Dreaming Freedom in Boston
Left image: the Combahee River Raid, June 2, 1863, in which Harriet Tubman led Union soldiers in the liberation of 750 enslaved people. Right image: 2019 Black in Design promotional graphic
In the late 1970s, a group of Black, queer feminists in Boston gathered to imagine a future in which they would be free. This was not just theorizing. White women in ‘their’ movement believed a focus on issues specific to Black women detracted from the ‘struggle for women’s liberation’. These issues included access to abortion, forced sterilization, domestic violence, anti-Black discrimination, food insecurity and other everyday effects of material deprivation. Recognizing that “the only people who care enough to work consistently for our own liberation is us,” these Black women articulated their position in a collective statement. The women, a large and fluid group including Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Fraizer, Audre Lorde, and Cheryl Clarke, identified a historical precedent for their project in a daring liberation raid executed by Harriet Tubman on South Carolina’s Combahee River in 1863, in which Tubman led 150 Union troops to evacuate approximately 750 enslaved people by boat in the dark of night.
The Combahee River Collective, active from 1974 to 1980, articulated many tenets of Black feminism then circulating. Its work underlies Black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw’s writing on intersectionality beginning in 1989. Although they have often been misrepresented, especially by White people and institutions, as something like 'the presence of Black women in a space’, Black feminism and intersectional practice are much more than tokenism. A key starting point, as articulated by Crenshaw’s contemporary, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, is the recognition that Black women exist at minimum in a state of ‘fiveness’: as Black, as women, as Black women, as economically oppressed, and as economically oppressed Black women...
Queerness, and Blackness in its Diasporic complexities, were necessary concerns for these women, who were fed up not only with the subordination of their needs as Black women to those of White women in the second wave of the feminist movement. They were frustrated by assumptions of heteronormativity rampant in a movement which feared and rejected many lesbians and trans women - especially trans women of color, despite the central role of Black lesbians and trans women as instigators of the Stonewall Rebellion and other radical interventions of the late 60s and early 70s. Immigrant Black and Latina women, coming in large numbers from (conditionally American) Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti and other Caribbean islands, faced different struggles than American-born Black women. However, the women of the Collective realized that recognition of their disparate identities, rather than dividing them, was central to their struggle for collective liberation. In 2019 you’d have thought the term was invented by Fox News to slander Congresswomen Tlaib, Omar, Pressley, and Ocasio-Cortez, but it was the women of the Collective who invented the term ‘identity politics’ to describe this recognition. In their own words:
This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.
At the Harvard Graduate School of Design African American Student Union’s Black in Design conference, ‘Black Futurism 2019’ in the Collective’s hometown of Boston in the first week of October that I was confronted with a question requiring deeper consideration: what does White liberation look like? This is a question we who are racialized as White rarely, if ever, ask ourselves - particularly as we work within struggles for the liberation of people racialized as Black.
Dozens of designers, activists, researchers and practitioners shared their work at Black in Design 2019, including cultural organizer Pierce Freelon and activist architect Deanna Van Buren. Members of the collectives Blackspace and Design in Color facilitated workshops on storytelling and speculative design. The conference, organized by students to address questions of identity and design’s role in movements for liberation in response to police murder of Black people in 2014 and 2015, is unique among architecture, design and planning spaces for the degree to which principles of feminism, antiracism, and even queerness are surfaced in interdisciplinary conversations. Though the degree of class consciousness expressed in the space is shaped significantly by its position within an elite institution of power and privilege, students have demonstrated an interest in discussing at least some of the material concerns around which the women of the Combahee River Collective organized, indicated by their inclusion in the program of speakers like Brigitte Wallace of G|Code House and Nia Evans of the Boston Ujima Project.
One of my favorite parts of Black in Design is the questions after panels, when attendees bring a wide range of critical perspectives to bear on the experiences speakers have shared. In an interdisciplinary space, with 150 people representing a broad spectrum of experiences within and around Blackness and Diasporic identities, good questions are always out there. True to form, after a panel this year, one arose: “What’s the point of considering a Black future without the constraints of White supremacy?”
At lunch following that session, I sat with a group of men and women, all of whom happened to be Black, and listened to discussion of that and other questions. One of the group, a friend and mentor, expanded the questioner’s inquiry and directed it at me for a response: what is White people’s place in a future where Black people are free?
