The Combahee River Collective Statement: Annotated
The Black feminist collective’s 1977 statement has been a bedrock document for academics, organizers and theorists for 45 years.
For this month’s Annotations series, we chose the Combahee River Collective Statement, written in 1977 and first published in Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, 1979. It is a foundational document in Black feminism, whose impact continues to be seen and felt throughout US political life today. It was one of, if not the first, documents to coin and define “identity politics”, and its descriptions of interlocking systems of oppression are integral to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. We present it here, along with related scholarship from both the time period in which it was written, as well as current discussions. We hope you find it a valuable resource for yourself, and for students. As always, links to the underlying scholarship are free to all readers.
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