I'm Sarah Hayet and Lafayette College would like to welcome Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw
She is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University and an expert in the
fields of civil rights, black feminist legal theory and race, racism and the law
On top of that she is also the director of the center of intersectionality and
social policy at Columbia University which she co-founded in 2011 and also the
co-founder of the African American policy forum
On top of that, she is the creator of interesectionality theory
We're so glad to have you
-It's a pleasure to be here, thank you
And speaking of intersectionality that actually leads us right into our first question
For the students who may not know what is intersectionality can you define that for us
-Well I have to practice my elevator version of it but intersectionality is basically the idea
that we experience life, sometimes discriminations, sometimes benefits based
on a number of different identities that we have so the the basic term came
out of a case where I was looking at black women who were being discriminated
against not just as black people, not just as women, but as black women. So
intersectionality was basically a metaphor to say they've got race
discrimination that they're facing coming from one direction, they've got
gender discrimination coming from another direction, and they're colliding in
their lives in ways that we don't really anticipate and understand so
intersectionality is basically meant to help people think about the fact that
discrimination can happen on the basis of several different factors at
the same time, and we need to have a language and an ability to see it in order to address it
I know my journey to women's and gender studies was based a lot on intersectional factors
like I'm Jewish and I'm a woman
and being raised in a Reform Jewish family with a female rabbi was huge it
really informed my feminism and I was wondering what was your journey
to women's and gender studies
-That's a wonderful question. So I was raised by a mother and father
who were deeply involved in the civil rights movement we talked about social
justice at the dinner table every day when I came home. My friends used to
tease me because I had to like study for dinner
like my parents wanted me to talk about what did you learn today what did you observe today
how do you defend what you think
-No pressure
No pressure, exactly! So that's the household I
grew up in and my mother is what, I guess, in the last century we used to call
race women. They're women who were deeply committed to the idea of racial
justice and they were committed to fighting for the rights of people of
color including and especially women so she would talk about some of
the ways that racism gets experienced by black people who are women not just black
people who are men and and basically give me tools to see when
it was coming at me so you know different ways that you might be spoken
to as a black woman as opposed to being a white woman, having to keep your eye
out for harassing behavior at work as sexual harassment actually came from
black women's employment experience. The first plaintiffs were black women
because these were the kind of things that would happen to black women in the
workforce. So just a general way in which you're a woman but not quite the kind of woman
that you're supposed to be these are the kinds of things that my mom taught me
about so I had sort of a race lens from the family as a whole and then
my mother would talk more specifically about 'now as a woman these are the
things that you got to look out for'. So I was kinda naturally drawn by the time I
got to college, both to
Africana Studies which was one of my majors in the other major was
government and then I did a a minor in Women's Studies
-To go back to what you said about your parents, that
they were involved in the civil rights movement and nowadays this kind of
resurgence of Black Lives Matter. But the names that stand out in the Black Lives Matter movement
get the most attention are Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown
but we don't see the Eva Smiths or the Renisha Mcbrides
and why do you think that is that black women who are also suffering from
systemic violence are getting kind of pushed under the rug, not getting that national attention.
-Yes it's an issue that I've been very much concerned with and it was one of the reasons we
started 'Say Her Name'; to draw attention to the names that people
don't have. They don't roll off the lips, you know we don't know the names of
Tanisha Anderson and Michelle Cusseaux and you know I've thought a little bit about
why this is the case and you know I can share that we have been participating in
some of the marches. We were participating for example in the Eric Garner march
when we came out with 'Say Her Name' because you know part of the march is your marching and
you're lifting up the names and so then we started saying some of the women's names
and people were looking at us like what are you talking about
that's why we just say well just say her name alright just say it because saying it
brings attention to the fact that there are women who are also and killed by the
police. We eventually created a big banner that had the names and the
photos of 20 black women who were killed by the police and for a while we were
marching in the march with it but we realized that actually the poster needed to
be seen by people in the march so we came out of the marching, stood on the side
of the road and and held up the banners of people walking by would see it
and we noticed that some people gave us the thumbs up, a lot of people were just
it didn't compute you know the idea of women being killed by the police was
just something they never imagined and so they would come over and they took pictures and
wanted to know about the stories and then there were a few people who you
know were like this this is not about women killed by the police this is about
black men killed by the police and that goes somewhat to your question I think
that there is a framing of the problem of police violence that's largely
influenced by an idea that this is about competing masculinities, this is about
you know the state or basically some men clothed with the power of the state
trying to constrain you know individuals that are seen as hyper masculine, out
of control and therefore in need of a course of punishment and there is an
element of police violence that is informed by that but you know that's not
the only you know aspect of police killings that we have to worry about so
you know in the same way that lynching for example was often framed as an
assault on black male sexuality, which many times it was, it was also the cover
for many other things that other people were subject to including black women who
were also lynched so we've been trying to broaden the frame so people can see how
state violence is rationalized by a lot of different stereotypes but the most
important one that black women share is that is black people more of a threat to
the police, more likely to engage in conduct that puts police officer's lives
at risk, and more in need of harsh disciplinary kind of coercive physical
punishment and we see this in cases that black women have experienced in
their homes, in their bedrooms, around the corner from where they live, in their
cars, everywhere.
-You kind of hinted at this but one of the biggest critiques of 'Black Lives Matter' is 'all lives should matter'
what would be your response
-Yeah well that's you know the 'Black Lives Matter' popular version of colorblindness right
we can't speak with any particularity about the risks that certain things will
happen to people who are embodied in a particular way because to do that is to
exclude all the other people so you know one of the most tremendously troubling
things that happened after the civil rights movement is the way that some of
the victories of the civil rights movement had been turned on their heads
so you know Brown v. Board of Education now has been twisted into an
idea that it is discriminatory to take into account race at all in school
assignments even if race is being taken into account to continue the process of
desegregation, right so the idea is everybody is similarly situated with
respect to race that's part of the idea behind all lives matters like
everybody is similarly situated with respect to the likelihood that they'll
be driving down the street one day and a police officer will you know interrupt
their day and they might end up in handcuffs or worse. It just is not the
case that everyone is similarly situated with respect to this and if it were to
happen to people at the same rates that it's happening to black people if it were
to happen to white people
the responses I think we have plenty of reason to believe will be different so
this is this is all of the background that makes 'Black Lives Matter' something to
say, it's being said because the evidence suggests that they don't. So it's
aspirational black lives should matter, the same as everybody else so just
erasing what is being said by saying they all do is just denying exactly what the
circumstance is, which is their hugely different risk and circumstances of being
encountered by the police and that's what 'Black Lives Matter'
is trying to politicize.
-Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time
to join us today.
-Well thank you for the wonderful questions
-It was my pleasure. I was so excited to get to meet you
-Thank you, thank you.