PHOTO COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE
In those formative, anxious moments that precipitate a big change in life, I find myself a little disoriented. I may have spent a life already welcoming and incorporating the inevitability of change, but each change feels brand new and I’ve never quite felt fully prepared for how change, in its essence, necessarily calls me to abandon what I thought I knew, how I thought I might react, how I thought I might navigate it. And in these moments, and there have been many, I find great direction when I look to those who came before me. As I embark on a new professional chapter in my life, as the executive director of the international LGBTQI human rights charity Kaleidoscope Trust, I’m finding particular strength in the Combahee River Collective. Formed in 1974, the Combahee River Collective was a group of Black lesbian women who came together to figure out just how they were going to help dismantle the systems of oppression keeping Black (lesbian) women down.