Why Combahee? Why Now? A Critical Conversation with Margo Okazawa-Rey
Illustration of Margo Okazawa-Rey. Artwork by Sed Miles.
By emerald faith, Karla Méndez, and Jaimee Swift
In the second installment of our Special Blog Issue, “50 Years of Combahee”, Margo Okazawa-Rey speaks about the history of the Combahee River Collective, the importance of an internationalist framework in Black feminist thought, and the evolution of her politics from Combahee to now.
Margo Okazawa-Rey, Professor Emerita San Francisco State University, is an activist and educator working on issues of militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women examined intersectionally. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, working closely with Du Re Bang/My Sisters Place and Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She also is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, serves on the International Board of PeaceWomen Across the Globe in Bern, Switzerland, and is President of the Board of Directors of Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID).
Her recent publications include “Nation-izing” Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Anti-militarist Feminists, Social Justice (2020); Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives, Oxford University Press (2020); “No Freedom without Connections: Envisioning Sustainable Feminist Solidarities” (2018) in Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda Carty (eds.). She was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective.
Black Women Radicals, “50 Years of Combahee” Editors spoke with Okazawa-Rey about the history of the Combahee River Collective, the importance of an internationalist framework in Black feminist thought, and the evolution of her politics from Combahee to now.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jaimee Swift (JS): Before we get into our questions, you mentioned that you had some questions for us.
Margo Okazawa-Rey (MOR): Since you reached out to me, I’ve been thinking about why Combahee, and why now? Because when you mentioned the hat, t-shirt, and other kinds of paraphernalia, it felt like a kind of [d]eification. So, I’ve been curious about why Combahee, and why now?
JS: Apart from it being 50 years since the Collective’s founding, as the Executive Director of Black Women Radicals, what has always been important to me – even prior to establishing BWR itself – is archiving Black feminist histories, movements, and stories while also honoring our elders. I always abide by this Akan word, Sankofa, which means to go back and fetch what is at risk of being left behind. Now, I am not saying that I’m leading any of the efforts to do this archival work. I believe that myself, emerald, and Karla are part of a longer lineage of Black women and gender expansive folks who have been doing and are committed to this work. Related to Combahee, last year Black Women Radicals hosted a summit in New York City to honor the 50th anniversary of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), and we brought together some of NBFO’s original members. Returning to Combahee right now is about a larger commitment to celebrating Black feminist and other women of color organizations, such as the Third World Women’s Alliance, which Karla has done amazing work with as well.
Secondly, I’m the co-biographer of Barbara Smith’s (founding member of Combahee) forthcoming biography along with Joseph Fitzgerald and honoring the 50th anniversary is also important for the framing of the book. Also, with the Combahee River Collective t-shirts and other items through the collaboration with Philadelphia PrintWorks, BWR doesn’t make any money from that partnership. The collection was created to celebrate and honor the work of Combahee – it’s not an attempt to co-opt the legacy of the organization. Finally, as co-editors of this special issue, we’ve received submissions from people across the diaspora who are writing about how Combahee has impacted their Black feminist thinking and practices, so we thought it was a great opportunity to acknowledge and honor that legacy and its impact 50 years later.
“We didn’t set out to make history. We were a group of Black girls…trying to explain ourselves as Black lesbians in a heterosexist, patriarchal, racist world…”
MOR: Thank you for that – I’ve been curious about why the big deal because when we were together, we didn’t set out to make history. We were a group of Black girls – our youngest person was 20 or something, and the oldest person, Helen Stewart, was about 26 or 27. We were just trying to explain ourselves as Black lesbians in a heterosexist, patriarchal, racist world where we had to deal with the external and the internal regarding issues of class, heterosexism, etc. So, partly, it was really thinking about who we were at that historic moment, in an individual and collective way.
The initial formation was in Boston. There were some retreats in Western Massachusetts, but it was a Boston-based group, including Cambridge. Barbara and Beverly had just come from the NBFO meeting in Chicago before that, and all of the homophobia and rhetoric about “lesbians invading” was reported back to us. So, 50 years on, 10 years on, it’s like what did we do? Why does it matter that we were together 50 years ago? How did we get to where we are now?
