The Shortcomings Of The Combahee River Collective

In the 1970’s African American women created the Combahee River Collective to address the unique struggles that African American women face in their day-to-day lives. In 2016, black activists founded The Movement of Black Lives to advocate for all black people more generally. Both groups incorporated at least some intersectional ideas into their arguments and used similar stylistic strategies to communicate their ideas. However, these groups differed in the ways that they established target audiences, the breadth of institutions that they addressed, and in the ways they used word choice to further their causes.

Despite oppression women have always resisted. Women have resisted oppression in many ways. Women have responded to their multiple sources of oppression of sexism, racism, heterosexism and colonialism. Women resisted oppression by standing up for their rights. Women have been left out of the discussion of oppression for centuries. In a patriarchy society where males are the narrators and voices being heard, one is rarely educated on women struggles. In the Western world gender is a construct made to keep one group superior and the other inferior. Gender concerns what it means to be women or men in society. The traditional notion of gender is acknowledged to not be defined the same all over the world. The general concept of gender is challenged

On March 1 2017, I attended an event for the anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. This event included readings, musical performances, and a choreographed performance. The entire event completely captivated me, but I was most impacted by Andrea Jenkins reading from her part of the anthology titled “The Price We Pay: How Race and Gender Identity Converge”. In her piece, she talked a lot about gender identity, race, and how they intersect.

When the U.S. Declaration of Independence was written, it was generalized towards one group: white, preferably European, males. As years passed and the United States grew into a well-known nation, it was still clear that this group was getting more rights than others. This group created the idea of intersectionality to anyone who did not fit inside their parameters of being the typical the Euro-American white male. Everyone should be getting free rights, but this was not the case, until the other groups started fighting back. The women of the United States were one group who stood up and fought for their rights, ending women’s suffrage.

Without applying intersectionality in analysis, oppression can only be understood in general terms, which can cause forms of oppression to become undetected (Mattsson, 2014). Instead, intersectionality, demonstrates the complexity of gender, sexuality, class, and race avoiding stereotypes as a whole, rather than simplifying an individual based on one characteristic (Mattsson, 2014). For example, when I was working at a Community Centre in the Jane and Finch area, I had a conversation with my co-worker. He described the barriers and struggles he has faced because of his race and socioeconomic status. It was through this conversation that I realized the pre-conceived notions my co-worker had about me, as a white individual who did not grow-up in the same neighbourhood.

Intersectionality has become the latest feminist “buzzword” as it comes to the discussion of pop culture, politics or academia. the article “Intersectionality” by The Washington Post, tells us how the term intersectionality was initially used to describe how race and gender could bisect as the forms of oppression. However, now the term is used to trace how different forms of discrimination overlap and relate. It also describes how important is it for feminists to consider women from diverse backgrounds when advocating for social causes. This term encompasses numerous social factors such as sexual orientation, disability, class and nationality.

In “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform,” Dean Spade proposes that the United States was founded through “racialization…(which) continues to operate under new guises… that produce, manage, and deploy gender categories and sexuality and family norms” (16). More over, these laws and norms tend to maintain the “status quo,” and employ an inherently flawed justice system that is only equipped to address single-axis discrimination issues (5). Thus, the intersectionality movement is largely dismissed by the social and justice systems, as it utilizes “critical intersectional tools… that are often (too) difficult for legal scholars to comprehend” (17). Interstionality’s progress is also impeded by advocates leaving to support single-axis issues. However, Spade warns that this approach is ineffective, as it fails to protect the most marginalized members of society.

Crenshaw (1989, 1993) argued that race and gender are not mutually exclusive social identities that a Black woman experiences, the intersection of race and sexuality go accordantly with each other. Similarly, hooks argued that they are equally congruent values to the lives of those affected by such identities (2000). Crenshaw (1989) criticized the feminist movement for its failure to consider and promote the voices of women in the margins; the women who occupy more than one oppressed space and hold more than one oppressed status because of their race, sexuality, class, as well as gender. She noted, in “mapping the margins,” as did hooks, that some women are so oppressed in ways other than their gender that they do not see the feminist movement

Kareen Harboyan English 1C Professor Supekar March 15, 2018 Word Count: Crenshaw’s Mapping the Margins: The Marginalization of Women of Color Analyzed Through Generalization and A Feminist Lens Crenshaw's Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color expands on the multifaceted struggles of women of color and the generalizations ingrained in society that limit women of color and keep them in a box. In this text, Crenshaw builds on the concept of intersectionality which proposes that social categorizations such as gender and race are intertwined and have great influence on one another.

It is impossible to discuss gender and the influences it has on one livelihood without acknowledging the other aspects of one’s identity. Other aspects such as race, class, and sexuality in combination with will always play a major role in one’s life choices and the way they are perceived by others. The term intersectionality as stated by Susanne Hochreiter offers a way to understand the multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed. Intersectionality explains why gender cannot be in isolation from other inequalities in the social world. As a black Haitian woman raised in America, it is clear to see that my identity occupies several spheres.

Additionally, these stories reveal the great diversity among women. Generally, women are grouped together, as stated by Lorde: “As women we have either been taught to ignore our differences or view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than forces of change (Lorde, 1979).” Despite the efforts to categorize women’s issues into one mass of problems, White women perceive the world differently than African American women, Hispanic women, Native American women, etc., and vice versa. This conglomeration of “women’s issues” does not address every aspect of being a woman in patriarchal and unjust societies throughout the world.

The problem with the “wave metaphor” is, when these periods of feminist history are viewed through an intersectional lens, we see that most of early feminist history was only the activity of economically privileged white women, or women whose intersectionality was favored by the American patriarchy. The marginalization of other women, whose intersectionalities were not favored in the past, leads to a whitewashed view of historical progress. However, women of color had recognized opinions among their own coalitions, but their opinions were simply not recognized by white upper-class feminist movements. Further analysis of feminist movements around the world, when viewed through an intersectional lens, allows us to see that the “wave metaphor” hardly holds it’s water.

The reading this week brought to my attention that historic events have a way of repeating themselves. In Folklore of the Freeway, Eric Avila explains that during the “Freeway Revolt” there were different ways that communities organized and the types of issues they were fighting against. These issues and organization structures mirror current day protests. Likewise, the connections between how women were treated with respect to protests during the “Freeway Revolt” and the recent Women's match are astounding. In the context of these two events, white women are seen as saints for fighting a fight that doesn’t affect them, while women of color as ridiculed for making a big deal out of nothing.

America presently still faces many inequalities and lack of justice against oppressed minority groups that aren’t white, cis, hetero, Christian men, even after the decades of activism to combat this. Activist constantly fight for these discriminated, marginalized groups and against the systematic oppression they face. But there are too many fights to be fought all at once. To name a few there is; racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. Textual evidence given to us over the course of this class shows that tackling all of the social justice movements at once is not possible.

Black feminism issued as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit. We need to understand the interconnections between the black and women’s