Our Black feminism, and the story of Frieda
Our Black feminism
Long before Black feminism had a name, before it was a theory, a political approach or a way of life, Black women were living it, and we are living it still. Ours is created through lived experience and led by it, rooted in the realities and the social position we occupy, and in the joys, the disappointments, the fear and the love that come with that position.
We do not hold it up against any other feminism, because to do so treats that feminism as the original and sells ours short, and ours is whole on its own terms.
We treat experience as the source of theory, and our Black feminism is a direct refusal of the colonial arrangement we are subjected to and forced to live under, still, even to this day, an arrangement in which knowledge about us is produced elsewhere and handed back to us. So when a survivor or a practitioner tells us what happened and what would have helped, we honour it, and we build from it.
I use the term radical in its original meaning, getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.Ella Baker, 1969
Our anchors
These three describe how our Black feminism behaves in praxis, and they help us stay accountable when the work gets difficult, much like our principles.
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Dynamic and responsive
Our Black feminism keeps changing because the lives it comes from keep changing. The definition we hold is wide enough to expand, adjust, flex and grow.
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A being, a doing and a living
It describes how a person practises rather than what they say about themselves. Plenty of organisations have taken up the language and changed nothing.
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Accountable to itself
Our principles realign us with our goal whenever the work pulls us away from it, which is what keeps us from drifting from our mission.
Why Frieda was founded
Frieda became necessary when it was clear that change was never the focus of a sector that white feminism had permeated, running deep enough to create a culture of exclusion and fear. The change that did come was too slow, too easily absorbed, and too dependent on people who did not share the urgency.
Our team is made of survivors, and Frieda was built from that perspective: practitioners who understood the whole of a woman's life, spaces that did not ask her to leave part of herself at the door, and a service that saw racialised women as worthy of protection on their own account.
We started in 2020 as a group of professionals from psychotherapy, psychology, sociology and social work, beginning with peer-led Sister Support Groups that were unfunded and run because they were needed. Everything since has grown from that beginning, and we hope we have lifted as we climbed.
The word radical
Many people notice that we call ourselves radical and read it through the trans-exclusionary strand of white radical feminism, and that could not be more wrong. We are radical in Ella Baker's sense, committed to abolishing the systems of power that cause harm, and our radical is root work: bold, shattering, forward-thinking and revolutionary. By radical we mean grasping things at the root, inspiring growth, and saying plainly what we will not accept.
Black feminism is both a way of doing and a way of being, and it is the anchor for all of our work and all of our interactions. It gives us a blueprint for carrying out that work: the liberation of all from both interpersonal and systemic harm.
