How We Get Free edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Compiled by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective statement, How We Get Free gathers together the statement itself as well as interviews with CRC founding members Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, an interview with Alicia Garza, founding member of Black Lives Matter, and a speech by scholar and activist Barbara Ransby. These texts are drawn together and contextualized with an introduction by Taylor.
I first read the Combahee River Collective statement in 2012, when facilitating a Young Women’s Feminist Leadership Academy in Cincinnati, Ohio. Reading it was a revelation then, and has become even more so each time I’ve returned to it in later years: the clarity, the path-making, the way so many threads of truth and experience are held together as simultaneously distinct and inseparable—this statement is a profound example of Black feminism, of speaking for yourself in a way that is collective, loving, unflinching, and intersectional. I was impacted by all of these qualities upon my early readings of the CRC statement, just as I was impacted by the anti-capitalist critique fundamental to this document—a critique I’d never found in the works of White feminists whose work I read. I was impacted and impressed, yes, but neither did I follow the thread of this inspiration to more deeply research the CRC or to pursue the works and writings of its founders. This was my shortcoming alone, and indicative of the way White feminism had raised me: I was in fact breaking out of the White feminist tradition I’d been brought up in to be reading the CRC statement and passing it along to young feminists at all. I thought reading this document, admiring it, and allowing myself to consider it alone and out of context, was enough to be a “good” White feminist.
How We Get Free, while by no means collected for the edification of White feminists, pushed me to reconsider my entire relationship to this document. No longer do I think of this document as an almost disembodied/dematerialized outcome of the 70s and the consciousness raising movement. Instead, I know it to be a deeply contextualized and material outcome of Barbara Smith’s experiences organizing in the anti-war movement from the vantage of overwhelmingly White Mt. Holyoke, Beverly Smith’s connection to her sister and alienation in the movement spaces of the academy, the two sister’s upbringing in a woman-led household; it is the outcome of Demita Frazier’s own student activism, her refusal to believe she did not belong in anti-capitalist/socialist spaces, even when the overwhelmingly White organizers wanted her to think White people were the only ones who had theorized against capitalism. It is the outcome of Boston and the consciousness raising and collective movement there. It is the outcome of Black feminism. It is the outcome of Harriet Tubman’s liberatory raid on the Combahee River, where she facilitated 750 enslaved people’s self-emancipation.
The interviews in the book are at turns funny, profound, incisive, rambling, revealing, and at all points inspirational. They are personal. They are political. They are not screeds, but reflections upon a past—and the way that past spirals into and through the present towards the future—that is inseparable from political life and activism undertaken to end capitalism, end racist oppression, and end misogyny and homophobia. This physically compact little book is expansive in its content, historical importance, and ability to inspire.