Week 8 Blog Post

This week’s reading, an interview with Barbara Smith, a founder of the Combahee River Collective, explores the ways in which various identities can overlap or intersect to produce an experience different than those experienced by those with only one of the composite identities. Furthermore, Smith goes on the describe how groups representing a group of people often only represent the most privileged in that group – for instance, feminist organizations representing primarily white women or Black Liberation organizations representing primarily Black men. Notable about this collective is that they engaged in what is clearly intersectional organizing prior to the contributions made by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who formalized and popularized the theory of intersectionality. Similarly, their statement is credited as being the progenitor of the term “identity politics.”

The article also delves into the topic of organizing. Naturally, the question of representation in an identity-based organization is one in which the theory of intersectionality is applicable, and the route taken by Barbara Smith was to create a local and smaller group focused on the specific experiences of Black lesbian socialist feminists and to partake in activism from this specific perspective. Members were still free participate in larger organizations, and the collective would even strategically cooperate with other groups with which they had fundamental disagreements but shared a specific goal.

The ideas presented in this interview are, of course, relevant to my chosen movement of climate justice. As climate change affects everyone, but is made to more greatly affect marginalized communities, it is important form those communities to have their own spaces in which to advance their interests and share their perspectives. At the same time, it is important that there is a large and coordinated movement against climate change too – but that movement should be designed so as not to reconstruct patterns of marginalization.