Mantra: "“Black women are inherently valuable.”

Contemporary Black feminism would not exist in the form in which we are celebrating it right now without the love and work of the Combahee River Collective.  Though most of these meditations honor an individual ancestor, and (praise be!) most of the members of the Combahee River Collective are alive and sharing new insights all the time, we want to honor this organization as an ancestral collective, a project that paves the way for the work we are doing now.  And we celebrate the founders of the collective for invoking an ancestral rebellion, the Combahee Uprising we talked about in yesterday’s meditation, as their very name!

In the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, the members of the collective affirmed that “Black women are inherently valuable.” That is a revolutionary statement in a global economy that would not exist without centuries of labor extracted from Black women, and it applies to all people because as the authors of the statement elaborate, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, because our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”  Are you ready to embrace that level of freedom?  As we repeat the mantra “Black women are inherently valuable,” explore what it means to be valuable not because of what you do or provide but inherently.  (And if you are not a Black woman release any and all entitlement to the labor extracted from Black women while you are at it.)