The Combahee River Collective Statement

The statement is dated Boston, April 1977; JSTOR Daily’s bibliographic note says it first appeared in print in 1979, in Zillah Eisenstein’s edited collection Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. That interval matters: movement writing has a moment of composition and discussion, then passes through editing, publication, and circulation before entering a public archive. The statement speaks collectively about Black feminist politics. It is not one representative speaking for every Black woman, nor a definition meant to contain every experience.

From different experience to connected systems

The opening does not treat race, gender, heterosexual norms, and class as separate identity labels. It argues that systems of oppression interlock and shape the conditions of life. That shifts the political question. It is not only whether a movement has added women to its membership, but whether its goals, organization, and distribution of resources still take white women’s circumstances, men’s leadership, or an abstract, supposedly “sexless” worker as the norm. Black women are not peripheral examples waiting for another movement to include them. Starting from their own position can expose what a theory organized around a single axis cannot explain.

The statement’s account of identity politics is also not the same as today’s shorthand for competition among labels. The Collective treats Black women’s worth and liberation as ends in themselves, not as an appendix to someone else’s liberation; it also connects self-definition to structural opposition to capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. The claim is not that only people with the same identity may speak. It is that people long pushed to the margins can make analysis from their own experience, rather than having a supposedly universal political agenda set for them in advance. To reduce this argument to “identity over solidarity” is to miss the statement’s sustained attention to organizing, class, and coalition.

How personal experience becomes shared knowledge

The text develops “the personal is political” through a concrete account of collective discussion. Members recall naming the experience of Black girls being considered both intellectually capable and socially undesirable as “smart-ugly.” This is more than self-deprecation: the phrase catches how intellectual ambition can be punished by racialized and gendered standards of desirability, and how private insecurity may be produced by repeated social sanctions. Through telling and comparing experiences in consciousness-raising, feelings easily dismissed as individual personality or social failure become patterns that can be named, analyzed, and challenged. The point is not that experience is automatically infallible; it is that marginalized experience can reveal institutional relations that dominant theory overlooks.

That process does not stop at listening. The statement recalls work against sterilization abuse, for abortion rights, in support of women facing violence, and an effort to establish a shelter for battered women in a Black community. It also records disagreement, departures, reorganization, and the group’s turn toward study and publication. Placing these practices alongside theory makes the organization itself an object of analysis. Who carries political labor, which needs count as urgent, and how emotional support and public action sustain each other are not administrative details added after politics; they are part of politics.

Coalition without silence; structural analysis beyond identity

The Collective argues both for solidarity with Black men against racism and for struggle with Black men over sexism. It also rejects white feminism’s tendency to treat white women’s experience as the experience of women in general. This double critique is not a refusal of coalition; it is a refusal to purchase coalition with silence. The statement resists explaining male domination as the inevitable nature of biological maleness, and it refuses to isolate women’s gendered oppression from race and class. Its strategic question is concrete: when a common goal asks some members to set their own injuries aside, whose unity is being protected, and whose safety is postponed?

Just as important, the statement does not stop at recognition of difference. It brings capitalism and imperialism into its political-economic analysis, arguing that the image of a raceless, sexless worker obscures Black women’s specific position in the labor force. Nor does it assume that a socialist revolution would automatically end racism or sexism. Anti-racist and feminist commitments must shape the transformation itself. Identity, material labor, and organizing strategy are connected here; readers are not asked to choose between acknowledging situated experience and changing institutions.

Read as a situated historical intervention

This is a Black lesbian socialist text produced through particular relationships, places, and movement conditions in the 1970s—not a ready-made checklist for every marginalized community today. Its candor about organizing difficulty makes it impossible to tell as a frictionless story of oppression leading directly to theoretical victory. Nor can its concepts replace the work of asking today who remains unheard and who controls resources. “Intersectionality,” later developed as a theoretical term by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, should not be retroactively presented as the Collective’s own name for its 1977 politics. A better reading begins with the statement’s language and then follows how later thinkers and organizers have inherited, debated, and revised it.

Read the full statement, then consult JSTOR Daily’s annotated text and bibliographic note for its publication history and later discussion. For contrasting forms of follow-up reading, Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought develops questions of knowledge, self-definition, and controlling images; Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s edited Words of Fire places Black women’s thought within a longer history of writing. These are reading paths, not works the statement claims to cite.