Will it turn into something more lasting than a frustrated outburst from those at the bottom? Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. Was the Conspiracy That Gripped New York in 1741 Real? They could not stop our lights from being periodically turned off, or a steady stream of bill collectors from coming to our front door. Analyzing the Combahee River Collective as a Social Movement . Feminism is, nevertheless, very threatening to the majority of Black people because it calls into question some of the most basic assumptions about our existence, i.e., that sex should be a determinant of power relationships. A good portion of the tension was generated by wild and unfounded assertions that socialism and the spoils of social democracy were only of interest to white people. 225 0 obj
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Their point was a simple one: you cannot expect people to join your movement by telling them to put their particular issues on hold for the sake of some ill-defined unity at a later date. The final, definitive version was published in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (Monthly Review Press, 1979), 362-72. 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. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt . A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American womens movement beginning in the late 1960s. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. The reaction of Black men to feminism has been notoriously negative. When we first started meeting early in 1974 after the NBFO first eastern regional conference, we did not have a strategy for organizing, or even a focus. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. The collective joined together to develop the Combahee River Collective Statement, which was a . 1, No. 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. 38, No. 190-222, African American Review, Vol. believed that another world was possible, one in which Black women, and thus all of humanity, were freed from systems of oppression and exploitation, as the result of a collective struggle that reached down to the roots of the problems we face. While my father believed that a revolution was within the grasp of those who fought hard enough to make it happen, my mother, who had studied English, French, and Spanish in college, was finishing her doctorate and raising me and my brother.
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