Artwork by The Homegirl Box, featuring members of the Combahee River Collective. Image description: Collage featuring a mirror image of two Black women with fists in the air, chanting or singing. A multicolored starry sphere rises behind them. Background is purple/magenta, with gold flowers at the top. The text reads: “Black women are inherently valuable,” and it is tagged @TheHomegirlBox.
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Hello!
This mini audio offering lifts up the work the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black, mostly lesbian, feminists in the 1970s. And it also lifts up projects by two contemporary queer Black feminists who are in conversation with the Collective’s work. Transcript is below.
More on the Combahee River Collective. The full statement here.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
Combahee Throughline Immersion, by Mobile Homecoming Trust.
Excerpt from M Archive: After the End of the World, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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Transcript
Hi, everyone, this is Tamiko Beyer. This is an audio offering of Starlight and Strategy, my newsletter, and I'm recording this on June 23 2020.
Yeah, I think I'll just jump right into it.
So last week, I was on a call organized by the Movement for Black Lives with many Asian American organizations on the call. They were talking about how to support the Juneteenth days of action that happened last weekend, and how to help carry on this work going forward of, you know, Black liberation with a focus on their specific demands of defunding the police, investing in black communities and demanding that Trump resign.
So during that call somebody from the Movement for Black Lives, I don't remember who it was, talked about how this work is, you know, part of the work towards collective liberation. And during the Q&A, someone wanted to know a little bit more about what that meant.
And so the person who took the question I believe, was M. Adams, who is the co-executive director at Freedom Inc. And M. talked about how the black feminists of the 1970s really gave us a roadmap for thinking about that. And when they said that I thought of--and I'm imagining that M. was referencing--the Combahee River Collective Statement, which was written in 1977. And for those of you who might not be familiar with it, it was written by a collective of Black feminists and lesbians who actually had roots in Boston. And I know about it...I came across it many years ago because of my obsession with Audre Lorde (as longtime readers of this newsletter know, I’m a big fan of Audre Lorde). And she was part of the Collective at some point.
So after the call, I was just thinking about that and how how true it is that these women thinkers really gave us a roadmap for how we can be thinking about this work today. And really, how they’ve laid the groundwork for black feminist work since the time that they wrote it.
So I went back and I reread the whole thing, and I just wanted to share some of some of it with you all. So the statement...part of the statement...they talk about what it means to organize as Black feminists, and they talk about how Black women psyches are not valued because of racism and sexism. And they say, quote, “We are dispossessed psychologically and on every other level. And yet, we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all black women,” end quote.
And then they go on to quote Michele Wallace who wrote “A Black Feminist Search for Sisterhood.” And she writes, “We exist as women who are Black, who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working interdependently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle--because being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.”
So the authors of the Combahee River Statement, or River Collective Statement, they note that Wallace is pessimistic but realistic in her assessment of black feminists' position. And then, here's where they see beyond the limitations of the present moment, kind of where Michelle Wallace ends, and they see beyond it to a liberatory future. And they write, “We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.”
And I believe if they were writing this now, that they would include trans and non binary, gender non-conforming folks within that, so, really the struggle and the work to support and to work towards the freedom of Black trans and gender non conforming folks and women is really the struggle for all of us to be free.
And this revolutionary thinking really has been so important to me in my understanding of intersectionality. And of course to so many other feminist queer thinkers of color. And so I’m not going to go on about it, but I did want to lift up specific works by contemporary, queer Black feminist scholars and writers that directly come from this statement, and I’ll link to them in the transcript below.
So the first one I wanted to lift up is a book, edited by scholar and writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. It's called, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.
And then the second one is something called a Combahee Throughline Immersion, which I haven’t signed up for yet, but I plan on it and it’s being offered by the Mobile Homecoming Trust. And here's how they describe it. They say, “This self-guided course is for people who want to access original scholarship and interactive media to engage the history of the Combahee uprising,” (which was orchestrated by Harriet Tubman) “and the Combahee River Collective, and who want to apply the insights of these important examples of collective freedom to their own liberation and the time we're living in now.” So I’m super excited to check it out.
And Alexis Pauline Gumbs (who I think I have referenced in this newsletter before, although not 100% sure), she’s one of the primary forces behind this project. And to end this little audio session, I wanted to just read an excerpt from her latest book, M Archive: After the End of the World.
And so she says, in introducing this—and I’ll also link to this in the in the transcript—but she says this was inspired by a work of M. Jackie Alexander. And she was inspired, Alexis was inspired, to think about “what would the training space look like, be like, feel like, for the creation of a significantly different world.” So that's kind of the genesis of this piece. And it starts like this:
Okay, that’s it from me for now. Thank you again, so much for listening.
Oh, and I wanted to say if you want to subscribe to this newsletter, I’m donating everything that I raise from the subscriptions to the Movement for Black Lives.
So if you’ve been thinking about subscribing but haven’t actually gone ahead and done it, this would be a great time to do it. Because, yeah, because we need it. We need the revolution and the Movement for Black Lives is doing really amazing work.
So yeah, that’s it. Thanks for listening for reading the newsletter, for subscribing, for sharing it. You guys are awesome, and I hope you are all staying well and fortified in this time. Bye bye.
Black feminists on collective liberation