Radical Black Feminism
From Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley (2003):
Radical Black Feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter (137). Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board. When bell hooks says “Feminism is for everybody,” she is echoing what has always been a basic assumption of black feminists. We are not talking about identity politics but a constantly developing, often contested, revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world.
Black feminists include: Paula Giddings, Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Deborah Gray White, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Elsa Barkely Brown, and Patricia Hill-Collins (138).
Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Pat Robinson published a book Lessons from the Damned (1977), in which they were unequivocal in their support for revolution (147). They insisted that revolution must take place on three levels:
Overthrowing capitalism, Eliminating male supremacy, and Transforming the self.
Haden, Middleton, and Robinson wrote in A Historical and Critical Essay for Black Women (1969): “All revolutionaries, regardless of sex, are the smashers of myth and the destroyers of illusion. They have always died and lived again to build new myths. They dare to dream of a utopia, a new kind of synthesis and equilibrium.” (148)
Combahee River Collective
In 1974, a group of radical black feminists in Boston broke with the National Feminist Black Organization (NBFO) to form the Combahee River Collective. In 1977, three collective members Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier issued “A Black Feminist Statement.” Because they found themselves fighting many oppressions at once--racism, sexism, capitalism, and homophobia--they regarded radical black feminism as fundamental to any truly revolutionary ideology (149).
As socialists, the collective did not believe that a nonracist, nonsexist society could be created under capitalism, but at the same time, they believed that socialism was not enough to dismantle the structures of racial, gender, and sexual domination (149). The core of their vision was manifest in their political practice. Combahee members immediately saw connections between class, race, and gender issues by working in support of “Third World women” workers, challenging health care facilities for inadequate or unequal care, and organizing around welfare or day care issues. Although a broad vision of freedom informed the group’s work, its political positions remained flexible and subject to change (149). They knew that the very process of struggle, in the context of the democratic organization, would invariably produce new tactics, new strategies, and new analyses. “We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice.”
As black feminist Ann Julia Cooper suggested some 85 years earlier, the collective insisted that black and Third World women's position at the bottom of the race/class/gender hierarchy put them in a unique position to see the scope of oppression and dream a new society (149-150). “We might use our position at the bottom to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If black women are free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.”
Julia Sudbury’s book Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics of Transformation (New York: Routledge, 1998) looks at black, Asian, and Arab women’s organizations in England and reveals how, through their work, study, and discussion, they came to see how racism is gendered, sexism is racialized, and class differences are reproduced by capitalism and patriarchy (150).
Black Women for Wages for Housework, for example, challenged existing academic and policy-oriented knowledge regarding who made up the working class by arguing that children, women, and black men represented “the most comprehensive working class struggle” (150).
They saw recognition and reparations for women’s unpaid labor, then, as the primary site of any global challenge to capitalism and imperialism (150-151). “Counting black and Third World people’s contribution to every economy--starting by counting women’s unwaged work--is a way of refusing racism, claiming the wealth back from military budgets, and establishing our entitlement to benefits, wages, services, housing, healthcare, an end to military-industrial pollution--not as charity but as rights and reparations owed many times.”
Poets June Jordan and Cheryl Clarke made eloquent pleas for bisexuality and lesbianism, respectively, as radical challenges to heterosexual domination (155).
For Jordan, sexual freedom is the foundation for all other struggles for freedom (155). “If you can finally go to the bathroom wherever you find one, if you can finally order a cup of coffee and drink it wherever the coffee is available, but you cannot follow your heart--you cannot respect the response of your own honest body in the world--then how much of what kind of freedom does any one of us possess? Or conversely, if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force?”
Cheryl Clarke makes a bold argument both against homophobia and for women’s autonomy, self-love, and independence from men (155). She does not argue that all women ought to become lesbian but rather that they reject “coerced heterosexuality as it manifests itself in the family, the state, and on Madison Avenue. The lesbian-feminist struggles for liberation of all people from patriarchal domination through heterosexism and for the transformation of all sociopolitical structures, systems, and relationships that have been degraded and corrupted under centuries of male domination.” Furthermore, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and transsexual movements contribute to the freedom of all by challenging all claims of what is “normal.” Sexuality may be one of the few conceptual spaces we have to construct a politics of desire and to open our imagination to new ways of living and seeing.