As I fumbled for an answer, I remembered advice from a White mentor, like myself a White cis gay man, who has built a career in cultural organizing mostly within Black spaces. “We must have our own reasons for doing this work, or else we’re just White saviors.” We had discussed the necessity of acknowledging both our Whiteness and our identities before, outside and in addition to it - in his case and mine, Jewishness and queerness - in Collins’ terms, our own ‘fiveness’, in which we are White, White and cis male, White, cis male and gay, White and generationally wealthy…
My answer is heavily informed by historical study of South African apartheid and Jim Crow in the United States: to dream a Black future under present conditions requires a healthy dose of imagination, and an understanding of the political and physical violence arrayed against attempts at liberation. These are histories White people rarely learn, and teaching them is a necessary prerequisite for any antiracist White futurism. As we stir from our state of historical amnesia, I believe White people’s place in a Black future is in collaborative and accountable practice. As Black feminist theorist bell hooks writes, “we must constantly work to undermine the ways in which we are socialized to perpetuate systems of domination”. It is through our antiracist, queer, feminist interventions on, around, and in the spaces that uphold these systems - our workplaces, friend groups, academic and professional institutions, governments and organizations, and in the built environment which enables the function of all these - that we place ourselves in this future. Crucial is our understanding that we are not merely White, but human - two ideas in opposition to each other, like Blackness and Americanness in W.E.B. Du Bois’ state of double consciousness.
White people are taught to see Black liberation as a zero-sum game, in which we must lose for “them” to gain. We are taught to fear and demean “them”. We are socialized to perpetuate a world where we must actively dehumanize everyone who doesn’t fit into a narrow vision of our dominating class. But despite the efforts of 400 years, deep down, we cannot erase our recognition of Black humanity, and so we live with guilt, and a constant if mostly unspoken fear of retribution. How would we live if we didn’t have to? (How would we design if we didn’t have to?)
Wealth and power can buy us comfort and control, but that they cannot purchase justice, or procure peace. It can make us forget our roles in systems of domination, but as long as the power remains in our hands to delimit the humanity of others, we have forfeited humanity for ourselves. As should by now be obvious, it is not the job of Black people or other people of color to save White people. If, as the Combahee River Collective wrote, ‘nobody will liberate us but us’, we must recognize our obligation to work for our own liberation alongside the liberation of others.
Like the women of the Collective, I do not believe separatism is a viable solution or strategy for movement organizing. As they wrote, “it is a misguided notion that it is maleness, per se - ie, biological maleness - that makes [men] what they are.” The same is true of people racialized and socialized as White. Though we work against deep racist, cisheterosexist, capitalist socialization, it is possible for us to work effectively and accountably for racial and economic justice, especially if we learn from White antiracists past and present like the Grimke sisters, Anne and Carl Braden, Christopher Petrella and Shannon Sullivan, and others outside the limiting Black-White binary, like Grace Lee Boggs and Asian Americans Advancing Justice. We must exist within collaborative, accountable relationships to others, White and Black, Asian and Latinx, because a movement that works for the freedom of one without the freedom of all will not ultimately secure it for any of us.
The Collective wrote that, “if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Reading their words, I know that there is no future in which I, a White queer cis man, am fully human, in which Black people are not treated as fully human; in which Black women are not treated as fully human; in which Black queer and trans people are not treated as fully human; in which poor and working class people are not treated as fully human; in which immigrants are not treated as fully human; in which disabled people are not treated as fully human. There may be a future in which I am wealthy, powerful and privileged, but as long as my position is built on the dehumanization of others, I will not be free.
Ending this dehumanization is not an academic exercise. That Black in Design speakers, like the women of the Combahee River Collective, would address such issues as police murder directly seems only natural. The murder of Botham Jean in his Dallas apartment, and the sentence his murderer received - handed down two days before the conference began - are issues with which architects and designers must concern ourselves, if we believe our Black colleagues, their families, and any random Black person in this country are as human as we are. If we do not know how our professional and academic work can contribute to ending police murder, we have only to ask the designers who are already working to answer this and other similarly important questions, from climate adaptation to cultural preservation.
Our challenge is to design, legislate, and shape a world which affirms these truths. I am at no kind of endpoint; antiracism, feminism, and queerness are processes, interventions in the system of domination which hooks reminds us we must constantly work to undermine. Our roles in these movements are, and should be, complex, contradictory and sometimes uncomfortable. We will make mistakes; we will be taught; we will teach. We will learn. We will create the only future worth fighting for: one in which all people, including us, are free.
For more on the Combahee River Collective, check out Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free, available at your local library and probably also your local independent Black-owned bookstore.