Document 23.3: Black American Feminism: Combahee River Collective, A Black Feminist Statement, 1977

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Within North American feminism, a distinctive voice arose among women of color—especially blacks and Hispanics. Many among them resented the claims of white, middle-class feminists to speak for all women and objected to the exclusive prominence given to gender issues. Capitalism, race, class, and compulsory heterosexuality, they insisted, combined with patriarchy to generate an interlocking system of oppression, unique to women of color. Such a perspective is reflected in the 1977 statement of the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization.

COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE

A Black Feminist Statement

1977

We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. . . . [W]e are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression . . . based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. . . .

[W]e find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. . . . Black women have always embodied an adversary stance to white male rule. . . . Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. . . . It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men. . . . [A]s we developed politically we [also] addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capitalism. . . .

Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. . . . We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. . . . We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. . . . We need to articulate the real class situation of persons . . . for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. . . . No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women’s lives. . . . “Smart-ugly” crystallized the way in which most of us had been forced to develop our intellects at great cost to our “social” lives. . . . We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society . . . [b]ut we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are.

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The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are . . . trying . . . to address a whole range of oppressions. . . . We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon. . . . The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. . . . As an early group member once said, “We are all damaged people merely by virtue of being Black women.” . . . The material conditions of most Black women would hardly lead them to upset both economic and sexual arrangements that seem to represent some stability in their lives. . . . Accusations that Black feminism divides the Black struggle are powerful deterrents to the growth of an autonomous Black women’s movement.

The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. . . . One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement. . . . Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue. . . .

Source: Zillah R. Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 362–72.