River Collective Response Essay

In April 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist group that began meeting in 1973, wrote and published the Combahee River Collective statement. The statement lists their organization’s intentions for social justice which focuses on the liberation of women of color, including queer, poor and foreign women of color. The source gives a glimpse into the extent of black progress in the post-Civil Rights Movement era, and how the movement developed political awareness and future organizing. The organization supports socialism, a radical statement during the Cold War, but a socialist movement that would also have to be feminist and anti-racist in order to be the most effective. However, they are also against some radical claims made

by previous movements, like the idea of lesbian separatism, as black women are also loyal to black men due to their collective struggle against racism. They see no real progress with fractionated movements, including white feminist movements that they critique. This is one of the first documents to recognize their multifaceted identities and suggest movements that take it into consideration but does not use the word “intersectional” because it is not coined until 1989 by black legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw. Additionally, it is radical because it includes queer women, when many movements at the time would exclude the LGBTQIA+ community from their agenda. Since past movements did not take into consideration their intersectional identities and the coinciding oppression, women of color therefore had to mobilize themselves in order to fight for their liberation that the Combahee River Collective claims would, in turn, liberate everyone.
The Combahee River Collective holds radical ideas on the intersection of identity, and how to overcome these oppressive structures.

Before this organization, movements did not think to study how race and sex and gender, and other marginalized identities, intersect to create a unique form and experience of oppression. This document, therefore, does not support fractionalized movements, like lesbian separatism or the exclusion of black women from roles of leadership in either the feminist or anti-racist movements. They see mainstream movements without an intersectional framework as exclusive and therefore unproductive. Because these women understand the hardships that come with single-issue movements, they include the perspective of queer women of color, who other social justice movements constantly overlook and undermine their issues. Additionally, the Collective focuses on their self-love and self-appreciation as women of color. Since there is such a strong force of oppression and dehumanization towards women of color, and black women, in particular, others, including black men, could see their expression of self-love as radical. Additionally, the fact that they “reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough,” continues to challenge the dehumanization of black women, either by idolizing them or by shaming and devaluing them. This statement targets men who fetishize black women as “queens” but at the same time

do not see their worth and capability as humans to be in positions of power or be able to make choices about their own bodies. Women of color do not wish to face inequalities in opportunity or psychological oppression, which refer to the socialization of black women to hate themselves as they do not fit European beauty standards. However, they recognize that the solution is not then to idolize women of color, but instead to treat them as equally human as others, in order to grant them agency and equal rights.
It can be difficult for men and women of color to understand each other because they have different experiences. Men of color may understand racism but they do not understand sexism and how both identities interact to impact women of color’s experiences and opportunities. Consequently, men of color may not recognize issues specific to women of color as problems of race, due to the additional factor of sex and gender. Therefore these issues are not prioritized, because they are then see as women’s issues. However, in the mainstream feminist movement, issues specific to women of color experience the same situation, but with their issues being labelled as in relation to race. Therefore women of color are continually excluded from mainstream movements because those movements have not adopted an intersectional framework. This continues to create an “other” out of women of color, as they recognize that they “find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in [their] lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”
Since sexist and racist oppression occur simultaneously, among other forms of oppression like homophobia and classism, there are issues that are not solely sexist or racist but a form of racial-sexual oppression, like the history of rape of black women by white men which the Collective cites as a prime example. When white men use their social position to take advantage of black women, they not only benefit from their whiteness but also from their positionality as men. It is not simply the domination of white over black or male over female but a combination of the two that cannot be recognized separately but rather creates a unique form of intertwined oppression that only black women face. Therefore, they recognize that “the only people who care enough about [them] to work consistently for [their] liberation is [them].” Since it is such a unique experience, other mainstream movements with a focus on a single issue do not recognize that the liberation of black women would eradicate all racial, sexual and racial-sexual oppression.
Additionally, the Combahee River Collective are cautious to ensure that they themselves are not hypocritical, and therefore include the liberation of queer women of color, whose issues were continually ignored, even in activist circles.

Unlike other organizations, the Collective makes a powerful case for the importance of fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights, as they claim that the liberation of queer women of color would ensure the liberation of everyone, since they face most forms of oppression. In other words, the overthrow of systems of oppression that affect queer women of color would result in the eradication all forms of oppression. This is a very different agenda than most movements, including the Civil Rights Movement, where queer activists had to hide their queer identity and did not get the same opportunities in leadership as their straight counterparts. Only queer women of color, and straight women of color who understand the limitations of an exclusive, single issue movement, would recognize the necessity of intersectional social justice movements to be the most

effective.
The Combahee River Collective statement began the framework for intersectional movements that are more inclusive and therefore more effective as it creates unity and multi-issue platforms. Therefore, with the publication of their statement, came a new wave of progressive thinking that takes into account all forms of oppression and how they may intersect. There is still a tension between race and sex and gender issues as seen in movements against police brutality in the United States today. As police officers mistreated and killed many unarmed black and Hispanic men, people from the affected communities came together to create the Black Lives Matter movement to combat police violence. However, the black and Hispanic women who also experienced police brutality did not receive the same attention, and their deaths and injuries occurred without backlash or outrage. As more people became aware of deaths like Sandra Bland, the movement Say Her Name began, in order to develop an intersectional lens to view this issue. As activists viewed police brutality as solely a racial issue, the abuse and death of women of color suddenly did not get the same attention, because race issue actually implies an issue related to men of color. Due to the beginning of criticism of single-issue movements, there has been a more inclusive approach toward social justice issues and the tools to understand intersectional identities even if one does not experience it themselves.