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

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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.

That is to say, if you could free the most oppressed people in society, then you would have to free everyone.

The point was to convince Black men that their interests were also tied to the liberation of Black women and that they should play an active role in that struggle.

“We are not convinced . . . that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

Black women were not radicalizing over abstract issues of doctrine; they were radicalizing because of the ways that their multiple identities opened them up to overlapping oppression and exploitation.

The CRC referred to this kind of approach to activism as coalition building, and they saw it as key to winning their struggles. Their analysis, “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,” captures the dialectic connecting the struggle for Black liberation to the struggle for a liberated United States and, ultimately, the world.

Black women vote/act in everyone's interest because our liberation is dependent upon the demolition of sexist and racist systems

As Demita Frazier says, the point of talking about Combahee is not to be nostalgic; rather, we talk about it because Black women are still not free.

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.

It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of Black and white men.

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.

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.

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. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are.

As Black women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.

Y. E. S.

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.

Duplicate but powerful

The reaction of Black men to feminism has been notoriously negative. They are, of course, even more threatened than Black women by the possibility that Black feminists might organize around our own needs. 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. Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black women’s movement.

We also decided around that time to become an independent collective since we had serious disagreements with NBFO’s bourgeois-feminist stance and their lack of a clear political focus.

As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture.

Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue.

So. Very. True.

In her introduction to Sisterhood is Powerful Robin Morgan writes: “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.”

Well damn...

My perspective, and I think it was shared, was let’s not name ourselves after a person. Let’s name ourselves after an action. A political action. And that’s what we did. And not only a political action but a political action for liberation.

So I read that she was in the Boston area, up from Mississippi, and she was going to be teaching a course on Black women writers. I said, “Wow!” I was so excited. And she would be doing that at Wellesley.

Alice Walker course at Wellesley

During a time when gay people can get married, and Beyoncé says she’s a feminist, it’s difficult to explain what we were up against in the late 1970s.

Audre was a key figure in the creation of the mobilizing of Black feminism as a political theory and practice.

I can’t tell you much about the state of Black feminism at the present time. And I’m not even clear that there’s a Black feminist resurgence.

everything that needed to be done in our household was done by women.

I’ve lived long enough to see, we’re monkeys with cell phones. On the evolutionary curve, we’re so low on the evolutionary climb that not in my lifetime will we even be able to come up with a plan of how to get to a more equitable socialist life in late-stage capitalism.

There was also the reality of white feminism. It became important for us to establish what we considered to be our Black feminist theory because we did a lot of coalition work and believed deeply in building coalitions to do the work necessary to destroy white supremacy. We wanted to speak in our own voice, as Black feminists.

So Black feminism is still problematic in the Black community. And I really don’t even think we have enough time to unpack who’s a feminist in the Black community because Beyoncé—and see, I’ve got to tell you, I’m just a low-class girl from Chicago who loves to shake my butt, so part of me loves her. Part of me.

The ways in which the mainstream Black mainstream culture has just gotten into the fuckery of white mainstream culture is ridiculous.

I’m not going to dispute Beyoncé or Solange or any of the other young sisters, including Blac Chyna [laugh]. Okay, because of the sex positivity and all that stuff. I get that too. I’m feeling them. However, what’s happening is the lack of any kind of ongoing interaction about what Black feminism means. Beyoncé—well, she’s an artist. So she’s doing her. She’s doing it the way she wants to do it. I’m not mad at her. I want to see her devote some more money to educating young Black girls. I want to see them come out and deal with the R. Kellys and the Rick Rosses of this world.

Because our competence has never been a question in my mind. Our brilliance has also never been a question. Historically proven, for many, many cultures across millennia. So it’s never been about that. Characterization is indeed everything—power lies with us wrenching the narrative out of the hands that are dedicated to maintaining that illusion.

Women’s lives are complicated because of the ways that we have to navigate patriarchy.

I get introduced to Black feminism because I’m getting introduced in the worst ways to white feminism.

“I really appreciate most of what you said. But the question that I’m trying to answer is where do I fit in any of this because you have not talked about Black women. You have not talked about Black queer folks. You have not talked about Black trans folks. And how that fits into your vision of liberation. I’m a Black queer woman. And I’m not just organizing Black people so other people can get free. I want to get free. So based on your framework, how do I get down? I want to be a part of this team. I want to build Black liberation. So where do I fit?”

we don’t have infrastructure to leave anybody behind. It’d be one thing if we were strong as fuck, right, and just winning all this shit. And then people come with what about me? I could see a perspective that would be like, “What about you? We have everything we need.”

If you could look around a room and be like, “Why is my life partner not here?” and feel okay with that, then you’re really not worried about the future.

Combating sexism and patriarchy, with male organisers that obviously don't value women enough to question the absence of their partners.

this was right around the time that people started to do this fucking weird All Lives Matter, Brown Lives Matter, Black and Brown Lives Matter thing. So I was deep in the thick of “Why are people doing that?”

Like anti-Blackness is the fulcrum around which white supremacy works. Right? And so it’s not that Brown folks are not impacted. It’s not that.

And then the person said, “It’s going to make all the white people leave.” And I was like, “Well, I really hope your strategy wasn’t predicated on white people because they just cannot be depended on yet, not in that way.” [laugh] You know what I’m saying? Please, god, tell me that’s not what your strategy is based on. Because, yes, white people will leave you. That is what they do. You know what I’m saying? That’s historical. Please tell me your strategy is not built there.

And that’s the thing, when we’re reimagining an economy and a democracy, if it’s led by white people, we will fucking get left behind.

POC have to understand and abide by the rules, so whn reimagining the future, need to understand were they fit in. This example was based on suggestion that we run up our credit and leve big banks with the bill...which isnt something POC can afford to socially or financially,

We don’t know what it looks like to run cities in ways that actually improve Black people’s lives. We know what it looks like to have a Black city council and a Black mayor and have it be corrupt as fuck.

And when I think about political power I can’t separate it from electoral organizing. I do separate it from Democrats and Republicans. Electoral organizing is still a vehicle that most people participate in. And if it wasn’t important for Black folks to be in that, they wouldn’t try to take it from us.

People may have seen the recent Buzzfeed article that really focused a laser beam attack against the Black feminist leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement.

????? look this up

The writer, Bari Weiss, in the op-ed page of the New York Times, said intersectionality is the problem with the left today. That is an odd assertion to say the least. What does that assertion even mean? It means all of the lame coalitions that are saying, “Put all of your differences on the back burner. Don’t talk about race. Don’t talk about gender. Don’t talk about sexuality. Just talk about class.” This approach led us to a false unity, because we have glossed over who we are and what privileges we enjoy, and oppression we suffer, as a result.

If we take to heart the spirit and politics of the Combahee River Collective Statement, what we go away with is this: (1) never be afraid to speak truth to power, and (2) in the face of racist, misogynist threats of violence and attacks, when you have the impulse to either fight or flight, what do you do? Fight! And, (3) always ally yourself with those on the bottom, on the margins, and at the periphery of the centers of power. And in doing so, you will land yourself at the very center of some of the most important struggles of our society and our history.

The larger-than-life Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara once said, “Every revolutionary is motivated by great feelings of love.” And we have to take from that, never hesitate to love your people, and the people who struggle alongside you, but also never be afraid to critique and struggle with those you love.