Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American lawyer, civil rights advocate, and a full-time professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. Crenshaw spent more than 30 years studying various issues concerning civil rights, race, and racism. The 60-year-old Ohio native has focused her academic work around violence against women, structural racial inequality, and affirmative action. Kimberlé Crenshaw is known for coining the term intersectionality. Intersectionality is the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise. The concept of intersectionality is not an abstract notion but a description of the way multiple oppressions are experienced. Intersectionality looks at different vectors of power like race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers and how they work together to promote one’s privilege or increase one’s discrimination. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality has aided in the public discourse revolving around gender and race and has become an integral part of social equity work.
Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term intersectionality in 1989 when she published her paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” The paper critiques legal and political systems that do not understand or recognize the problems black women face in America (Crenshaw). “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” examines legal cases that dealt with racial and sexual discrimination. Crenshaw critiques how the law refuses to recognize black women as a distinct identity category that deserves special consideration. Crenshaw argues that Black women are discriminated against in ways that often do not fit neatly within the legal categories of “racism” or “sexism” but as a combination of racism and sexism.
Crenshaw examines DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, one of the cases in her paper, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” DeGraffenreid v. General Motors was a 1976 case where five black women sued General Motors. The women argued that the company’s seniority system, guided by the principle “the last hired-first fired,” discriminated against them. The company did not hire black women before 1964, but all of the black women who were hired after 1970 lost their jobs in a seniority-based layoff during a recession (Crenshaw). Even though this court case dealt with both racial discrimination and sex discrimination claims, the court deemed that the lawsuit could only be examined for either race discrimination or sex discrimination, but not a combination of both (Crenshaw). The court's reasoning:
The legislative history surrounding Title VII does not indicate that the goal of the statute was to create a new classification of 'black women' who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box (Crenshaw).
The court refused to acknowledge that black women experience a combination of race and sex discrimination. The courts ignored the specific challenges black women face by only seeing black women as purely women or purely black (Crenshaw). Under this view, the women were only protected to the extent that their experiences coincide with white women’s gender experiences and black men’s racial experiences (Crenshaw). Since General Motors did hire women -- white women -- during a time that no black women were hired, the court deemed that there was no sex discrimination that the seniority system could have perpetuated. The court also dismissed the race discrimination complaint and suggested that the women consolidate with another case, involving a group of males, suing General Motors for race discrimination. Since the women, in this case, were viewed as purely black or purely women, the employment experiences of white women and black men obscured the discrimination that black women experienced. As a result, the women’s experiences could not be recognized or understood by the court, and the case was closed.
In 2016, Kimberlé Crenshaw spoke at TED Women about the DeGraffenreid v. General Motors case and how that inspired her to create the term intersectionality. Crenshaw recognized that the court's frame to see gender and race discrimination in DeGraffenreid v. General Motors was partial and distorting. Instead of broadening the frame to include African American women, the court closed the case. For Crenshaw, the issue she faced was creating an ‘alternative narrative’ or a ‘prism’ that would allow judges to understand and recognize the women’s full story. Crenshaw thought that the dilemma the women were facing in the DeGraffenreid v. General Motors' case was similar to an intersection; Crenshaw stated, “The roads to the intersection would be the way the workforce was structured by race and gender. Then, the traffic on those roads would be the hiring policies.” Since the women involved in the DeGraffenreid v. General Motors case were both black and female, they were put in the center of where the two roads overlap. As a result of their multiple identities, the women experienced both of the company’s gender and race ‘traffic.’ Crenshaw then goes on to talk about where the law’s relationship to the intersection analogy, “The law is the ambulance that shows up and would only treat the women, only if she could prove that she was harmed on the race road or the gender road, but not where the roads intersected.” This traffic analogy inspired Kimeberlé Crenshaw’s term intersectionality.
Intersectionality is a framework that recognizes people’s intersecting identities and experiences and deals with the fact that many of our social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice (Crenshaw). Intersectionality recognizes that race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability are all interconnected and work together to either construct experiences of both privilege and marginalization (Smooth). In an interview with Times in May of 2018, Kimberlé Crenshaw explained what intersectionality means to her:
It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. 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.
Intersectionality inspires people to look at the differences that exist among groups (Smooth). By doing so, intersectionality helps shed light on the experiences of people who live at the intersection of different identities. Intersectionality also aims to reveal the system of oppression that maintains power hierarchies (Smooth).
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality has aided in the public discourse revolving around gender and race and has become an integral part of social equity work. Even though Crenshaw made the term intersectionality to understand black women’s oppression, it is now used to understand a wide range of differences (Smooth). The intersectional lens enables women to recognize inequalities and injustice towards women. Feminists have embraced intersectionality because it acknowledges that people have unique experiences of discrimination and oppression. Intersectionality plays an important role with eliminating violence against all women and girls. Intersectionality allows people to better understand how violence differs between women because the violence women and girls endure is not just based on their gender. For example, 44% of lesbian women experience partner violence, compared to 35% of heterosexual women. Women and girls with disabilities are four times more likely to experience domestic violence than women without disabilities. By looking at violence against all women and girls with an intersectional lens, people can better understand the complexity of prejudices each woman and girl face. Crenshaw’s exceptional academic work has played an important role in having activists and community organizations have more dynamic conversations about the differences in experience with people who have intersecting identities.
In an interview with Vox in May of 2019, Crenshaw said watching her theory go mainstream and used in public discourse outside academia has been an “out-of body experience.” Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work embodies the responsibility of the public intellectual, her work has “uncovered implicit orientations and world-views that, in turn, affect public decisions and actions” (Mack). Even though the intersectional lens has been praised by many, it has also been severely criticized. For many conservatives, the practice of intersectionality is deemed to be “extremely dangerous.” Conservatives are not afraid of the term; they recognize that people who have intersecting identities will experience different types of oppression. Conservatives are afraid of applying the term in real-life situations, e.g., college campuses. Conservatives fear that implementing intersectionality into our daily lives will create a “new caste system,” which will place nonwhite and non-heterosexual people at the top. In short, the conservatives who fear intersectionality are concerned about losing their spot in the current identity hierarchy. Crenshaw did not create intersectionality to invert the image of what the world is today, but she hoped that the term would create a more egalitarian system. The purpose of intersectionality is not to flip the current power dynamics to give people of color power over white people but to end those power dynamics involved in our politics, law, and culture altogether.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is one of those rare public intellectuals whose academic work has shaped the public discourse inside and outside of academia. Intersectionality, which was once an obscure legal term, is now in the Oxford Dictionary and guides the conversation about gender, race, and identity. Crenshaw’s work is an integral aspect of social equity work and has ignited more dynamic discussions about intersecting identities' complexities. For 2021 and the years to come, people of every race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion need to be heard and have the same rights as you and me. Movements like Feminism and Black Lives Matter are sections in society that have been deprived of their rights and silenced. Intersectionality is a key factor in allowing those invisible groups within marginalized communities to have a voice and be recognized beyond a single frame.
Works Cited
www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination.
Coleman, Arica L. “What Is Intersectionality? A Brief History of the Theory.” Time, Time, 6
Nov. 2019, time.com/5560575/intersectionality-theory/.
Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist
Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8.
http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The Urgency of Intersectionality.” TED, 2016,
www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality/up-next? languge=en#t-690422.
“Intersectionality 101: What Is It and Why Is It Important?” Womankind Worldwide, 15 Oct.
2020, www.womankind.org.uk/intersectionality-101-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-important/.
Mack, Stephen. “Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past? .” The New Democratic Review,
14 Aug. 2012, www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2012/08/are_public_inte.html.
Smooth W.G. (2013) Intersectionality from Theoretical Framework to Policy Intervention. In:
Wilson A.R. (eds) Situating Intersectionality. The Politics of Intersectionality. Palgrave
Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025135_2
Steinmetz, Katy. “Kimberlé Crenshaw on What Intersectionality Means Today.” Time, Time, 20
Feb. 2020, time.com/5786710/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality/.
Comentarios