What are the central tenets of the Combahee River Collective Statement?

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What are the central tenets of the Combahee River CollectiveStatement?

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The Combahee River Collective Statement Combahee River Collective We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974 1 During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial sexual heterosexual and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face We will discuss four major topics in the paper that follows 1 the genesis of contemporary Black feminism 2 what we believe ie the specific province of our politics 3 the problems in organizing Black feminists including a brief herstory of our collective and 4 Black feminist issues and practice 1 The genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism Before looking at the recent development of Black feminism we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of AfroAmerican womens continuous lifeanddeath struggle for survival and liberation Black womens extremely negative relationship to the American political system a system of white male rule has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes As Angela Davis points out in Reflections on the Black Womans Role in the Community of Slaves Black women have always embodied if only in their physical manifestation an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways There have always been Black women activistssome known like Sojourner Truth Harriet Tubman Frances E W Harper Ida B Wells Barnett and Mary Church Terrell and thousands upon thousands unknownwho have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice militancy and work by our mothers and sisters A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American womens movement beginning in the late 1960s 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 In 1973 Black feminists primarily located in New York felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group This became the National Black Feminist Organization NBFO Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation particularly those of the 1960s and I970s Many of us were active in those movements Civil Rights Black nationalism the Black Panthers and all of our lives Were greatly affected and changed by their ideologies their goals and the tactics used to achieve their goals It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left that led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist unlike those of white women and antisexist unlike those of Black and white men There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black Feminism that is the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black womens lives Black feminists and many more Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our daytoday existence As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently For example 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 As we grew older we became aware of the threat of physical and sexual abuse See Answer

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