5/20/2023 0 Comments Combahee river collectiveAnd I met her since I was working at Ms.īarbara Smith: Those of us who attended the Eastern Regional Conference, which drew several hundred people, were asked to start chapters of the National Black Feminist Organization in our respective cities. I knew about it because one of the people who was heavily involved in the organization’s formation was a woman named Margaret Sloan. Barbara and Demita Frazier established the Boston chapter of the NBFO, which brought together members of the future Combahee River Collective.īeverly Smith: I was the one who told Barbara about the first Eastern Regional Conference of the National Black Feminist Organization in the fall of 1973. The collective got its start when Beverly Smith told her twin sister, Barbara, about an organization called the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). These beliefs and aspirations have found new expressions in Black Lives Matter as well as socialist organizations such as the revived Democratic Socialists of America-particularly in its diverse working groups and caucuses. Activist groups recognize, or at least pay lip service to, the need to organize people in multiple ways justice can never be about just class, race, gender, or homophobia. To this day, activists hold this statement in high regard, and it continues to serve as a primer on socialist organizing that recognizes the importance of holistic organizing against multiple oppressions. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. In the case of Black women, this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. The group introduces “identity politics” with a powerful explanation of its liberatory potential: The statement emphasized economic, gender, and racial repression and made fighting on all fronts key to its emancipatory politics. They coined the term “identity politics” to describe their unique position as Black women facing a variety of oppressions. They were socialists who rejected capitalism and imperialism, but wrote in their declaration that they were not convinced that “a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.” The group’s political strategy was to form coalitions with other activist groups while retaining their independence as Black women.
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