the combahee river collective statement quizlet

The statement is an important piece of feminist theory and description of black feminism (Balliet, pg. These were hardly doctrinaire disputes. 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. I myself have found the Combahee Statement more compelling than ever. 155-191, Race, Gender & Class, Vol. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black womens movement. 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. These were, in their view, the preconditions for a mass movement in which no ones issues were left behind. 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. 52-71, Feminist Studies, Vol. 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. All of this stood in stark contradiction to what, as a young person, I had understood feminism to be. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. Today, in the midst of the greatest wave of protest and social upheaval in more than a generation, books about racism, policing, and the Black Lives Matter movement top best-seller lists. Issues and projects that collective members have actually worked on are sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape and health care. 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. 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. How is the name of the group related to Harriet Tubman? Flashcards. Some images used in this set are licensed under the Creative Commons through Flickr.com.Click to see the original works with their full license. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. The Combahee River Collective started its activities in 1974 and was committed to a non-hierarchical structure. 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. We had been reading about divisions within the feminist . 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. Learn. 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. Demita Frazier had been a member of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, right up until the Chicago police helped to assassinate the Panther leader Fred Hampton, in 1969. Black feminism made sense of my mothers life of work, her compulsory caretaking and debt. 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. The first was its effort to combine socialist politics with feminism. 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. Demonstrations following the murder of Floyd enter their third week. [2] Wallace, Michele. The work to be done and the countless issues that this work represents merely reflect the pervasiveness of our 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. We can obviously create a politics that is absolutely aligned with our own experiences as Black womenin other words, with our identities. described how the myriad ways that Black women experienced oppression could translate into a radical rejection of the status quo. She didnt know about the Volcker Shock and the recession that would follow. 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. But we can take inspiration from the imaginative optimism of the Combahee Statement. 1. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. Smith told me, Im not convinced that, despite the millions of people who are out in the streets expressing that they are done with things as they areIm not convinced that that translates into a movement. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening. 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. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. 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. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black womens lives. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) by Combahee River Collective. Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters. 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. The final, definitive version was published in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (Monthly Review Press, 1979), 362-72. 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. 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. Men are not equal to other men, i.e. "A Black Feminist Statement" by the Combahee, Feminist Theory, the body and the Disabled Fi. The class and race tensions within feminism lasted far beyond the seventies. 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. Both are essential to the development of any life. 13, No. Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters. In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white womens revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex. A small donation would help us keep this available to all. 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. Our development must also be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of Black people. 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. 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 women of the C.R.C. 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. 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. 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. Respond to the following prompts in 300+ words (total), with reference to the Module 2 texts: Both "Ain't I a Woman?" and "A Black Feminist Statement: The Combahee River Collective" make statements in response to exclusionary aspects of feminist activism in the 19th and 20th centuries respectively. [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. In 2016, black activists founded The Movement of Black Lives to advocate for all black people more generally. pioneered the notion of identity politics, perhaps one of the most controversial and misunderstood terms in all of U.S. politics. 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. Gender was also an incomplete answer. Reading the statement for the first time, two things struck me. However, we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening. They were also inspired by the national liberation and anti-colonial movements, from the Algerian struggle against the French occupation to the Vietnamese resistance to the American war. 20 (2018), pp. Photograph by Ellen Shub / Courtesy the Estate of Ellen Shub. 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. The first was that oppression on the basis of identity . 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. JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. As they put it, 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.. 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 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. 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. 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. What We Believe 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. This document was one of the earliest explorations of the intersection of multiple oppressions, including racism and heterosexism. It is a living thing. Stemming out of growing disillusionments with mainstream feminism, the Collective was a Boston-based organisation of Black queer socialist activists. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR. [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 . 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. There are no maps or predetermined paths that guarantee the success or failure of a movement. 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. 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. The Combahee River Collective, a black feminist lesbian organization, released the Combahee River Collective Statement in 1978 to define and encourage black feminism. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political . 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 Combahee River Collective Statement conceptualized the notion of intersectionalitythe idea that marginalization and oppression are experienced simultaneously in different, interlocking ways as a result of how systems of domination interact with people's identities. As it was explained to me, feminists saw the world as divided between men and women and not between classes. [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. 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. Terms in this set (20) interlocking. Instead, they argued that Black womenand all oppressed peoplehad the right to form their own political agendas, because no one else would. 3 (February 1974), pp. 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. During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. A Black Feminists Search for Sisterhood, The Village Voice, 28 July 1975, pp. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group.

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