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The Combahee women did not coin the phrase “intersectionality”—Kimberlé Crenshaw did so in 1989—but the CRC did articulate the analysis that animates the meaning of intersectionality, the idea that multiple oppressions reinforce each other to create new categories of suffering. The CRC described oppressions as “interlocking” or happening “simultaneously,” thus creating new measures of oppression and inequality. In other words, Black women could not quantify their oppression only in terms of sexism or racism, or of homophobia experienced by Black lesbians. They were not ever a single category,
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oppression on the basis of identity—whether it was racial, gender, class, or sexual orientation identity—was a source of political radicalization.
One can see the importance of international solidarity and identification especially today, when the United States so readily uses the abuse of women in other countries, such as Afghanistan, as a pretext for military intervention.
Black women and men are overrepresented in the most dismal categories used to measure the quality of life in the United States.
we talk about it because Black women are still not free.
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.
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 else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.
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 else’s oppression.
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. 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. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.
The sanctions in the Black and white communities against Black women thinkers [are] comparatively much higher than for white women, particularly ones from the educated middle and upper classes.
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.
Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do,
“I haven’t the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary- vested-interest-power.”
white women were, for lack of a better word, well, I’ll just say taking instead of appropriating. They were taking the names of Black women, particularly Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and using them for different projects.
“What do white women have to complain about? I mean, they’ve been terrorizing us in their homes and in their kitchens for several centuries here now.” “They are the excuse for a pandemic of lynchings in the United States.” Their status as, you know, “pure white women” is instrumental, and has been instrumental, in lynching and other forms of racial violence. Their status also was the absolute opposite of what our status was as Black women.
In those days, the term “women of color” or “people of color” was not used. It may have been used on the West Coast, but we were not there. I didn’t hear it until the early eighties. We were third world women. We considered ourselves to be third world women. We saw ourselves in solidarity and in struggle with all third world people around the globe. And we also saw ourselves as being internally colonized.
