6, No. But we can take inspiration from the imaginative optimism of the Combahee Statement. 163-179, Feminist Studies, Vol. But the civil-rights revolution and concerted efforts by the political establishment created a different reality for a small number of African-Americans. 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. Monthly Review | A Black Feminist Statement 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. During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. 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. Rr_||2=?|,f]a]IWrYWs~qH(OSn4b$ yV_IU{L]HJ>l#)r<1-a/ %}:f4&-4qIQ >zx /w\p @0P' Demonstrations following the murder of Floyd enter their third week. It was one of, if not the first, documents to coin and define identity politics, and its descriptions of interlocking systems of oppression are integral to Kimberl Crenshaws concept of intersectionality. 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. Stemming out of growing disillusionments with mainstream feminism, the Collective was a Boston-based organisation of Black queer socialist activists. Men are not equal to other men, i.e. Reading the statement for the first time, two things struck me. Combahee River Collective Flashcards | Quizlet Module 2.docx - Respond to the following prompts in 300 JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. Statement Combahee River Collective We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. 3 (Autumn, 1980), pp. What distinguished the C.R.C. In 2016, black activists founded The Movement of Black Lives to advocate for all black people more generally. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. Combahee River Collective - Wikipedia 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. 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. I had to put it away. Combahee River Collective: Summary & History | StudySmarter 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. The first was its effort to combine socialist politics with feminism. 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? 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. 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. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. 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. Their centering of Black women was not an exclusion of others with . In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. 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. The overwhelming majority of Black women were working-class and were forced to labor both outside and inside their homes. As Smith put it, These people were looking at the situation and saying, What we have here is not working. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like interlocking, manifold, inroads and more. The overwhelming feeling that we had is that after years and years we had finally found each other. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black womens lives. 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 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. described how the myriad ways that Black women experienced oppression could translate into a radical rejection of the status quo. 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. 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. 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. 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. The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone. Was the Conspiracy That Gripped New York in 1741 Real? Evictions and foreclosures in the U.S. could trigger a new wave of infection and illnessbut its not too late to act. My other revelation came out of their insistence that Black feminism was necessary to clearly articulate the experiences of Black women. 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. Thats what we meant by identity politics, that we have a right. She founded the legendary Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, with Audre Lorde, in 1980. We just wanted to see what we had. In describing the distinct experiences of Black women who were lesbians, they pioneered what would eventually become known as intersectionalitythe idea that multiple identities can be constantly and simultaneously present within one persons body. Combahee River Collective Statement. hbbd``b`U@P: 1D8 @k2~$2012b`Mg . endstream endobj startxref 0 %%EOF 248 0 obj <>stream 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,. We were not being reductive, we were not being separatists, she said. A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American womens movement beginning in the late 1960s. How One Mothers Love for Her Gay Son Started a Revolution. We began functioning as a study group and also began discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication. It was years before I pulled those different strands of my mothers life together. 3, Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice System (Summer 2015), pp. 42, No. 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? 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. 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. They disbanded in 1980 due to internal disagreements. During the summer those of us who were still meeting had determined the need to do political work and to move beyond consciousness-raising and serving exclusively as an emotional support group. 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. A few years ago, Barbara Smith told me that she and her comrades believed that, by naming the group after the Combahee River Raid, they were both honoring Harriet Tubman and indicating that liberation required political action. Thus, the women of the C.R.C believed that, if Black women were successful in their struggles and movements, they would have an impact far beyond their immediate demands. 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 "second wave" feminist movement fought for body . Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving correct political goals. 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. 225 0 obj <> endobj 240 0 obj <>/Filter/FlateDecode/ID[<55A8DDF17D624C57A3DD9554302617BF><2BF3B81EF49545358296A73A72E810D6>]/Index[225 24]/Info 224 0 R/Length 78/Prev 307736/Root 226 0 R/Size 249/Type/XRef/W[1 2 1]>>stream Join our new membership program on Patreon today. 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. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. Since 1977, that term has been used, abused, and reconfigured into something foreign to its creators. 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. Mao Zedong: Reader, Librarian, Revolutionary? 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. 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. Analyzing the Combahee River Collective as a Social Movement . We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. 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. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening. 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. 1977 Both Truth and Combahee River Collective 's readings are interesting . 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. BlackPast.org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and our EIN is 26-1625373. It had never occurred to me that the framework of race was not nearly capacious enough to capture the particular ways that Black women experienced American society. We have also done many workshops and educationals on Black feminism on college campuses, at womens conferences, and most recently for high school women. 1. "$JP 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. 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. 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. I had seen feminism as the domain of white women primarily concerned with glass ceilings and access to abortion. 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. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. And every Black woman who came, came out of a strongly-felt need for some level of possibility that did not previously exist in her life. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR. Both are essential to the development of any life. 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. 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. 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. 1100 Words5 Pages. We have found that it is very difficult to organize around Black feminist issues, difficult even to announce in certain contexts that we are Black feminists. connecting together (qui s'imbrique) manifold. They fared no better in organizations led by white women, who, for the most part, could not understand how racism compounded the experiences of Black women, creating a new dimension of oppression. 2023 Cond Nast. The Combahee Statement obliterated that premise. 730-734, The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of African American Review (St. Louis University), Massachusetts Historical Review (MHR), Vol. 4. Barbara Smith at a National Gay Rights March, 1993. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) by Combahee River Collective. 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. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. 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. But the radicality of Black womens politics was based on their position at the bottom. 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. 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. 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. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. 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. May 28-29, 1851 The Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement. 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. What are the similarities between Truth's and the Combahee Collective's concerns? And, trust me, very few people agreed that we did have that right in the nineteen-seventies. [2] Wallace, Michele. Black History Boston: Combahee River Collective | Boston.gov 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. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. Match. Match. [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 . 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. 1-24, Off Our Backs, Vol. How do we mobilize all of this energy and actually bring about fundamental political, social, and economic change?. 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. We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 4-5. THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE: The Combahee River Collective Statement, copyright 1978 by Zillah Eisenstein. The term "identity politics" was first coined by Black feminist Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective in 1974. 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. 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. For the first Read MoreCombahee River Collective (1974-1980) We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. Here is the way male and female roles were defined in a Black nationalist pamphlet from the early 1970s: [2] [3] The Collective argued that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement were not addressing their particular needs as Black women and more specifically as Black . 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. 43, No. Malcolm X made it plain: The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. 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. 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. 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. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. Help us keep publishing stories that provide scholarly context to the news. 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. Many things have changed since the publication of the document, but many have not, and therein lies the problem that continues to pull people into the streets. 3/4, THE 1970s (FALL/WINTER 2015), pp. 113, No. In her introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful Robin Morgan writes: I havent the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest-power.
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