women and Girls in Education (Summer 2016), pp. 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. 3 (February 1974), pp. We began functioning as a study group and also began discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication. We dont have to do white feminism, we dont have to do patriarchal Black nationalismwe dont have to do those things. Wallace is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic isolation most of us face. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. We publish articles grounded in peer-reviewed research and provide free access to that research for all of our readers. 6-7. Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free 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. If the 1960s was America's decade of mass mobilisation, the 1970s perhaps saw the greatest explosion of groups clambering for their rights to simply exist. 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. 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. After the C.R.C. 27, No. 42, No. We need to think about things in a different way. And who better to do that than feminists of color who are queer and on the left? She added, One of the signs to me that feminist-of-color politics are influencing this moment is the multiracial, multiethnic diversityand not just racial and ethnic, but every kind of diversityof the people who are in the streets now. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. 81-100, Meridians, Vol. [3] They are perhaps best known for developing the Combahee River Collective Statement, [4] a key . ITHAKA. | Columbia Journal of Race and Law The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. More generally, Black men dominated the leadership of the organized Black left. During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. Our development must also be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of Black people. When I was seven, I saw my father jump in to stop a group of white teen-agers from threatening my older brother, only to have the police blame him for the altercation. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. During our years together as a Black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. The statement is an important piece of feminist theory and description of black feminism (Balliet, pg. 1. 43, No. 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. So we asserted it anyway.. As they put it, 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.. 5, No. The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. But we can take inspiration from the imaginative optimism of the Combahee Statement. Of course, what comes next will depend on what those who constitute the movement do. 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. In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Smith is skeptical about the longevity of this particular moment, as she has earned the right to be. Identity politics has become so untethered from its original usage that it has lost much of its original explanatory power. In her introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful Robin Morgan writes: We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. Statement Combahee River Collective We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. Black History Boston: Combahee River Collective | Boston.gov saw themselves as revolutionaries whose aspirations far exceeded womens rights: they aspired to the overthrow of capitalism. HTKo0>!0`PzN6WK$i:$%>>%O/Kp}XfAi8;84q0~23:\B. 1 / 2. The eugenics programs of the early twentieth century continued into the nineteen-seventies, as tens of thousands of women in the United States were subjected to sterilization procedures without their informed consent. 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. Equality of men and women is something that cannot happen even in the abstract world. Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that we women use to struggle against our 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. In this section we will discuss some of the general reasons for the organizing problems we face and also talk specifically about the stages in organizing our own collective. Problems in Organizing Black Feminists 3, Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice System (Summer 2015), pp. 3/4, SOLIDARITY (FALL/WINTER 2014), pp. 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. During the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, she served as a surrogate for Bernie Sanders. A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American womens movement beginning in the late 1960s. 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. 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. Racism alone could not explain what killed my mother. I first encountered the Combahee River Collective Statement in a women's-studies class, my second year of college at SUNY Buffalo. Created by. 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. Wallace is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of Black feminists position, particularly in her allusion to the nearly classic isolation most of us face. 428-447, The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. PDF The Combahee River Collective Statement - Yale University Match. Many Black women have a good understanding of both sexism and racism, but because of the everyday constrictions of their lives, cannot risk struggling against them both. 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. Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and I970s. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. 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. We now have language, we have an analysis of whats going on with the prison-industrial complex, with mass incarceration, with police brutality, with extrajudicial murderswe have that, and we have bases of operation, because there are definitely Black Lives Matter organizations in various cities around the country. She continued, But the question for me is: Whats next? We present it here, along with related scholarship from both the time period in which it was written, as well as current discussions. The Black women of the C.R.C. During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to 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. @B)UH3Qd`-2 HCY=\4D-' 2] endstream endobj 226 0 obj <> endobj 227 0 obj <> endobj 228 0 obj <>stream To Jeanne Manford, it was just part of being a parent. Terms in this set (20) interlocking. Flashcards. connected the exploitative tendency of capitalism to a range of oppressions that kept apart those with the most interest in coming together. Reading the statement for the first time, two things struck me. 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. 164-189, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. The CRC made two key observations in their use of identity politics. [3] Mumininas of Committee for Unified Newark, Mwanamke Mwananchi (The Nationalist Woman), Newark, N.J., 1971, pp. