Combahee River Collective

The Politics of Black Feminist Thought For this week, we read Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” by Kimberle Crenshaw and the book Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics by Joy James. Our discussion focuses on feminist thought and intersectionality. The Combahee River Collective’s aim was to combat the oppressions experienced by all women of color and to acknowledge the role of lesbians to the development of black feminism and African American history. There are four major topics of the collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement.” They are: 1) Genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism: Black women have a negative…

Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and I970s […] 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 women's lives. Black feminists and many Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence” (The Combahee river collective). They state that black feminist groups started in…

After reading this article “The Combahee River Collective Statement” I grab numerous information not just on black feminist but colored woman as well. Editor Zillah Eisenstein notes that the Collective does “Black women's 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.” (Eisenstein,1). Black female body, and how the dehumanization of the black body impacts black…

address issues of gender, leaving black women with no political allies. On top of this, neither of these ideologies adequately took class into account. In the 1970’s, a group of women came together to form the black feminist movement and write the Combahee River Collective, a manifesto of their beliefs. This document outlines the nature of racial, sexual class and heterosexual oppression and the overlap between racial, sexual, and class oppression. Oppression is an intersectional phenomenon…

[2]The Combahee River Collective began in 1974, in an effort to create a group who had the capability to fight oppression against black females.” (Smith,…

The critical piece of literature, “A Black Feminist Statement” by the Combahee River Collective, provides its readers with the backbone of what Black feminism is. The Combahee River Collective is a collection of Black feminists that established itself in 1974. Their fundamental cause is fighting “against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” (A Black Feminist Statement 210). The Combahee River Collective, in other words, sees Black feminism as “the logical political movement to…

Reflection Worksheet Introduction The Palmerston North Women’s Health Collective (PNWHC) has been part of the community since 1984 and providing the women of the Manawatu region with information and support on a wide range of health and well-being issues. The PNWHC offers free services such as pregnancy tests and cervical screening, and low cost services including counselling and natural therapies (The Palmerston North Women’s Health Collective [the PNWHC], 2014). The PNWHC was not my first…

What does the world of Anthem imply about the nature of technological progress? The society in the beginning of Anthem is a collective society with no room for any independence and it is a society that is very technologically primitive. The collective society of Anthem does not allow for innovation because they reject new ideas, frown upon independent thinking, and restrict people from doing what they want. These three ideas of the collective society block all innovation and research from the…

Collective Learning Technology has brought huge influences on everyone’s lives. The Duke University had brought iPod as an academic device and educational experiment to all the first-year class students. The iPod inverted the traditional role of technology, which has many new functions. Students not only can listen to music, but also use the iPod as an academic device to collaborate with others. This concept can be seen in Project Classroom Makeover, by Cathy Davidson. In Project Classroom…

In collective action, however, each part is a person. While humans are certainly much more complex than blocks on a computer screen, tetriminos and individuals are surprisingly comparable. Each individual takes up a different space in society, fitting into different social roles. Likewise, each tetrimino fits into a different crevice because of its shape. Yet, like humans, tetriminos are all fundamentally the same; they are all made up of four blocks, pieced together in different ways.…