If we take the numbers in Undermining Intersectionality seriously, the intersectionality most people know bears little resemblance to the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, and the
Combahee River Collective.
2017 How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the
Combahee River Collective.
Instead, the idea was to break bread (and lots of eggs) with the African American writers and activists of the
Combahee River Collective, the women of color who contributed to This Bridge Called My Back; Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Smith, and Elly Bulkin who together wrote Yours in Struggle; and Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz who edited Tribe of Dina.
For the Boston-based black feminist lesbian organization known as the
Combahee River Collective, which existed in the 1970s and early '80s, "simultaneity" was the word used to describe the cumulative impact of the various oppressions they experienced.
To this point, scholarship on intersectionality underscores the critical role of vulnerability and how systems make particular identities the result of and medium for such (Beale 1970;
Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 1989, 1991; Davis 1981; McCall 2005; Nash 2008).
Of course, feminists of colour--including the
Combahee River Collective (a collective of Black Lesbians in the 1970s and '80s) gender theorist Judith Butler, as well as feminists from other marginalized communities--had been demanding for years that the feminist movement include and advocate for them in equal measures.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the
Combahee River Collective situates Black women's archive of memory as critical to the narrative of the
Combahee River Collective's (CRC's) herstory.
Two years later, in 1972 Gerda Lerner published Black Women in White America and a year later Beverly Hawkins counteracts Simone de Beaudovir with Women is not Just a Female (1973) aimed at making visible "race" as an oppressive social category on the basis that minority groups shared a unique history in America "since they've been exploited, abused, dehumanized, and killed because of the color of their skin." (1973: 3) The following year, the "Black Feminist Statement" was proclaimed by the
Combahee River Collective.