How We Get Free

FIrstly, I believe that books like How We Get Free are inherently import to the black rights movement. More than that though I was excited to read this text because often times I feel like black women don’t have a place in movements that protest for their rights. They have historically been kept from both women's rights movements and certain civil rights movements as well. It is refreshing to see a piece of work that discusses the issue of just black women's rights. The book discusses the issue of black women's place historically in liberation movements in the introduction, specifically on pages 5 and 6. The author writes “The inability or unwillingness of most white feminist organizations to fully engage with anti racist issues that affected black women...alienated Black women. The same was true with the Black liberation movement.” The author notes that in the African-American rights movements, male leaders often opposed women's right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. Similarly most of the women’s rights movements of the time didn’t have platforms that focused on issues that really affected women of color, such a sterilization, sexual assault, and workplace rights. The book then transition from the history of African-American women's place in the movement to talking about the Combahee River Collective. The CRC as they are mentioned in the book, is a radical Black feminist organizations that was created circa the 1970’s. Their platform was based off a reorganization of the capitalistic society, which is what they believed contributed to the oppression of women of color. I feel as though radical groups like this were born out of the anger and alienation that African-American women felt. While I was reading I compared the CRC to the emergence of the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers. I feel as thought the CRC was simply a way for black women to draw more attention to their cause, while advocating for rights and issues that affected them; rights and issues that were often left out of the other movements. As this class progress and we get into more radical movements and formations of organizations, I think it would be interesting to have a class discussion on civil discourse. Again I am often reminded of the panel that I attended on the topic earlier in the semester where one panelist said that if a conversation isn't enough then something else must be done. I would be curious to see my classmates take on this approach.

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