A Black Feminist Statement

Overview

About twelve pages, a short political statement drafted in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black lesbian feminists based in Boston, principally authored by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier, and named for Harriet Tubman’s 1863 raid along South Carolina’s Combahee River, an operation that freed several hundred enslaved people and remains, notably, the only military engagement in American history planned and led by a woman. The collective grew out of the National Black Feminist Organization but formed as a separate group specifically to develop a politics its members felt the larger organization was not fully able to address, one grounded explicitly in the simultaneous, inseparable experience of racism, sexism, homophobia and class oppression in Black women’s actual lives.

The statement was written collectively and organized into four short sections: the genesis of contemporary Black feminism, the collective’s statement of belief, the problems the group faced in organizing, and a discussion of Black feminist issues and projects, moving from historical and theoretical grounding toward the practical, often difficult work of building a movement that did not fit comfortably within either the mainstream feminist movement or existing Black political organizations.

The argument

Historical grounding. The statement opens by situating its politics within a long history of Black women’s political activism in the United States, from resistance under slavery through the long, largely uncredited participation of Black women in abolitionist, suffrage, civil rights and Black power movements, arguing that contemporary Black feminism represents a continuation of this existing tradition rather than an entirely new invention responding only to recent circumstances.

Interlocking oppressions. The statement’s central theoretical claim, and the passage most frequently cited in later scholarship, is that Black women experience racism, sexism, heterosexism and class oppression not as separate, addable systems but as genuinely interlocking and simultaneous, lived together rather than one at a time. The authors state directly that they find it difficult, in practice, to separate these oppressions in their own lived experience, and argue that any political framework treating them as separable, focus on race first, then gender, or vice versa, will necessarily misdescribe and therefore fail to address Black women’s actual situation.

A politics rooted in identity. The statement’s opening section includes the passage that would later make it widely cited as an origin point for the phrase identity politics, the claim that the most genuinely radical politics emerges directly from a group’s own identity and experience of oppression rather than from a more abstract commitment to ending oppression experienced primarily by others. This was, for the collective, a specific and considered political claim rather than the looser, more general usage the term would later acquire in broader political discourse.

Socialism and its limits. The statement identifies the collective’s politics explicitly as socialist, arguing that capitalism as an economic system is bound up with and dependent on the racial and sexual oppression Black women experience, and that genuine liberation requires transforming the economic system alongside racial and gender relations. The authors are equally explicit, however, that ending capitalism alone would not automatically end racism or sexism, insisting on the interlocking framework even when addressing economic structure specifically.

Practical obstacles to organizing. A substantial portion of the statement addresses, with real specificity, the practical difficulties the collective faced in building its movement: reluctance within Black political organizations to take sexual politics seriously as a legitimate concern alongside racial justice, and, separately, a persistent, often unexamined racism within predominantly white feminist organizations that made those spaces frequently unwelcoming or actively hostile to Black women’s specific concerns and leadership.

How to read it

Read the statement’s opening historical section as doing real argumentative work rather than merely as background; situating contemporary Black feminism within a longer tradition of Black women’s political activism is itself part of the collective’s argument against treating their politics as a new or marginal departure from an already-established Black political tradition.

Pay close attention to the precise, specific meaning the statement gives to identity politics, a politics arising from lived experience of interlocking oppression, since the phrase’s later, much broader circulation in American political discourse has often lost the specific analytical content the collective originally gave it.

Notice how directly and specifically the statement names the practical obstacles the collective faced, rather than speaking only in general theoretical terms; the sections on organizing difficulties ground the document’s theoretical claims in the collective’s own concrete experience of building a movement that did not fit comfortably within existing organizational structures.

Read the statement’s socialist commitments alongside its insistence on interlocking oppression carefully; the collective is making a considerably more precise claim than simply adding class to a list of concerns, arguing instead that economic, racial and sexual oppression must be understood and addressed as genuinely bound together rather than as separable priorities to be ranked.

Read this document as a founding text of what would later be developed, in more extended academic form, under the term intersectionality, while keeping in mind that the collective’s own statement predates and is considerably more concise than much of the later scholarly literature that built on its central insight.

Questions it raises

• How does the statement’s specific, theorized meaning of identity politics, a politics grounded in the interlocking experience of oppression, compare to how the term is more commonly used in contemporary political discourse? What is lost in that broader circulation?
• The collective argues that racism, sexism and class oppression must be addressed simultaneously rather than in sequence. What are the practical political challenges of building a movement organized around this simultaneity rather than around a single, more easily mobilized priority?
• What does the statement’s account of obstacles within both Black political organizations and white feminist organizations suggest about the limits of coalition politics organized around a single shared identity category?
• Is the statement’s socialism essential to its broader argument about interlocking oppression, or could the analysis of racism and sexism as interlocking systems stand independently of its specific economic commitments?
• How does grounding the statement’s argument in the collective’s own lived, specific experience, rather than in more abstract theoretical argument, affect its persuasive force compared to a more conventionally academic treatment of the same claims?
• The statement was written in 1977 in response to specific organizational failures the collective experienced directly. How much of its analysis remains applicable to political organizing today, and how much reflects circumstances specific to that particular historical moment?