The Combahee River Collective Statement, written by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, was the first articulation of “identity politics,” offering a Black feminist framework in which knowledge, revolutionary theory, and practice was created out of the lived experience and study of "interlocking" systems.
Published in 1978, in a partnership with white socialist feminist Zillah Eisenstein (who invited the essay for her book Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism), the Statement is often cited as a precursor to Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality in critical legal studies (1989, 1991). I suggest the Statement’s theory of identity politics was—in the original design—not only a theory that centered Black women’s experiences in critiquing heterosexism, capitalism, and white supremacy, but also a method of knowledge-production in service of coalitionary politics.
For my paper, I propose to explore how the Statement holds critical pedagogical and curricular methods for building transformational learning and praxis across identities. While it is important to center the specific interventions of the Statement and the Black feminist history and labor in its genesis, I also suggest that its methods of the “revolutionary leap” (Hong, 2015) might provide a pedagogical pathway toward learning in ways that catalyze contemporary coalitions. More specifically, I want to explore if and how the Statement could invite white men, who often don’t have methods for feminist praxis, into learning and joining the legacy of the coalitionary politics of Black feminism through developing their own feminist statements in 2025.
To be clear, the Statement does not imagine white men being involved in supporting Black feminist politics. Rather, the essay ends with a sentence that is an indictment: Quoting Robin Morgan, the Statement reads in its second to last lines: “I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white heterosexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary-vested-interest power.”
When I teach this text to white men, I ask them to move from feeling defensive to doing the labor of imagining how they could, in fact, take up a revolutionary role. This question, in this historical moment, is especially urgent because we need to build a large, inclusive feminist politics.
I run feminist studies programs for clergy and teaching white male clergy requires experiments. There are challenges with teaching Black feminist texts as a non Black woman to white male religious leaders. For example, students struggle at a psychological level to reorient their reading, such that Black women’s experiences are centered (instead of their felt responses, including their defenses). At the same time, I want white male clergy to wrestle with how Black feminists make theory that also applies to their spiritual practices and epistemologies. I want to encourage white men to lean into the ways of knowing in feminist texts and to do their own labor of making feminist theory that holds the “personal is political” for their own lives. Given the amount of labor historically contributed by feminist women—and Black women specifically—how could white men join with their contributions?
The Black women leaders of the Collective needed to center their theory in their own subjectivities—that was a revolutionary intervention amidst the devaluation of their psyches, a theme the Statement speaks to. In How We Get Free, the Statement writers share that while their concept of “interlocked systems” is celebrated today, at the time of their writing, they faced immense opposition (2017). An attentive reading of the Statement itself shows the psychological, emotional, relational, and intellectual labor involved in their work. For example, the writers narrate the “feelings of craziness” and psychological overwhelm that many Black women felt before coming to a theory that reflected the material, psychological, and affective realities of their lives. They write: "..we had no way of conceptualizing what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening.” As How We Get Free describes, the theorizing of their lived experience was also interconnected to study groups, activism, and building coalitions throughout Boston.
That process radically honored the psyches and lives of Black women—and, the text itself still presses toward coalitionary politics and action. For example, the Statement’s theory and practice differentiated itself from the middle class white feminism of its time, as well as the Black masculinist nationalism. Still, the writers argue that they are not “separatists”—their writing was in service of using their theory of interlocked systems to build coalitions, including with progressive Black men suffering under white supremacy and capitalism. The Statement’s publication in Zillah Eisenstein’s collection also shows their partnerships with white anti-racist feminists. Barbara Smith (one of the Statement's writers), often emphasizes in her contemporary teaching the long-term work of white anti-racist feminist women, pointing to a history of building movement work through coalition.
My research and pedagogical question is how we can keep pressing, today, for the coalitionary politics and action to include more white men taking up feminist labor, even leadership. (And what is feminist leadership for white men? What does it look like?) What methods can white men learn from this text to develop their own theory and praxis of feminism?
For instance, the writers of the Statement situate the genesis of Black feminism in the work of Black foremothers— “like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown.” Today we might also add to these names Pauli Murray’s theorization of Jane Crow in the 1940s (Murray, 1987), or Louise Thompson Patterson’s theory of triple exploitation in the 1930s (McDuffie, 2011). Re-finding foremothers was a central method of 1970s Black feminism. What if white male readers did their own ancestral exploration—Who are the white men in history who have supported feminism, and Black feminism specifically? What models are there? What kinds of affective, spiritual, and psychological experiences would emerge for white men in doing their own labor to theorize new sets of feminist actions for today? What would I learn pedagogically from this experiment? And what could we build together in this historical moment?
The Combahee River Collective Statement was the first articulation of “identity politics,” offering a Black feminist framework in which knowledge, revolutionary theory, and practice was created out of the lived experience and study of "interlocking" systems. I suggest the Statement’s theory of identity politics was not only a theory that centered Black women’s experiences in critiquing heterosexism, capitalism, and white supremacy, but also a method of knowledge-production in service of coalitionary politics. While it is critically important to center the Black feminist history and labor in its genesis, I also suggest that its methods of the “revolutionary leap” (Hong, 2015) might provide a pedagogical pathway toward learning in ways that catalyze contemporary coalitions. Drawing on my teaching of white clergy men, I explore how studying the Statement invites white men, who often don’t have methods for feminist praxis, into learning and joining the legacy of the coalitionary politics of Black feminism through developing their own feminist statements in 2025.