the combahee river collective statement quizlet

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. 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. connected the exploitative tendency of capitalism to a range of oppressions that kept apart those with the most interest in coming together. But then I understood it differently, not just as a critical document in the canon of feminist literature or as a much-needed exposition of the origins of Black feminism. The Combahee River Collective formed in Boston, in 1974, during a period that regularly produced organizations that claimed the mantle of radical or revolutionary struggle. 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. The reaction of Black men to feminism has been notoriously negative. 1-17, Negro History Bulletin, Vol. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. If black women were free, everyone . 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. 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. 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. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. The work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our oppression. 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. There are no maps or predetermined paths that guarantee the success or failure of a movement. Reading the statement for the first time, two things struck me. 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. 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. 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. Get your fix of JSTOR Dailys best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free 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. !@9 .nosps5B{B>#@] 0qMpd 8|Fw |:bS1Z =0 endstream endobj 229 0 obj <>stream Their centering of Black women was not an exclusion of others with . disbanded, in 1980, Barbara Smith went on to play a critical role in the establishment of womens studies in colleges and universities, as well as in publishing. But they were not only reacting to the deficits they found in organizations led by white women and Black men. 159). 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. The genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism Vacations in the Soviet Union were hardly idylls spent with ones dearest. As Smith put it, These people were looking at the situation and saying, What we have here is not working. 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. The Strange Career of the Lady Possum of the New World, To Get Help for Sick Kids, Mothers Wrote to Washington, Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, About the American Prison Newspapers Collection, Submissions: American Prison Newspapers Collection. A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. 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. 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. Learn. 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. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. How do we mobilize all of this energy and actually bring about fundamental political, social, and economic change?. 22, No. document.getElementById( "ak_js_3" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); JSTOR Daily provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and other material. 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. The Revolutionary Practice of Black Feminisms We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. Demonstrations following the murder of Floyd enter their third week. As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. 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. 1100 Words5 Pages. Identity Politics: Friend or Foe? | Othering & Belonging Institute 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. 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. Module 2.docx - 1. What are the similarities between 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. 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. 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. 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. A small donation would help us keep this available to all. Help us keep publishing stories that provide scholarly context to the news. BlackPast.org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and our EIN is 26-1625373. 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. We began functioning as a study group and also began discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication. 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. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We have also done many workshops and educationals on Black feminism on college campuses, at womens conferences, and most recently for high school women. The Combahee River Collective Statement is believed to be the first text where the term identity politics is used. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. 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. Heres some of what has happened since they began. 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. Test. These were, in their view, the preconditions for a mass movement in which no ones issues were left behind. The "second wave" feminist movement fought for body . Photograph by Ellen Shub / Courtesy the Estate of Ellen Shub. 100, No. More than a fifth of Black women live below the poverty line, but their lives are largely invisible. 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. 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. 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. 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. y~ ;`bz*,f-Fu\i A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American womens movement beginning in the late 1960s. 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. 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. We decided at that time, with the addition of new members, to become a study group. How is the name of the group related to Harriet Tubman? 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. We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black womens lives as are the politics of class and race. we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. showed how to understand the relationship between race, class, and gender through the actual experiences of Black women. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. 8XXANaA{s*ZQe(GCCM|+J_mCmI^tiPrLs:YfZ/&`7?2I!KRODf!;EM$X Ghpo:A0r# saw themselves as revolutionaries whose aspirations far exceeded womens rights: they aspired to the overthrow of capitalism. 38, 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. 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. Smith served on the Albany city council from 2006 to 2013, and later worked in the Albany mayors office on issues related to inequality. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. 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. 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. Combahee River Collective Statement. 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. Monthly Review | A Black Feminist Statement In the statement, the authors described the concept of identity politics in the following way: 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. 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. PDF The Combahee River Collective Statement - Yale University 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. The Black feminist collectives 1977 statement has been a bedrock document for academics, organizers and theorists for 45 years. 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. 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. 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. 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. They are, of course, even more threatened than Black women by the possibility that Black feminists might organize around our own needs. We had been reading about divisions within the feminist . 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. One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white womens movement. 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. 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. They disbanded in 1980 due to internal disagreements. 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. The Combahee River Collective and Intersectionality in the Age of 13, No. Stemming out of growing disillusionments with mainstream feminism, the Collective was a Boston-based organisation of Black queer socialist activists. 50, No. Men are not equal to other men, i.e. There have always been Black women activistssome known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. The Combahee River Collective Statement: Annotated 155-191, Race, Gender & Class, Vol. Identity politics has become so untethered from its original usage that it has lost much of its original explanatory power. 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 foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt . It was years before I pulled those different strands of my mothers life together. 1-8, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 2 (2011), pp. Privacy Policy Contact Us All Rights Reserved. Match. Malcolm X made it plain: The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.. As black feminists, members struggle together with black men to fight racism, but against black men to fight sexism. 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. 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. Any concept, once it is released into the world, can take on new meanings when confronted with new problems. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black womens lives. The view is decidedly different from the top. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). March 24, 2022. 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. Of course, what comes next will depend on what those who constitute the movement do. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving correct political goals. 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 are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. 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 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 are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. 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. Thats what we meant by identity politics, that we have a right. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) by Combahee River Collective.