Rumors that enslaved Black New Yorkers were planning a revolt spread across Manhattan even more quickly than fires for which they were being blamed. 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. 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. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. 43, No. 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. 3. 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. Combahee River Collective Statement. Gender was also an incomplete answer. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. 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. Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone. We present it here, along with related scholarship from both the time period in which it was written, as well as current discussions. 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. 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. 100, No. 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. 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. 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 ITHAKA. There are no maps or predetermined paths that guarantee the success or failure of a movement. 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. Do you find this information helpful? We dont have to do white feminism, we dont have to do patriarchal Black nationalismwe dont have to do those things. [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 . In the introduction these women state that "The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. 1/2, Woman: An Issue (Winter - Spring, 1972), pp. 21-43, Meridians, Vol. Most important, the C.R.C. March 24, 2022. Combahee River Collective Flashcards | Quizlet 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 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. 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. [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 . [1] This statement is dated April 1977. 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 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 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. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black womens lives. We began functioning as a study group and also began discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication. 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. 14, No. 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. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). 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.
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