the combahee river collective statement quizlet
It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt throughout US political life today. We had been reading about divisions within the feminist movement in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, and the emergence of a body of thought captured in the framework of Black feminism. The Combahee River Collective was a small organization, but it involved some of the luminaries of Black feminism: Barbara Smith and her twin sister, Beverly Smith, as well as Demita Frazier, Cheryl Clarke, Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Chirlane McCray, and Audre Lorde. After a period of months of not meeting, we began to meet again late in the year and started doing an intense variety of consciousness-raising. The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. Currently we are planning to gather together a collectIon of Black feminist writing. More generally, Black men dominated the leadership of the organized Black left. The Combahee River Collective Statement appeared as a movement document in April 1977. We had been reading about divisions within the feminist . I kept coming back to the C.R.C.s basic claim: We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. Today, there is a small but influential Black political classa Black lite and what could be described as the aspirational Black middle classwhose members continue to be constrained by racial discrimination and inequality but who hold the promise that a better life is possible in the United States. 1-32, The Journal of African American History, Vol. There have always been Black women activistssome known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Learn. The eugenics programs of the early twentieth century continued into the nineteen-seventies, as tens of thousands of women in the United States were subjected to sterilization procedures without their informed consent. There have always been Black women activistssome known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to Black women (e.g. My mothers advanced degrees could not protect her from bankruptcy in 1982. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess anyone of these types of privilege have. we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being ladylike and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people.