Celebrating Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality as Women’s History Month Continues
Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. Photo by Cifuentes, Nolwen photographed for Vox, 2019.
“You can’t change outcomes without understanding how they come about.”
I think it’s safe to contend that making a positive change in the world requires a deep understanding of the problem you’re trying to resolve. And, as complexities to a problem are uncovered, increasingly complex mental models are necessary.
Enter intersectionality, an antiracist term and analytical framework defined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Crenshaw’s model enables complex solutions, because it presents a complex basis for understanding. Intersectionality is an important tool for anyone working to promote equity and justice.
But there’s another complexity to consider here, and that is the story of the term itself. It started, very specifically, as a tool that sought to center the experience of Black women in America. That origin is sometimes overlooked.
Today, as we continue our Women’s History Month celebration, we celebrate this origin story. We highlight the importance of intersectionality and the ongoing work of Kimberlé Crenshaw.
The Pioneer Herself: Kimberlé Crenshaw
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a Distinguished Professor of Law at both UCLA and Columbia Law School, an American lawyer, a theorist and philosopher, an Ohio native, an author and a public figure. Crenshaw is the originator of Critical Race Theory, the culture-shifting intellectual movement that argues that societal problems are a function of faulty societal structures and practices rather than a function of individual behaviors. Her work has international reach and acclaim. She’s a UN rapporteur and has worked with various NGOs to address race and racial equity in their structures. She even helped draft the equality clause in the South African Constitution. Stateside, she also co-founded The African American Policy Forum, of which she is the executive director, as well as the #SayHerName campaign. She’s a tireless sexagenarian with a wide reach.
We should note that today is a few short days after the one-year anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s murder on March 13, 2020, at the hands Louisville, Ky police department. Justice has not yet been served in Ms. Tayor’s case. Last weekend we witnessed demonstrations in a continued effort to seek justice, many evoking #SayHerName. This is one recent example of why Kimberlé Crenshaw is such an essential figure, and why her work is so important today. Crenshaw a bright star in the firmament of justice work.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, and the #SayHerName Campaign. Photo by Hanashiro, Robert, USA TODAY, 2021.
“We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.”
How Intersectionality Came To Be
In 1989, Crenshaw published a groundbreaking paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum entitled Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. In it, Crenshaw showed through 3 case studies how the American legal system discriminated against Black women by only considering a single element of their identity- their race or their gender- rather than considering the symmetrical, compounding realities of their race plus their gender. By ignoring the overlapping identities of Black women, the courts were essentially rendering Black women invisible, somehow ineligible for certain protections a white woman or a man might have been awarded.
Crenshaw’s intersectionality helped to show where discrimination was/is embedded in our legal system.
Intersectionality took a few more years to get famous though. While it spent the 90’s and early aughts making a big splash in academic and legal circles, it wasn’t totally a part of the everyday vernacular until 2015 when it was entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. Its use was then amplified exponentially in reaction to pretty much anything Pres. 45 represented, said or did. And Crenshaw’s framework continues to be essential today, particularly to the work of toppling unjust racial hierarchies like that of white supremacy in America.
Which brings us to the present where intersectionality is often used but not always understood.
Intersectionality - What is it and what is it not
Since Crenshaw coined the term, intersectionality has been stretched and expanded. Where it began as a term to describe the double bind of Black female identity, it is now also used to illustrate the effect of infinitely more vectors like class, sexual orientation, ability, nationality, age, et. al. Crenshaw acknowledges the development of her framework, but she also warns that it is sometimes de-contextualized, misunderstood or misused by people who haven’t done their homework. (Just google “intersectionality misunderstood” or start with this declaration of confusion from 2017 for good example.)
When asked what is intersectionality in a 2020 interview with Time magazine, Crenshaw answered:
“These days, I start with what it’s not, because there has been distortion. It’s not identity politics on steroids. It is not a mechanism to turn white men into the new pariahs. It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”
So, just circling back, intersectionality is a tool used for observation and analysis of the interlocking threads that construct identity. It’s not a weapon, nor is it a contest. You can’t be more intersectional than someone else. But you can discover through intersectionality that you are more or less enabled by certain social or political or economic structures. Intersectionality can show you where the privileges and gaps exist.
Intersectionality and The Fourth Wave of Feminism
Intersectionality also shows us where the gaps are in the fight for women’s civil rights and justice. Since the very first wave of feminism, the feminist movement has chronically dismissed and overlooked whole groups of people it should embody. Black women, Indigenous women, women of color as well as non-cisgender, nonbinary and transgender people have long struggled inside of feminism because the energy required to consider overlapping, intersectional identities was seen (is still sometimes seen) as too heavy a lift for the broader aka mainstream aka liberal feminist agenda.
So, as Women’s History Month continues and as the fourth wave of feminism attempts to progress through an intersectional framework, it’s especially important to understand what intersectionality is and how it came to be. Otherwise, feminism is simply appropriating and exploiting this essential framework. We have to all consider that in 2021, Black women and Indigenous women and Latinx people and NB folx and trans folx and so many other human beings continue to struggle for parity in visibility, representation and care inside our legal and socio-economic frameworks. Intersectionality proves to matter a great deal more than simply sounding in touch. Intersectionality matters to all people seeking social justice, racial justice, food justice and equity.
Welcome to the tip of the intersectionality iceberg! And thanks to Kimberlé Crenshaw for offering the world so very much with one incredibly complex framework.
Post Script, Self-Aware Disclaimers
I am not an expert. I don’t have an academic background in law or critical race theory or feminism. I am a cisgender, white woman working in the space of food justice where I am learning a lot all of the time. Please consider this your invitation to learn with me rather than from me.
There’s a ton of scholarship and opinion out there - more and more every day. Please note the further references hyperlinked above and below. They represent a nowhere near exhaustive list of what you can discover, but I hope they helps start you on your way.
While Crenshaw coined the term, intersectional, she was not the first or only visionary to construct the paradigm of intersectionality. Scholar / activists of special note who have promoted and continue to promote the ideals of intersectionality include bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins.
Thanks for diving into the intellectual thicket of intersectionality with me!
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectionality Matters on Youtube