The Combahee River Collective was never like an institution or a formal organization. It wasn’t like a 501 C3, or anything like that. It was primarily a series of retreats. And the statement, which was written by Demita, Beverly, and Barbara, is what activated women studies, sociology, ethnic studies, etc. professors and the subsequent generation. With this, I’m trying to think through the relationship between the “entity” that was the Combahee River Collective and the statement itself, and the difference in impact between the two of them, specifically the actual impact of the organizing the collective did.
emerald faith (ef): Thank you for these questions! One of the reasons why it’s important to document and ask you these questions about Combahee, even though it wasn’t a formal entity, is because of this critical moment that we’re in with these right-wing, conservative, fascist attacks. You can’t talk about anything that is somehow related to Blackness and Black feminist politics, queerness, transness, Palestine – which you’ve done significant work in – without being reprimanded or retaliated against. Alongside that, we also want to make sure we’re documenting the correct information, whether it’s the political commitments named in the statement or the history of the “organization,” from the different viewpoints of the members.
I have also noticed the ways that people, particularly across the artistic and literary landscape of the 70s, 80s, and 90s participated in these ephemeral processes and projects where they weren’t beholden to fixed organization or long-standing projects. They were coming together to do something and then moving on. These sort of untethered socio-cultural configurations were critical. The Combahee River Collective as a different version of that has so much to teach us in this moment. It challenges us to interrogate our intentions and political investments while clarifying what our work is. Returning to Combahee right now is also about correcting the record, as Jaimee said. It has been difficult to gather information about who was actually a part of the organization’s original formation versus who only attended the retreats.
MOR: Thinking two things in response to you, emerald, specifically regarding this idea of ephemerality that you mentioned because we were not a membership organization. You’re never going to know who came to the retreats or not, but more fundamentally, what constituted membership. That’s a real fundamental question to be asked. Would everyone who attended the retreats be considered members or visitors? We didn’t have that clearly outlined because we were loose. We were just meeting, talking about ideas, cooking, and making cookies.. So, I’m thinking about what might be the upsides of having that kind of formation, and what might be the challenges? Clearly, one of the challenges is determining who is who. The good side is that, these days, I think we need more ways to come together that’s not so clearly bound because then it just reinforces the dominant paradigm – what I think about as the geometry of oppression and marginalization that [re]creates a center and margin that has really trapped us in our own progressive movements.
Margo Okazawa-Rey at the Women Peacemakers Initiative. 2019. Photo Credit: Aadele. Wikimedia Commons.
“I think these ideas of inside and outside, center and margin, have really trapped us in our own progressive movements as well. All of these things configure around a particular geometry that is really part of the dominant paradigm that we are absolutely trying to transform, but we end up recreating.”
JS: Thank you for this. I’ve also been thinking a lot about this since our last conversation. It really pushed me to reassess myself, the work of BWR, and Black feminist movement as a whole to ask what are we doing and where are we going? Is what we’re practicing now really radical and revolutionary Black feminist politics or is it just neoliberal Black feminist politics? Are we influencers, or are we organizers? I will also say, when you mentioned the geometry of liberation, our enemy is very organized. I’ve seen a lot of things, but I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in Palestine in my entire life. I’ve seen so many dead children on my timeline that I can’t handle it. Because our enemy is so organized, it really makes me wonder where we go from here if we’re still having some of the same issues that you all were dealing with 50 years ago.
MOR: And [Palestine] connects directly to us as Black feminists in the United States. A question that we don’t often think about is what does it mean to be connected to the US State in all the ways we are. Even though we say we’re against it, we can say anything. We are inextricably connected to it, and I’m talking about two ways specifically. One is, of course, we’re paying taxes. The entire discretionary fund goes to militarism and funding wars. Billions to Israel, to Ukraine, you know all these places. And, of course, who are the beneficiaries? Manufacturers.
