the combahee river collective statement quizlet

100, No. We just wanted to see what we had. 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. 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. It was mind-blowing! We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. 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. 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. How do we mobilize all of this energy and actually bring about fundamental political, social, and economic change?. Instinctively, many of us turn to history as a way to grasp some frame of reference. 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. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like interlocking, manifold, inroads and more. When I was seven, I saw my father jump in to stop a group of white teen-agers from threatening my older brother, only to have the police blame him for the altercation. 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. 3/4, SOLIDARITY (FALL/WINTER 2014), pp. 22, No. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. 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. Both are essential to the development of any life. 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. 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. But they were not only reacting to the deficits they found in organizations led by white women and Black men. (There was no refuge in Boston at that time.) Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. 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. It was one of, if not the first, documents to coin and define identity politics, and its descriptions of interlocking systems of oppression are integral to Kimberl Crenshaws concept of intersectionality. Here is the way male and female roles were defined in a Black nationalist pamphlet from the early 1970s: To be honest, I didnt know what to do with the Combahee Statement. It was years before I pulled those different strands of my mothers life together. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. The Combahee River Collective started its activities in 1974 and was committed to a non-hierarchical structure. 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. 163-179, Feminist Studies, Vol. The class and race tensions within feminism lasted far beyond the seventies. 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. Vacations in the Soviet Union were hardly idylls spent with ones dearest. The experiences of Black lesbians could not be reduced to gender, race, class, or sexuality. 38, No. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. 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 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. 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. The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. The material conditions of most Black women would hardly lead them to upset both economic and sexual arrangements that seem to represent some stability in their lives. 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. 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. During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. 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.. 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 might, for example, become involved in workplace organizing at a factory that employs Third World women or picket a hospital that is cutting back on already inadequate heath care to a Third World community, or set up a rape crisis center in a Black neighborhood. We had a retreat in the late spring which provided a time for both political discussion and working out interpersonal issues. 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. 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. 42, No. 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. The Combahee River Collective Statement is believed to be the first text where the term identity politics is used. As a result, many Black women felt shut out of directing those organizations, just as they felt that their experiences as Black women were ignored. When I reached college, in the nineties, these same debates could be found animating womens-studies classes. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. 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. 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. 428-447, The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 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 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. Equality of men and women is something that cannot happen even in the abstract world. 6, No. hbbd``b`U@P: 1D8 @k2~$2012b`Mg . endstream endobj startxref 0 %%EOF 248 0 obj <>stream 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.

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