Indira Singh, Week 02

Black Feminism

The Combahee River Collective Statement

Summary

Black Feminism holds that the experience of a black woman gives rise to a particular understanding of their position in relation to sexism, class oppression and racism. A Black Feminist lens in the United States was first employed by black women to make sense to how white supremacy and patriarchy interacted to inform the particular experiences of enslaved black women. Black Feminism rose to prominence in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement excluded women from leadership positions, and the mainstream movement largely focused its agenda on issues that pre-dominantly impacted middle-class white woman. From the 1970s to 1980s black feminists formed groups that addressed the roles of black women in black nationalism, gay liberation, and second wave feminism.

Combahee River Collective is a collective of Black Feminists that are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression. There was a need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of black and white men. Black Feminism is seen as a logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppression that all women of color face. The life and death struggle for liberation and survival of an Afro-American women has been going on since a long time.

What makes thee struggle of a black woman unique is how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity affects their life situation and political struggle. Their economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalistic economy, a handful of them have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable them to more effectively fight for their oppression. Black feminists carry a hared belief that they are inherently valuable, that their liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s may because of their need as human persons for autonomy. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to black women such as Sapphire, Whore, Bull dagger, let alone cataloguing the cruel, often murderous, treatment received indicates how little value has been placed upon their lives during four centuries of bondage in the western hemisphere.

The major source of difficulty in this politics is that they are not just trying to fight oppression from one front or even two, but instead they are addressing a whole range of oppressions. They do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual or class privilege to rely upon, nor do they have seen minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess anyone of these types of privilege have. Also, there is a very low value placed upon a black women’s psyche in this society, which is both racist and sexist.

If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since their freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.