How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

The inattention to Black women’s issues also cut them off from newly radicalizing Black women looking to become involved in political activism. In this context, the women of Combahee were not only making a political intervention into the feminist movement, but by doing so, they were also creating new entry points into activism for Black and Brown women who would have otherwise been ignored.

The CRC identified their recognition of this political tension as “identity politics.” The CRC statement is believed to be the first text where the term “identity politics” is used. Since 1977, that term has been used, abused, and reconfigured into something foreign to its creators.

But Black feminism is a guide to political action and liberation. Political analysis outside of political movements and struggles becomes abstract, discourse driven, and disconnected from the radicalism that made it powerful in the first place.

We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.

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 always say that the people I can work with are the people with whom I share political values and goals and priorities. So that means just about anybody as far as ethnicity, race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity.

there have always been multiple strands to the Black feminist enterprise. There always have been. Because Black women, Black people, are as diverse as we’ve ever been.

Demita