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.
