[“In' A Black Feminist Statement' (1977), Combahee River Collective (CRC) members reflected that the group's consciousness- raising sessions were able to expand on white women's insights because they discussed race and class alongside sex, delving into the specificities of black women's experiences and addressing the ‘psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness'. But they also noted that some members of the group were concerned that consciousness-raising functioned primarily as ‘emotional support', and these members rejected it to focus on more directly political work.
Former CRC member Barbara Smith recalls her first encounter with the term ‘women's liberation': in 1968 she invited Mark Rudd to speak at Mount Holyoke where she was studying. (Rudd was prominent in SDS before he joined the Weathermen.) The young white woman who accompanied him described herself as involved in women's liberation, and Smith initially found the notion baffling and slightly absurd: ‘I could not even understand what the hell is she talking about? I could not— this is '68, right ?. ... my perspective then was like, “What do white women have to complain about?" Prior to the formation of the CRC in Boston in the mid- 1970s, Smith had been involved in the Civil Action group, anti-Vietnam War organising and women's groups. Reflecting on the statement's composition and lasting significance, Smith notes that the group were not only coming together as black women, but that they were also mostly lesbians, were all anti-capitalist and were, moreover, committed internationalists:
We were third world women. We considered ourselves to be third world women. We saw ourselves in solidarity and in struggle with all third world people around the globe. And we also saw ourselves as being internally colonized. We were internally colonized within the United States.
The genealogy of the term' identity politics' can be traced back to the CRC statement. In the CRC's definition, identity politics facilitated the articulation of interlocking oppressions— race, class, gender, sexuality and so on. Colleen Lye discusses how the concept came to be treated as synonymous with intersectionality, later articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, a conflation which, Lye argues, risks masking internal differences and historical shifts within the radical black feminist tradition. While the CRC's goal was ‘the quest for a revolutionary anticapitalist subject to which Black women might belong and, in belonging, transform and advance', Crenshaw's theory demonstrates the impossibility of representing such a subject. Lye reads this distinction as reflecting a historical shift away from ‘the emancipatory promise of a politics of subjectivity'. A concern with subjectivity was retroactively reduced to a concern with individualism, but by insisting on a historically contextualised reading Lye shows that subjectivity was seen by the CRC as a crucial site in the struggle for collective social transformation. The inescapably circular logic that also undergirded the Weather Underground's self- criticism practices returns here: socially formed psyches need to transform in order to transform society, which formed the psyches, which need to transform and so on and so on. Yet the CRC statement expressed far more patience for processes of both social and psychological transformation than the Weather Underground's self-destructive self-criticism practices.
Lye proposes reading the CRC statement as a ‘document of US Maoism'. Prising the CRC statement apart from its subsequent reception, Lye plunges it back into the immediate internationalist political context of its composition, reading Mao's dialectical understanding of contradiction, in which particularity and universality coexist, into the CRC's definition of' identity'. Identity for Mao does not signal the splintering of a whole into discrete fragments; instead, he sees parts as linked to a totality. Lye notes that the CRC statement's concluding emphasis on subjective transformation could seem strangely disappointing and deflating, its revolutionary bombast undercut by humble proposals for future endeavours. The CRC writes:
As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. 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 feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.”]
hannah proctor, from burn out: the emotional experience of political defeat, 2024
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