“It was not simply that black people were turned away from homeownership in nice (read: white) neighborhoods, or that they were systematically denied loans while white borrowers were subsidized through government funding (although all of this happened), but that black spatial belonging was defined by an intricate system of physical and legal boundaries.”

“hair is an added embodied layer to our blackness. However, the testimonies of women interviewed in New York, or the past controversy over Google Image results on unprofessional hair, also reveal that black women’s hair is tied to much more than our bodies or our sense of self. Our hair cannot be separated from our economic means, our relationships, our self perception, our educational opportunities or a host of other material and social realities.”

Here’s my unpopular opinion. One should not call themselves an intersectional feminist without first reading and understanding the The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement.” I say this because The Combahee River Collective articulates a fundamental part of intersectional feminism, one that is often missing from mainstream discourse. It’s not just that we should pay attention to the way social categories intersect, or even that we should remember the way some people face multiple levels of oppression. Rather, intersectionality is about building a movement around very specific identities.

“I bring up this story because it is reflective of the kind of white liberalism that likes to tout itself as a champion of all people, yet retain the ultimate power over what that looks like. Anyone with any sense of what it is like to have the n-word hurled at them, as I do, or perhaps worse, to be treated like an n-word, would never dare to even purse their lips to say the word. They couldn’t, because they would know that to do so is about more than intellectual rights or abstract arguments. It is about history, experience and, decidedly, violence.”