Alone: Black Socialist Feminism and the Combahee River Collective 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. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. It is a living thing. 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. 11, No. Our development must also be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of Black people. 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. Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and I970s. The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most Black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression. 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. These were hardly doctrinaire disputes. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per sei.e., their biological malenessthat makes them what they are. 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. 4, Commemorative Issue: 50 Years of AAR (Winter 2017), 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. hb```f``e`a` @V8OCH'2 19Qiq.&)L)Sa\@>s L95
J:pj]gkivud|8:8:GsGGCi$& y@g00* @, We publish articles grounded in peer-reviewed research and provide free access to that research for all of our readers. We began functioning as a study group and also began discussing the possibility of starting a Black feminist publication. It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt throughout US political life today. Their centering of Black women was not an exclusion of others with . document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. Support JSTOR Daily! "w- d4bJeR|oEj
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8X!. 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. mammy, matriarch, Sapphire, whore, bulldagger), let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, Indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during four centuries of bondage in the Western hemisphere. 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. [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 . 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 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. !@9
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1-17, Negro History Bulletin, Vol. Match. A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American womens movement beginning in the late 1960s. As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. saw themselves as revolutionaries whose aspirations far exceeded womens rights: they aspired to the overthrow of capitalism. 2023 Cond Nast. 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. 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. Before becoming leader of communist China, Mao was an ardent library patron and then worked as a library assistant. Instinctively, many of us turn to history as a way to grasp some frame of reference. 384-401. 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. 1977 Both Truth and Combahee River Collective 's readings are interesting . Analyzing the Combahee River Collective as a Social Movement . Reading the statement for the first time, two things struck me. We just wanted to see what we had. 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. 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. 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. 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. Here is the way male and female roles were defined in a Black nationalist pamphlet from the early 1970s: We had a retreat in the late spring which provided a time for both political discussion and working out interpersonal issues. 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. 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. Men are not equal to other men, i.e. HTKo0>!0`PzN6WK$i:$%>>%O/Kp}XfAi8;84q0~23:\B. It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt . 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. We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. 5, No. Vacations in the Soviet Union were hardly idylls spent with ones dearest. Currently we are planning to gather together a collectIon of Black feminist writing. The Combahee River Collective Statement appeared as a movement document in April 1977. The Combahee River Collective was a Black Feminist Lesbian organization that was active between 1974 and 1980. [3]. 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. 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.
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May 28-29, 1851 The Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement. Thats right out of the Black feminist playbook.. As it was explained to me, feminists saw the world as divided between men and women and not between classes. 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. 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. The overwhelming feeling that we had is that after years and years we had finally found each other. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. Both of these articles talk about black women 's rights in the 19 th and 20 th centuries talking about topics of racism and sexism . Illustration by Palesa Monareng; Source photograph by Vivien Killilea / MAKERS / Getty. 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 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. All rights reserved. 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. 27, No. 38, No. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. The C.R.C. 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. 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. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); 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. 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. As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse by men. 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. As Smith put it, These people were looking at the situation and saying, What we have here is not working. 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. I first encountered the Combahee River Collective Statement in a womens-studies class, my second year of college at SUNY Buffalo. 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. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. Statement Combahee River Collective We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. The overwhelming majority of Black women were working-class and were forced to labor both outside and inside their homes. 1/2, Woman: An Issue (Winter - Spring, 1972), pp. 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. The C.R.C. The women of the C.R.C. 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. Mao Zedong: Reader, Librarian, Revolutionary? 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. 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. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. 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 my Intro to Womens Studies class, one white woman, who said she was from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, chafed at what she described as the divisiveness of Black feminism. 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. 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. Join our new membership program on Patreon today. Protests of George Floyds Killing Transform Into a Global Movement. The women of the C.R.C. Wells, the NAACP, and the Historical Record, The Interstitial Politics of Black Feminist Organizations, The Modern Mammy and the Angry Black Man: African American Professionals' Experiences with Gendered Racism in the Workplace, Talking Back: The Perceptions and Experiences of Black Girls Who Attend City High School, Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality, notes prompted by the national black feminist organization, Rethinking the Personal and the Political: Feminist Activism and Civic Engagement, Radical Feminism, Lesbian Separatism, and Queer Theory, BEYOND "BLACK MACHO": AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHELE WALLACE, The Edelin Manslaughter Trial and the Anti-Abortion Movement, She Ain't No Rosa Parks: The Joan Little RapeMurder Case and Jim Crow Justice in the PostCivil Rights South, Lessons in Self-Defense: Gender Violence, Racial Criminalization, and Anticarceral Feminism, Racism and Feminism: A Schism in the Sisterhood, Alondra Nelson: Leave More Genius Work Behind, Unmaking a Priest: The Rite of Degradation.