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

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

I think our goal first of all was to make a political place for people like ourselves. We were marginalized in the Black movement, in the Black liberation movement, certainly in the Black nationalist movement. And we were marginalized in the white feminist movement, for different reasons. One of the reasons we were marginalized in the Black movement, besides sexism and misogyny, was also homophobia. A lot of us were indeed lesbians, and we—including myself, at this time I was coming out. Some people had been lesbians for longer. So they weren’t coming out simultaneous with their involvement with Combahee. But for me, those things kind of went together. So, as I said, we were marginalized in Black contexts. We were marginalized and not understood in white feminist or women’s liberation contexts. We needed to have a place of our own. We needed to have a place where we could define our political priorities and act upon them. And that’s where identity politics come from. I explain this over and over and over again. I believe that the Combahee River Collective statement is the first place that the term “identity politics” actually appears.