ABSTRACT
Bernice Johnson Reagon articulates not only what people laboring for social change need to leave behind, but also what those who inherit their work should expect to receive. There have been and there will continue to be attempts to create metaphors for experiences of oppression where singular analytics fail. Very few feminist and gender scholars are not familiar with critiques from Black feminists on the difficulty of fitting their experience of oppression into categories demarcated by one vector of vulnerability, for example, gender-based oppression and/or race-based oppression. Oppression can be seen to function according to diverse systems of jeopardy that interlock and complicate one another. It is the understanding of oppression as a holistic phenomenon, as experience-based and not given to discrete systems that can be analyzed separately, that informs the Collective's call for "identity politics". Identity politics is underwritten by a realization of a real danger in not owning one's social identity and how it affects one's understanding of oppression.
