Making Possible the Impossible: A Black Feminist Perspective on Child Welfare Abolition

In 1863, Harriet Tubman and eight of her trusted scouts orchestrated the Combahee River uprising in South Carolina. The uprising, which followed a year of planning and organizing, freed almost eight-hundred enslaved people, burned thirty-two planation buildings, and decimated the rice plantations that rested at the center of the state’s economy.[1] The Combahee River uprising directly freed enslaved people and devastated South Carolina’s confederate economy, but the uprising also signaled a commitment to live in a way that understands that the impossible must be possible.[2] That is, the uprising rested on a belief that a world without slavery and systems of domination—the seemingly impossible—was not only possible but necessary, and that the creation of such a world demanded action that affirmed a futurity of freedom for Black people. In 1997, when Black, mostly queer, feminists gathered in Combahee and drafted the Combahee River Collective statement,[3] they did so purposely as a continuation of the struggle of the Combahee uprising and as an expression of a commitment to building another world.

Read the full post from The Columbia Journal of Race and Law here