Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“The authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement have reminded us over and over again that this was a left document. It was a socialist document”

Barbara Ransby

“So what’s exciting for me is I think that part of why we established this frame as not just being about police violence was to be able to take in and take on the totality of the state apparatus. And police are like the tip of the iceberg. They’re the most visible part of the state.”

Alicia Garza

“So I sort of think about Black feminist Freedom Schools that are focusing in the first three semesters on, you know, the history of cooperatives, the history of socialist thinking, how it could work for us, what are we thinking around now”

Demita Frazier

“Now you see in forty years what’s happened to everything. The commodification of everything is real in late-stage capitalism. So there was always going to be a tendency, especially under white supremacy, of elevating white women and white women’s organizations, even within the dominant culture”

Demita Frazier

“So we evolved out of the National Black Feminist Organization, and, once we began meeting and talking, realized we were more radical, and we were wanting a different kind of structure. And we wanted to have an economic analysis as well. We weren’t willing to just have a discussion about, you know, sort of fitting into mainstream capitalist thinking”

Demita Frazier

“the ideas that we developed—that that probably helped to foster the development of Black feminism, and that it continues.”

Beverly Smith

“So I feel like what we contributed was a politics that says, “No, it is not as simple-minded and flat and one-dimensional as you all may think it is.”

Beverly Smith

“I might not have called what we did “original” Black feminism, but instead wrote that the reason Combahee’s Black feminism is so powerful is because it’s anticapitalist. One would expect Black feminism to be antiracist and opposed to sexism. Anticapitalism is what gives it the sharpness, the edge, the thoroughness, the revolutionary potential.”
Barbara Smith