Radical Black Feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter (137). Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board. When bell hooks says “Feminism is for everybody,” she is echoing what has always been a basic assumption of black feminists. We are not talking about identity politics but a constantly developing, often contested, revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world.
Black feminists include: Paula Giddings, Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, Deborah Gray White, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Elsa Barkely Brown, and Patricia Hill-Collins (138).
Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Pat Robinson published a book Lessons from the Damned (1977), in which they were unequivocal in their support for revolution (147). They insisted that revolution must take place on three levels:
Overthrowing capitalism, Eliminating male supremacy, and Transforming the self.
Haden, Middleton, and Robinson wrote in A Historical and Critical Essay for Black Women (1969): “All revolutionaries, regardless of sex, are the smashers of myth and the destroyers of illusion. They have always died and lived again to build new myths. They dare to dream of a utopia, a new kind of synthesis and equilibrium.” (148)
Combahee River Collective
In 1974, a group of radical black feminists in Boston broke with the National Feminist Black Organization (NBFO) to form the Combahee River Collective. In 1977, three collective members Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier issued “A Black Feminist Statement.” Because they found themselves fighting many oppressions at once--racism, sexism, capitalism, and homophobia--they regarded radical black feminism as fundamental to any truly revolutionary ideology (149).
As socialists, the collective did not believe that a nonracist, nonsexist society could be created under capitalism, but at the same time, they believed that socialism was not enough to dismantle the structures of racial, gender, and sexual domination (149). The core of their vision was manifest in their political practice. Combahee members immediately saw connections between class, race, and gender issues by working in support of “Third World women” workers, challenging health care facilities for inadequate or unequal care, and organizing around welfare or day care issues. Although a broad vision of freedom informed the group’s work, its political positions remained flexible and subject to change (149). They knew that the very process of struggle, in the context of the democratic organization, would invariably produce new tactics, new strategies, and new analyses. “We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice.”
As black feminist Ann Julia Cooper suggested some 85 years earlier, the collective insisted that black and Third World women's position at the bottom of the race/class/gender hierarchy put them in a unique position to see the scope of oppression and dream a new society (149-150). “We might use our position at the bottom to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If black women are free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.”
Julia Sudbury’s book Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics of Transformation (New York: Routledge, 1998) looks at black, Asian, and Arab women’s organizations in England and reveals how, through their work, study, and discussion, they came to see how racism is gendered, sexism is racialized, and class differences are reproduced by capitalism and patriarchy (150).
Black Women for Wages for Housework, for example, challenged existing academic and policy-oriented knowledge regarding who made up the working class by arguing that children, women, and black men represented “the most comprehensive working class struggle” (150).
They saw recognition and reparations for women’s unpaid labor, then, as the primary site of any global challenge to capitalism and imperialism (150-151). “Counting black and Third World people’s contribution to every economy--starting by counting women’s unwaged work--is a way of refusing racism, claiming the wealth back from military budgets, and establishing our entitlement to benefits, wages, services, housing, healthcare, an end to military-industrial pollution--not as charity but as rights and reparations owed many times.”
Poets June Jordan and Cheryl Clarke made eloquent pleas for bisexuality and lesbianism, respectively, as radical challenges to heterosexual domination (155).
For Jordan, sexual freedom is the foundation for all other struggles for freedom (155). “If you can finally go to the bathroom wherever you find one, if you can finally order a cup of coffee and drink it wherever the coffee is available, but you cannot follow your heart--you cannot respect the response of your own honest body in the world--then how much of what kind of freedom does any one of us possess? Or conversely, if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force?”
Cheryl Clarke makes a bold argument both against homophobia and for women’s autonomy, self-love, and independence from men (155). She does not argue that all women ought to become lesbian but rather that they reject “coerced heterosexuality as it manifests itself in the family, the state, and on Madison Avenue. The lesbian-feminist struggles for liberation of all people from patriarchal domination through heterosexism and for the transformation of all sociopolitical structures, systems, and relationships that have been degraded and corrupted under centuries of male domination.” Furthermore, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and transsexual movements contribute to the freedom of all by challenging all claims of what is “normal.” Sexuality may be one of the few conceptual spaces we have to construct a politics of desire and to open our imagination to new ways of living and seeing.