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political . No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black womens lives. Identity politics originated from the need to reshape movements that had until then prioritized the monotony of sameness over the strategic value of difference. 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. 52-71, Feminist Studies, Vol. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE: The Combahee River Collective Statement, copyright 1978 by Zillah Eisenstein. 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. 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. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The final, definitive version was published in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (Monthly Review Press, 1979), 362-72. 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. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. 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. ability, experience or even understanding. One of our members did attend and despite the narrowness of the ideology that was promoted at that particular conference, we became more aware of the need for us to understand our own economic situation and to make our own economic analysis. 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. 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. There is a very low value placed upon Black womens psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. ability, experience or even understanding. 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. 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. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. Match. 6-7. The women of the C.R.C. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. We hope you find it a valuable resource for yourself, and for students. %PDF-1.6 % Flashcards. The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. Was the Conspiracy That Gripped New York in 1741 Real? To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. A good portion of the tension was generated by wild and unfounded assertions that socialism and the spoils of social democracy were only of interest to white people. described how the myriad ways that Black women experienced oppression could translate into a radical rejection of the status quo. But her caution also betrays the hope and deep desire for radical change that all revolutionaries harbor. 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. More than a fifth of Black women live below the poverty line, but their lives are largely invisible. 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. 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. 350-354, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Meridians, Vol. This intersectional group was created because there was a sense that both the feminist movement or civil rights movement didn't reflect the particular needs of Black women and lesbians. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving correct political goals. Analyzing the Combahee River Collective as a Social Movement . Black womens extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. pioneered the notion of identity politics, perhaps one of the most controversial and misunderstood terms in all of U.S. politics. As Smith put it, These people were looking at the situation and saying, What we have here is not working. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. Instead, I read it as a powerful intervention for the left as a whole. Stemming out of growing disillusionments with mainstream feminism, the Collective was a Boston-based organisation of Black queer socialist activists. Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. 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. Smith served on the Albany city council from 2006 to 2013, and later worked in the Albany mayors office on issues related to inequality. 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. After a period of months of not meeting, we began to meet again late in the year and started doing an intense variety of consciousness-raising. 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. How One Mothers Love for Her Gay Son Started a Revolution. But they were not only reacting to the deficits they found in organizations led by white women and Black men. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. What We Believe "A Black Feminist Statement" by the Combahee, Feminist Theory, the body and the Disabled Fi. 1-17, Negro History Bulletin, Vol. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. 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. It was years before I pulled those different strands of my mothers life together. 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. 2 (2011), pp. The first was that oppression on the basis of identity . 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. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. In a political moment when futile arguments claimed to pit race against class, and identity politics against mass movements, the C.R.C. ThePennsylvaniaMagazineofHistoryandBiography, Combahee River Collective Statement: A Fortieth Anniversary Retrospective, Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves, "One Great Bundle of Humanity": Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), Missing in Action Ida B. 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. 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. As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse by men. We reprint that version here in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of its publication by Monthly Review Press. For example, 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. 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. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.) 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 quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone. 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. Summary: The Combahee River Collective | ipl.org 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. In 2016, black activists founded The Movement of Black Lives to advocate for all black people more generally. 11, No. Sociological analysis of social movements has progressed dialectically, each new theory building off and in contrast to what previously existed, whilst what previously existed is modified as newer theories bring up relevant new ideas. Black women were at the helm of the growing Black Lives Matter movement, and they, too, were gravitating to the politics of the C.R.C. 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. 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. The work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our oppression. Illustration by Palesa Monareng; Source photograph by Vivien Killilea / MAKERS / Getty. To be honest, I didnt know what to do with the Combahee Statement. 113, No. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. We have also done many workshops and educationals on Black feminism on college campuses, at womens conferences, and most recently for high school women.