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

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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.

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.

the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.

Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources.

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

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

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

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.