The Combahee River Collective Statement shaped Black feminist thought in the US by insisting that oppressions do not arrive one at a time. Written in 1977, it described the overlapping economic and social oppression Black women faced, in the words of its co-author Barbara Smith. Smith says it also coined the term “identity politics”.
She made that claim in The Guardian in 2020. She wrote that the statement pushed the international left and other movements to see inequality as structural, and as something that hits oppressed groups in different ways.
Who wrote it
The statement had three co-writers. Barbara Smith co-founded the collective and also Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Beverly Smith, a Black feminist health advocate and writer, was among the original members.
Barbara Smith was born under Jim Crow in 1946 and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where her family had moved in the first wave of the Great Migration. She joined the civil rights movement as a teenager, working with the Congress of Racial Equality. By her own account she has been out as a Black lesbian feminist since the mid-1970s.
The word that mattered: interlocking
Boston Review singles out one idea as the statement’s fame: its description of oppressions as “interlocking”. The magazine places it in a line of Black feminist thought. It updated the “triple oppression” that the activist Claudia Jones set out in 1949. It also inspired Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined “intersectionality” about a decade later.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in her book How We Get Free, argues that the collective’s contribution is hard to measure because feminists now take so much of it for granted. In her reading, Black women could not describe their oppression as sexism alone or racism alone. What compounded it was the way those identities merged.
How the term travelled
The phrase has since spread well beyond the people who wrote it. Barbara Smith said in 2020 that the statement’s ideas “continue to reverberate”. She also said she was often disheartened to see identity politics and intersectionality reduced to buzzwords.
