A room of one’s own. That’s what Demita Frazier and Barbara Smith were thinking when they formed the Combahee River Collective in 1974. Originally the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), Combahee became independent when its founders realized the need for a more radical and overtly political voice than was possible in the NBFO given its reformist leanings. In particular, the women who made up Combahee were intent on bringing the concerns and perspectives of Black feminist lesbians and their allies from margin to center. It was ironic. The NBFO, after all, was one of multiple groups founded out of Black women’s discontent with the racial exclusionary practices of the women’s rights movement and the gender exclusionary practices of the civil rights and Black power movements. Yet it, too, failed in its inclusivity of the marginalized among the marginalized. Combahee was short-lived, disbanding in 1980. It continues to exert a powerful impact through the 1977 publication of the Combahee River Collective Statement, which has become a sacred text for Black feminist organizing, teaching, and writing.[1] In the proposed presentation, I utilize the Combahee statement as a lens for reflecting upon the practices that have transformed my teaching from the constraints of double consciousness to a womanist space that is “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people.”[2]
Womanist religious scholars are, by definition, what Patricia Hill Collins deems the “outsider-within.”[3] This is especially the case within theological education. As extensions of denominations, seminaries function as gatekeepers of denominational theology and polity. Rarely are Black women, however, employed by institutions representing their own traditions. Womanist epistemologies draw upon different sources of knowledge, ask different questions, and utilize different interpretative frameworks than “mainstream” scholarship. Consequently, our teaching and scholarship often attracts resistance, critique, and even hostility from our colleagues as well as our students. As members of a larger academic community, however, we must conduct our work in ways that satisfy the epistemological demands of educational institutions, publishers, and professional guilds.[4]
Our status as perpetual outsiders in academic spaces can inflict us with a particularly pronounced case of double consciousness, wherein we are constantly viewing and adjudicating ourselves based upon what we think our White and/or male colleagues, our institutional administrators, and denominational power-brokers might think. This can stilt our teaching, rendering the classroom into gilded cages where we seem to wield power but experience little freedom. The key to unlocking the cage is tapping into the “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior” that is characteristic not only of womanist identity but of transformative and liberative education.[5]
The four topics addressed in the Combahee statement – the genesis of our work, the beliefs and values that shape our politics, the psychological burden of our organizing, and the foci of our work – provide a framework for truly transformative teaching and learning. In the proposed paper, I utilize these four topics as a lens through which to name four principles that undergird the cultivation of a womanist classroom: (1) being centered and confident in my own outsider-within identity as a religiously hybrid African American woman who does interdisciplinary work in a mainline, predominantly White seminary; (2) decolonizing methods of assessment and discussion, decentering writing skill and encouraging cultural modes of communication such as personal storytelling and “talking ourselves into speech”; and (3) addressing the emotional labor inherent to transformative pedagogy, both that of students and faculty; and (4) designing and teaching courses that reflect Katie Cannon’s admonition to “do the work [my] soul must have] and that unapologetically center womanist and Black feminist perspectives. Using a specific crisis in a course on racial reconciliation, I describe how these help me to navigate emotionally and politically fraught situations in the classroom.
[1] Combahee River Collective, Combahee River Collective Statement, April 1977.
[2] Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi.
[3] Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986): S14.
[4] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2000), 253.
[5] Walker, ibid.
Existing for only six years, the Combahee River Collective has had a long-term impact on Black feminist organizing, teaching, and writing through the 1977 publication of its Combahee River Collective Statement. This paper explores how the Combahee River Collective Statement’s themes—genesis, values, burdens, and focus—offers a vital framework for transformative pedagogy by womanist theologians and religious scholars. Key principles include embracing an outsider identity, decolonizing assessment, addressing emotional labor, and centering Black feminist perspectives. By reflecting on a crisis in a racial reconciliation course, this presentation illustrates how womanist pedagogy fosters liberatory learning spaces, breaking free from double consciousness to cultivate classrooms committed to survival, wholeness, and courageous exploration.