Week 8 Blog Post

This reading discusses activist Barbara Smith, founder of the Combahee River Collective Statement, and how many of those she worked with often those who had different beliefs than that her, yet they were still able to collaborate together on issues they shared common ground with. With the topic of feminism, she tended to collaborate with women of all different kinds of backgrounds, as she says, "I’m not saying that there were no kinds of tensions among and between us. There definitely were between us, as women of different racial and class backgrounds. But socialist feminists at least had it out on the table that they thought race and class were important oppressions to be integrated into an analysis of gender oppression." The idea of a divide among a community is important to address; of course, not everyone in a community is going to be the same, but continuing to work together despite these differences is what really helps to drive a movement forward.

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In terms of the Me Too Movement, the movement is dominated mainly by women, accounts of sexual assault from men residing in the minority. This has led to misconceptions about the movement, stating that it is only for women or how it is a supposed "witch hunt" against men, when this is not the point at all. There are instances of men supporting the Me Too Movement (such as male celebrities donning black and wearing Time's Up pins at the 2018 Golden Globes), despite women being the ones more prone (per se) to be sexually assaulted. Even non-victims of sexual assault work together with the movement to support it and raise awareness of it, which goes to show that even people of different identities and experiences can still form together to work with a movement and demand a change to be made.