Extract 1: Combahee River Collective Statement
This extract is part of our Series 1 Topic 2 Podcast on ‘Roots of Intersectionality.’ Find the podcast here.
Context
The Combahee River Collective were a Black feminist lesbian collective, with socialist roots, who were active in Boston in the 1970s. They were vital in pushing the white feminist movement, and the Civil Right Movement, to recognise the specific needs of Black women, especially Black lesbians. The extract in the podcast grapples with the idea of multiple identities leading to multiple oppressions.
Year published: 1977
Writers: The Combahee River Collective (some members include: Barbara Smith, )
Extract
We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. [1] During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
[...]
we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of AfroAmerican women's continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women's extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. As Angela Davis points out in "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," Black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. There have always been Black women activists—some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown—who have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique.