[3] The Combahee River Collective Statement[4] clearly articulates the intersecting forces of power: "The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that major systems of oppression are interlocking.
Exercised by activists, organizers, intellectuals, care workers and community members alike, the queer of color critique imagines and builds a world in which all people can thrive as their most authentic selves- without sacrificing any part of their identity.
"[9] Lorde highlights the importance of loving the experience of doing the work- and not solely valuing the work itself- as an act of resistance to capitalism and a way of creating genuine change.
"Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.
"[9] This approach allows individuals to bring their whole creative selves to their activism and seek joy in the process of doing, thereby expanding, sustaining and queering the movement for change by distancing it from the capitalist notion that gives value only to the finished product.
The queer of color critique was also influenced by the Combahee River Collective Statement, written by a group of Black feminist lesbians in 1977 in Boston Massachusetts.
The statement aimed to advance liberation for all people by identifying the interlocking nature of oppressive systems and laying out a blueprint for Black feminist organizing.
While the term queer of color critique had not yet been articulated, the Combahee River Collective alludes to the idea that sexuality exists in the bodies and lived experiences of people that hold other marginal identities.
In her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,[11] Anzaldua challenges readers to understand "borders," not merely as physical barriers that divide nation-states, but as an articulation of identity- invisible boundaries that exist inside the body.
[11] Anzaldua writes of her Chicana lesbian experience: "We're afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged.
Anzaldua provides a narrative that explains "dual consciousness" of having to understand both dominant and non-dominant cultures to live in two worlds, both rejecting certain aspects of identity.
[13] Gloria Anzaldua draws on this narrative in an anthology titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which she coedited with Cherrie Moraga.
[14] This Bridge Called My Back challenges the whiteness of mainstream queer discourse and uplifts and centers the political voices of marginalized women in an attempt to build international solidarity across difference: "We each are our sisters' and brothers' keepers; no one is an island or has ever been.
By centering the lived experiences of trans and gender non-conforming people of color, and operating in an anti-Black framework, transformative solutions and collective liberation become possible.
By using this lens, we are aided in creating alternatives of self-governance and self-determination, and by using it we can more effectively prioritize problems and methods that center historically marginalized people in our communities.
Scholar PJ DiPietro says "The coloniality of gender framework makes sense of a paradigmatic shift, the rendering of Native, Indigenous, and Black flesh into modified versions of 'gender'..."[21]