• What is meant by the following quote?: “We might use our position at the bottom to make a clear leap into revolutionary action.  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.”

I think what she mean by this quote is that we are the only one that can stand up for ourselves and since not many people like us we should rely on each other to make our fight and do whatever necessary to change the norms of the way society see us. “We exists as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.” [2]

• What does the Combahee River collective mean by “identity politics”? How do you see this operating in Paris is Burning?

the political analysis and practice that we women use to struggle against our oppression. The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most Black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression. Our development must also be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of Black people.

• What do race and gender have to do with capitalism?

We know that expressions of gender, race and class are often expressed in forms that are not only intersectional but mutually constitutive. We know that in most parts of the world that the greatest burdens of exploitation and expropriation are born by women of color whom also bear the, often unacknowledged, brunt of movements of resistance.