The other part that’s really important is, do you all think for one moment, that if this statement did not come out of the US, it would have traveled as far as it did? Absolutely not. So, we can’t just look at 50 years without looking at all the structural pieces of it, whether it’s connection to the academy with professors assigning the readings, or the ways in which knowledge from the U.S. travels to other places because of structural inequalities. Because it’s not that we’re so smart. It’s how power works. That’s the flow; that’s the circuit. We don’t hear about the African feminist statement on war and militarism from the 1980s. There were [women doing the work], and we don’t hear about them. We don’t even know about them. I think it’s really important for us to be humble as we’re celebrating all the contributions that different folks in Combahee made and recognize the structural features that make our work so visible.
“And [Palestine] connects directly to us as Black feminists in the United States. A question that we don’t often think about is what does it mean to be connected to the US state in all the ways we are? Even though we say we’re against it, we can say anything. We are inextricably connected to it…”
I can’t stress that enough because I’m all over the place in different parts of the world, and I see how much comes from the U.S. – whether it’s progressives or right wing. As leftists, as progressive folks, one of the things we have to come to terms with is, how do we understand that? What do we do about it? Most important to me is understanding for what are we responsible and to whom do we need to be accountable? Because all this stuff happens “in our name” even though we don’t align ourselves with the state.
What are the different kinds of questions we should be asking to understand the world in a deeper way, to understand power in the ways it configures and reconfigures itself with different actors? For example, we talked about class in the statement, but we didn’t really do anything with it. So, in this moment, how do we understand both class and nation? Something I’ve been turning around in my head as I’m approaching my 75th year of life is, what did I believe back then? What did I think back then that I now know wasn’t the best way to think about things because of different circumstances? Not necessarily that I was wrong, but just reflecting 50 years ago, what would be our core principles now?
JS: Thank you so much for that. I have so many things to say about that, particularly the internationalist aspects of what you were discussing as someone who works with Black Brazilian feminists. Many of them made statements or had literature prior to the Combahee River Collective, prior to what we call intersectionality coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. We can go back to Angela Davis who said, “Why do you honor me so much when you have Lélia Gonzalez.” Even as I’ve gone to Salvador, Bahia where my research, host family, friends, and community are located – it’s the Blackest city in the Blackest state in the Diaspora – only second behind Nigeria. However, my U.S. passport and U.S. citizenship affords me a different experience. And so, how do we grapple with that? How do I grapple with being a Black, light-skinned, heterosexual, woman with a PhD who is able to go back and forth to Brazil – without a visa – and my Black Brazilian counterparts cannot do the same?
MOR: And how do we think about the “you” as a collective? That’s the other part of being so embedded in dominant culture. Well, it’s not even dominant, it’s kind of permeated all levels, but it’s this deep, deep individualism, which is going to be our downfall. Everybody’s a lone-ranger. How do we really internalize that our destinies are all bound up together? How do we really internalize that none of us are free until all of us are free? That’s a slogan that’s been repeated so many times, and I realize that I’m sounding really, really critical. I guess I’m frustrated. Frustrated from just seeing what’s happening in Palestine.
So much of the work around Palestine seems like its performance. You know, I wonder what the next hot topic is going to be. Black folks say, “Well, you know, we can identify with Palestinian people’s struggle,” and sometimes what’s being said is, “Their struggle is just like ours,” instead of saying the forces underlying the conditions are what’s similar. There’s still this idea beneath that sentiment that “we’re still the most oppressed.” It’s a slick way to do oppression Olympics. Before, it was straight up hierarchy of oppression until Audre Lorde said, “Just stop that.” So, I’m confused about that. I don’t know how to get through it, beyond it, over it, past it so that we really get how our struggles are linked, and not just get stuck on the particulars.
JS: I’m glad you feel comfortable to say that you’re frustrated because I think we need to hear that too. I think many of us are having similar frustrations. Like I said, I’m so concerned about the future of Black feminist politics – radical, revolutionary, Black feminist politics. Do you think that there is a Black feminist movement right now?
MOR: This is going to be quite controversial, but I think this is a both/and moment. Historically, there have been so many contradictions and disjunctions in our own lives as in the political world. I think that Black feminism, or any sort of identity-based feminism was useful at a particular moment in history, at different times. For me, now, my question is how do we conceptualize a Black feminism that’s bigger, that is about the whole world, not just geographically speaking, but a feminism that thinks about all of life, all living beings, the natural world, while still being grounded in the specificities of where we are? I don’t even want to say transnational because it’s still then tied to the national, but how do we think about a global feminist movement where we can get clear about our values, unifying principles, relational practices, and methodologies, irrespective of where we are geographically, and how will those values and principles help us do the specific organizing and movement building that needs to happen in various locations?
“For me, now, my question is how do we conceptualize a Black feminism that’s bigger, that is about the whole world, not just geographically speaking, but a feminism that thinks about all of life, all living beings, the natural world, while still being grounded in the specificities of where we are?”
I think the question of does Black feminism exist, or what does Black feminism in the future look like kind of reproduces the same geometry that I mentioned previously. For folks who identify as Black feminist, what’s the movement we want to create where every living being can thrive.
And, to an extent, things have changed these days. You can proudly proclaim yourself as a feminist. Back in the day, it was more that feminism was perceived as a “white woman” thing, or they would just call you a bulldagger. We were dealing with both internal and external antagonism on two fronts at least. So, it’s great that things have changed in a way, and that’s important to acknowledge.
ef: I agree that things are better in that regard, but I do think that although people are able to publicly declare themselves as Black feminists today, we do still face significant misogynoirist violence and antagonism online, and also – to your point – there’s an issue of people claiming Black feminism but having no real political grounding or expression of what their investments are in a way that abstracts the term from any real meaning, or, at least, doesn’t automatically imply a certain set of values, beliefs, and practices, as you’ve said. And finally, I do think there’s a dangerous conflation between folks who study Black women’s history and political thought and an identification as a Black feminist.
MOR: To be a developer of ideas, a developer of praxis is important, and I agree with you. I think people need to have ways to learn and study together, and there’s lots of ways to do that. Also, related to social media and beyond, there’s a lot of information, much of it is contradictory. It’s not simply a matter of knowing something, but really understanding. For example, if we take the current moment, if Jewish people, their families generations of people back, were affected, massacred in the holocaust, and they can say six million people were murdered, what about that experience do they have to understand to make sure it never happens again? They know that happened, but how do you take that information in such a way that when you say never again, it permeates your consciousness and conscience in such a way that never again means to anybody? I would like us as Black feminists to really make a distinction between just knowing and understanding something.
Also, returning to an earlier point, there’s a difference between living with contradictions and being a hypocrite, right? There’s no clean place for us to stand, we know that. So, recognizing these structural contradictions and advantages as embedded in how we move through the world, how they shape our relationships is important. 50 years is important, too. It makes us want to be better, or it makes me want to be better. We can’t rest on our laurels. We live with contradictions and they help us become more whole human beings. Who do we have to become to live in the utopia we’re going to create? Maybe not in my generation, not in your generation, but we’re going to do it. We’ve seen too many examples of radical organizations or decolonized states where people end up recreating the same mess, except in some ways worse because they were supposed to have done better.
Editors: We want to say thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. It has truly been a Black feminist masterclass. Thank you for everything that you’ve done and continue to do for us – for your wisdom, care, consideration, and leadership. Are there any parting words you have for us?
MOR: I’ll say this, and I’ve come to this just recently, I do this work because I love life, and I love people. That’s a really different starting place than when I was part of Combahee where we wanted to explain ourselves and find a place for ourselves. And this difference has made me more compassionate. I’m doing this work and being in the world because I love life, and I love people. You know, it can be pretty discouraging to see things that are happening in the world and discouraging to struggle with how we keep moving forward, but having these kinds of conversations makes you remember that there are avenues and people that are going to continue to do the right thing, or what they think is the right thing, to make the world a better place for everyone. So, thank you so much.