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. 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. the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women. Henrietta Lacks and the Debate Over the Ethics of Bio-Medical Research, African American History: Research Guides & Websites, Global African History: Research Guides & Websites, African American Scientists and Technicians of the Manhattan Project, Envoys, Diplomatic Ministers, & Ambassadors, Foundation, Organization, and Corporate Supporters. 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. In 2016, as the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee Statement approached, I realized that it would be an opportunity to draw attention back to the document and its astounding prescience and analysis, and to complicate a stilted and unsatisfying national discussion about who the real inheritors were of socialist politics in the United States. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. 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. 190-222, African American Review, 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. 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. described how the myriad ways that Black women experienced oppression could translate into a radical rejection of the status quo. drew on their experiences in Black, male-dominated organizations. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black womens lives. 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. 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. 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. In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Get your fix of JSTOR Dailys best stories in your inbox each Thursday. 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. She and my father met in high school, dated through college, and eventually landed in graduate school, at SUNY Buffalo, in the early nineteen-seventies. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. How is the name of the group related to Harriet Tubman? In this way, the C.R.C. I kept coming back to the C.R.C.s basic claim: 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. Photograph by Ellen Shub / Courtesy the Estate of Ellen Shub. The women of the C.R.C. [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. I had seen feminism as the domain of white women primarily concerned with glass ceilings and access to abortion. 81-100, Meridians, Vol. hbbd``b`U@P: 1D8 @k2~$2012b`Mg . endstream endobj startxref 0 %%EOF 248 0 obj <>stream 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 A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, Michele Wallace arrives at this conclusion: Match. 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. It celebrated the possibilities of a political coalition born out of solidarity among groups who recognized the need to be engaged in struggle. 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. Stemming out of growing disillusionments with mainstream feminism, the Collective was a Boston-based organisation of Black queer socialist activists. 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. 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. Statement Combahee River Collective We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.) 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. 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. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. 163-179, Feminist Studies, Vol. The claims that socialism was for white people were an affront to a long lineage of Black communists and socialists here in the United States. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. Men are not equal to other men, i.e. 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. Both are essential to the development of any life. 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 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. 4, Democratic Theory (Autumn, 2007), pp. It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt throughout US political life today. 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. 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. It was years before I pulled those different strands of my mothers life together. 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. 6, No. What are the similarities between Truth's and the Combahee Collective's concerns? 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. Here is the way male and female roles were defined in a Black nationalist pamphlet from the early 1970s: We understand that it is and has been traditional that the man is the head of the house. How do we mobilize all of this energy and actually bring about fundamental political, social, and economic change?. 2, Harriet Tubman: A Legacy of Resistance (2014), pp. 8XXANaA{s*ZQe(GCCM|+J_mCmI^tiPrLs:YfZ/&`7?2I!KRODf!;EM$X Ghpo:A0r# JSTOR, the JSTOR logo, and ITHAKA are registered trademarks of ITHAKA. 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. 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. [2] Wallace, Michele. A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white womens movement. 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. 20072023 Blackpast.org. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. [3] They are perhaps best known for developing the Combahee River Collective Statement,[4] a key document in the history of contemporary Black feminism and the development of the concepts of identity as used among political organizers and social theorists.[5][6]. We have also done many workshops and educationals on Black feminism on college campuses, at womens conferences, and most recently for high school women. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. 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. The C.R.C. 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. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. 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. 1977 Both Truth and Combahee River Collective 's readings are interesting . 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. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. 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. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. 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. We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. 164-189, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. 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. How do those who have been the objects of scientific study and medical experimentation become the agents or the producers of scientific knowledge? As black feminists, members struggle together with black men to fight racism, but against black men to fight sexism. 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. 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. 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. The C.R.C. But the radicality of Black womens politics was based on their position at the bottom. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.) 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. This document was one of the earliest explorations of the intersection of multiple oppressions, including racism and heterosexism. 1. 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. During our years together as a Black feminist collective we have experienced success and defeat, joy and pain, victory and failure. Before becoming leader of communist China, Mao was an ardent library patron and then worked as a library assistant. Problems in Organizing Black Feminists 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. 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. 3, Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice System (Summer 2015), pp. The Combahee River Collective Statement appeared as a movement document in April 1977. 1, No. All rights reserved. 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. Flashcards. 1-24, Off Our Backs, Vol. advances at the expense of someone or something (perces), the methods and actions taken to accomplish strategies, the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce, supposedly; purportedly; allegedly (apparemment), related to jobs not requiring physical labor, something that discourages or prevents a certain action, London Bridge is falling down - Meaning behin. During the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, she served as a surrogate for Bernie Sanders. 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. 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. 2 (2011), pp. 11, No. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. Learn. In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. In the reality of organizing, these tensions manifested themselves in white womens desire to focus their organizing on abortion rights, while Black feminists argued for the broader framework of reproductive justice, which included the struggle against forced sterilizations of Black and brown women. connecting together (qui s'imbrique) manifold. 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. 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. 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 made sense of her senseless death, just shy of the twenty-first century. The first was that oppression on the basis of identity . 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. What distinguished the C.R.C. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. 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. 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. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR. [3] Mumininas of Committee for Unified Newark, Mwanamke Mwananchi (The Nationalist Woman), Newark, N.J., 1971, pp. 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. Analyzing the Combahee River Collective as a Social Movement . We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. [3]. 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. Demonstrations following the murder of Floyd enter their third week. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black womens lives. 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. I had seen my father harassed by police, in Cincinnati, Ohio, for jaywalking. 2-3, Hypatia, Vol. 1, No. In a political moment when futile arguments claimed to pit race against class, and identity politics against mass movements, the C.R.C.
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