Black feminism argues that sexism, class oppression, and racism are inextricably bound together. The way these relate to each other is called intersectionality. Forms of feminism that strive to overcome sexism and class oppression but ignore race can discriminate against women through racial bias. The Combahee River Collective argued in 1974 that the liberation of black women entails freedom for all people since it would require the end of racism, sexism, and class oppression.
One of the theories that evolved out of the Black feminist movement was Alice Walker's womanism. Alice Walker and other womanists pointed out that black women experienced a different and more intense kind of oppression than of white women. Womanism is a critical disidentification with what black women understood to be the anti-male sentiments of white feminists and white feminist movements. Black womanists such as Alice Walker and Sherley Anne Williams contended that "womanist" is preferable to "feminist" because "womanist" is actively anti-separatist. Sherley Anne Williams notes, for example, that "womanist theory is, by definition, committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people". Womanists also point to the emergence of black feminism after earlier movements led by white middle-class women which they regard as having largely ignored oppression based on race and class. Patricia Hill Collins defined Black feminism, in Black Feminist Thought (1991), as including "women who theorize the experiences and ideas shared by ordinary black women that provide a unique angle of vision on self, community, and society".
There is a long-standing and important alliance between postcolonial feminists, which overlaps with transnational feminism and third-world feminism, and black feminists. Both have struggled for recognition, not only from men in their own culture but also from Western feminists.
Black feminist theory has argued that black women are positioned within structures of power in fundamentally different ways from white women. Black feminist theorists such as Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins have argued, for example, that black women, unlike many white women, are marginalized along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. As such, mainstream white feminist theory has neither comprehensively accounted for the economic, racial, and gender exigencies of the black female experience, nor, in many cases, tried to. As black feminist legal studies scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw notes, "black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender" (The Black Feminist Reader, Crenshaw 209). Black women's exclusion from feminist and antiracist discourses became especially clear in the 1960s and 70s social movements for racial and gender equality. Hence, the emergence of black feminist organizations.
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