Here's my take on Combahee,
frogwoman
The Combahee group was for black women and encouraged essentially a form of separatism, certainly from male-infected family structure, all AFAIK were - to a greater or lesser extent - able to coincide with a lesbian feminist outlook.
Some of its members Audre Lorde (had a famous exchange with Mary Daly who said all religions were sexist, Lorde said black and African ones weren't) and Cheryl Clarke were involved in Conditions, particularly the famous 5th issue - a major collection of black feminist writing.
That issue in 1979, large run later reprinted in 1982, featured the brilliant or notorious poem (depending on how you look at it) 'Minority' (either expressed the rejection of black history or appeared to pit Jewish minority against black minority):
"Mine is not a People of the Book/ taxed but acknowledged;/
their distinctiveness is not yet a dignity;/ their Holocaust is lower case"
A lot of Combahee and Conditions production was
feeling-based and
literature-based featuring recollections of events of a past racism and sexism often in the formally segregated Deep South.
Not all black feminists left the mainstream women's organisations but the majority of those that did to form Combahee were southern black women.
Although anti-capitalist in general, because most were outside of the labour market in their formative experiences (which the consciousness raising was based/developed upon), a lot of the Combahee's focuses - as mostly black lesbian women in the south - were chauvinism from poor black males and poor whites.
In a sense, perhaps it was an inevitable result of a legacy of a 100 years of failed racist Reconstruction.
Virtually all of them entered either 1 Academia esp. literature and english departments (the old era of writing was dead and boring by the 1980s - needed blood), or 2 widening non-profit charities linked with support to women (funded properly for the first time as women starting making and holding onto their money).
Combahee has become a kind of totem for 'intersectionality' because it was people living through sexism, racism, classism and homophobia, although they only ever used the phrase 'interlocked', it has been retrospectively applied - to make it out as if 'intersectionality' comes from a huge movement when it comes from a 1991 liberal legalistic analysis of women's issues.
'intersectionality' is only tangentially involved with what was in the first place only a consciousness raising exercise (nothing wrong with that at all, but be careful of thrusting it cold to the non-political oppressed in different ways).
Interlocked is actually a much better description because people get it much quicker and it leaves open the aim/goal of people being able to unlock them.
does anyone know what i mean or am i talking bollocks?
