Me, We

“And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”

Audre Lorde said that an oppressed group cannot afford to combat oppression on one front. If one is to believe that the right of freedom from intolerance belongs to only one group, that belief, in itself embodies discrimination and exclusion and it won’t be long, before the same forces oppressing others come for you because those forces function on the same belief. Lorde argues that attacks directed against lesbian and gay communities are also anti black because the oppressed mirror one another and of course there are differences in the degree of oppression but the basic principle that they must be excluded and discriminated against applies across the board. In this scheme of things, politics of intersectionality is not only liberating but a necessity.

The Combahee River Collective aimed to establish a political framework that is both anti-racist and anti-sexist. Their main argument being that there can be no emancipatory politics which is not inclusive, and which does not acknowledge those who suffer the most because of inter-sectional oppression. Black feminists supported the Civil Rights Movement wholeheartedly, because the belief was that it was everyone’s fight but if black men refuse to acknowledge their internalized misogyny and continue to marginalize and abuse women, rather base their politics on the patriarchal claim that men are to be leaders and women followers, then they cannot claim to speak for black people. The speak only for black men. If white women are to speak of a universal sisterhood but do not address their internalized racism, against black women, they do not get to claim that speak for all women. They speak only for white women. And if black men and white women do not acknowledge the inadequacy of their politics, they are also guilty of excluding, discriminating and making totalizing claims, the very things they claimed to rally against.

“We reject queenhood, pedestals and walking 10 paces behind. To be recognized as human, and levelly human, is enough.”  The politics of intersectionality, from this lens is a politics of recognition and that is liberating, for there is a refusal to accept the deadening, oppressive silence the world imposes on one’s self. The critique against intersectional politics is that if oppressed groups start seeing their identities as natural and cannot see themselves beyond their fixed identities of black, women, lesbian and so on and so forth, but black feminism is a very wholesome reply to this critique.

 Within their statement, the Combahee River Collective, reiterates that men are not enemies because of their biology but because of the maleness they have been socialized to conform to. Bell Hooks said that being an oppressor in just as anti-human as being the oppressed is; men, themselves are victims of patriarchy. Within that statement the collective also argues that they are Marxist because they understand how freedom can never be divorced from the class question and that capitalism, in itself, promotes a certain kind of masculinity. Hooks argued that the masculinity that the capitalist-patriarchy nexus created derived its power from exercising violence on the bodies of women. Similarly, white women are not inherently evil but if they don’t actively acknowledge the racism that they have been socialized with, they can never form a sisterhood with black women.

These identities are not natural, but they are very real, and, in that sense, emancipatory politics is much more complex and will miss out on what it claims to represent, which is an end to marginalization and discrimination, if it continues to do single issue politics. Oppression has no hierarchy when the ideal is a place for Everyone on the rendezvous of victory.