Intersectionality describes how different elements of a person’s identity can be discriminated against - with negative outcomes. Now heading into its third season, Intersectionality Matters has evolved, and Columbia News caught up with Crenshaw to learn more about episodes that touched her, how the podcast might change under the Biden-Harris administration, and exactly what intersectionality means in 2021. Q. Q: It's Black History Month. But Crenshaw said that contrary to her critics’ objections, intersectionality isn’t “an effort to create the world in an inverted image of what it is now.” Rather, she said, the point of intersectionality is to make room “for more advocacy and remedial practices” to create a more egalitarian system. In this episode, Kimberlé Crenshaw sits down with a panel of esteemed thinkers and storytellers to examine the origins, implications and failings of America’s grand narratives. Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism? “In particular, courts seem to think that race discrimination was what happened to all black people across gender and sex discrimination was what happened to all women, and if that is your framework, of course, what happens to black women and other women of color is going to be difficult to see.”, But then something unexpected happened. Drawing on black feminist and critical legal theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality, a term she coined to speak to the multiple social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. And we cannot fail to answer that. The fact that Rhanda trusted me to tell that story in all of its heart-wrenching detail, and that telling that story was advancing why we needed #SayHerName, that really convinced us that there is a role for this kind of engagement with intersectionality. The conservatives I spoke to understood quite well what intersectionality is. Imagine what happens when we allow ideas about social justice to go undefended? Kimberle Williams Crenshaw In this moving talk, she calls on us to bear witness to this reality and speak up for victims of prejudice. Defending the C.R.O.W.N. She wants to get rid of those existing power dynamics altogether — changing the very structures that undergird our politics, law, and culture in order to level the playing field. Crenshaw is also the founder of Columbia Law … We were just in the conversation and, before I knew it, I was telling the story about my own childhood and a mistake that my father made one day in allowing me to get my hair wet and what a catastrophe that had created the next morning. It tells you how oppressed you are. I had talked to Rhanda many, many times before, but this time, we actually went in-depth and the intimacy of the episode opened us both up. The current debate over intersectionality is really three debates: one based on what academics like Crenshaw actually mean by the term, one based on how activists seeking to eliminate disparities between groups have interpreted the term, and a third on how some conservatives are responding to its use by those activists. I would say Black History Month is an opportunity to really grapple with what white supremacy has to do with our country nearing the edge of collapse. That's actually kind of the opposite of what intersectionality is really about. So what does intersectionality (coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw) mean? New Press, Mar 17, 2017 - Discrimination - 320 pages. promotes solipsism at the personal level and division at the social level, Please consider making a contribution to Vox today from as little as $3. Activist and law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw urges us to ask this question. So February is a good time to really think very hard about what its implications are for higher education, for public discourse, for civil society.”. Indeed, they largely agree that it accurately describes the way people from different backgrounds encounter the world. When you talk to conservatives about the term itself, however, they’re more measured. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both. While the concept had previously existed, she put a name to it so that we could develop a framework for understanding: “The view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity. The term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles, almost 30 … And the continuing cancer almost took out the body. (I asked Shapiro this question directly, and he said, “the original articulation of the idea by Crenshaw is accurate and not a problem.”) Rather, they’re deeply concerned by the practice of intersectionality, and moreover, what they concluded intersectionality would ask, or demand, of them and of society. LISTEN. And the observance of power imbalances, as is so frequently true, is far less controversial than the tool that could eliminate them. Often, that doesn’t happen with intersectionality, and there are any number of theories as to why that’s the case, but what many people have heard or know about intersectionality comes more from what people say than what they’ve actually encountered themselves.”, Beginning in 2015 and escalating ever since, the conservative response to intersectionality has ranged from mild amusement to outright horror. Basically, the company simply did not hire black women before 1964, meaning that when seniority-based layoffs arrived during an early 1970s recession, all the black women hired after 1964 were subsequently laid off. Once we acknowledge the role of race and racism, what do we do about it? The New Press, Dec 6, 2022 - Social Science - 320 pages. I talked to Rhanda Dormeus about the killing of her 23-year-old daughter Korryn Gaines. To understand what intersectionality is, and what it has become, you have to look at Crenshaw’s body of work over the past 30 years on race and civil rights. Kimberlé Crenshaw at the Women’s March in Los Angeles in January 2018. Intersectionality is about capturing dynamics and converging patterns of advantage and disadvantage. In 2015, she helped create the Say Her Name movement to call attention to police violence against Black women. This was, she argued, a delusion as comforting as it was dangerous. What are your favorite episodes? Imagine what happens when we allow ideas about social justice to go undefended? enters its third season, Columbia News checks in with host and Columbia Law Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw on why it is more important than ever. And, frankly, how reunion without justice is the name of the disorder that affects us still. Photograph: Sipa USA/PA Images Hill’s case, Crenshaw believes, was also a … Crenshaw's term is now at the forefront of national conversations about racial justice, identity politics, and policing—and over the years has helped shape legal discussions. Q: What are you hoping people will take away when they listen? But rather than just talking about 1619, we were explicitly intersectional. Kimberlé Crenshaw, law professor and social theorist, first coined the term intersectionality in her 1989 paper “Demarginalizing The Intersection Of Race And Sex: A Black Feminist Critique Of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory And Antiracist Politics.” Gillborn 279 So, intersectionality—as envisaged by Crenshaw and other critical race activists—has two key elements: first, an empirical basis; an intersectional approach is needed to bet- ter understand the nature of social inequities and the pro- Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both. Crenshaw said conservative criticisms of intersectionality weren’t really aimed at the theory. First of all, the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black feminist academic who has taught at both Columbia Law School and UCLA. To Crenshaw, the most common critiques of intersectionality — that the theory represents a “new caste system” — are actually affirmations of the theory’s fundamental truth: that individuals have individual identities that intersect in ways that impact how they are viewed, understood, and treated. And that's a big “if” there. When Ashley Judd spoke of “intersectionality” during the Oscar ceremony this past Sunday night, Kimberlé Crenshaw was thrilled. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that In other words, the law seemed to forget that black women are both black and female, and thus subject to discrimination on the basis of both race, gender, and often, a combination of the two. Now I'm doing a book for Simon and Schuster that is an intersectionality, sort of,  memoir-manifesto. Still, as Crenshaw told me, “plenty of people choose not to assume that the prism [of intersectionality] necessarily demands anything in particular of them.”. 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