Black Feminist Book Club #8: How We Get Free by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

A necessary read for those who believe in liberation.

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017. 191 pages, $15.95 paperback. ISBN-13: 978-1608468683.

Black feminist activism and organizing remains a critical site for the articulation of a radical set of politics and political framing. Unfortunately, the emphasis on mainstream white feminisms has long worked to diminish and undermine these critical contributions and their influence on communities at the margins. In How We Get Free, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor reveals how queer Black feminists have made intentional efforts to build intersectional movements from their inception. Rather than leaning on charismatic Black male leads and the patriarchal gaze of whiteness, these movement leaders and organizers have centered the lives and experiences of Black, queer, disabled, poor, and immigrant people in their grassroots work.

This text is a brief anthology of the fundamental organizing principles, genealogy, and motivations behind the creation of the Combahee River Collective, a Black lesbian liberationist organization in Boston in the 1970s.

This important collection of interviews shows how Black women’s unique histories and social locations have long been catalysts for social change and for imagining futures otherwise. Importantly, this text also relies on narrative history and archiving Black women’s words in their own voices. This tradition has been largely abandoned and must be restored and protected.

Next month, we are reading Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman.