Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born 1959) is an American scholar in the field of critical race theory, and a professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.

Early biography

She was born in Canton, Ohio in 1959. She received a bachelor's degree from Cornell in 1981, a J.D. from Harvard Law in 1984, and an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985. At Cornell, she was a member of the Quill and Dagger society.

Career

She has been a part of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law faculty since 1986, where she teaches Civil Rights and other courses in critical race studies and constitutional law. She is the founding coordinator of the intellectual movement called the Critical Race Theory Workshop. In 1991 and 1994, she was elected Professor of the Year. At the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she received her LL.M., Professor Crenshaw was a William H. Hastie Fellow. Later, she clerked for Justice Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Her work on race and gender was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. In 2001, she wrote the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nations World Conference on Racism and helped to facilitate the addition of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration. Crenshaw has also served as a member of the National Science Foundation's Committee to Research Violence Against Women and has assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill. She is also a founding member of the Women's Media Initiative and is a regular commentator on NPR's The Tavis Smiley Show. Crenshaw is known for her work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was especially important in influencing and developing the idea of intersectionality, a word she coined in 1989.

She contributed the piece "Traffic at the Crossroads: Multiple Oppressions" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.[1]

African American Policy Forum

In 1996 Crenshaw was co-founder, with Prof. Luke Harris, of the African American Policy Forum. According to AAPF's mission statement: the Policy Forum is dedicated to advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of all human rights, in the U.S. and internationally. she used the forum to house a variety of projects designed to deliver research- based strategies to better advance social inclusion. Crenshaw is currently the executive director of that organization.[2]

My Brother's Keeper

A nationwide initiative to open up a ladder of opportunities to youth males and males of color.[3] Kimberlé Crenshaw and the other participants of the African American Forum have demonstrated through multiple means of the media to express that the initiative has good intentions but perpetrates for the uplifting of youth but excludes girls and youth girls of color. The AAPF have started a campaign #WHYWECANTWAIT to address the realignment of the "My Brothers Keeper" initiative to include all youth boys, girls, and those girls and boys of color. The movement has received a lot of support from all over letters signed by men of color, letters signed by women of color and letters signed by allies that believe in the cause.[4]

In an interview on the Laura Flanders Show Kimberlé Crenshaw expressed that the program was introduced as response to the widespread grief from the African American community after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the case of his shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, a young, unarmed, African American, male teen. She describes the program as "feel-good", and fatherly initiative but does not believe that it is a significant or structural program that will help fight the rollback of civil rights; the initiative will not provide the kinds of things that will really make a difference. She believes that because women and girls of color are a part of the same communities and disadvantages as the under-privileged males that are focused in the initiative, that in order to make it an effective program for the communities it needs to include all members of the community girls and boys alike.

The letter is signed by girls and women of all ages, from different backgrounds, ranging from high school teens to professional actors, from civil rights activist to university professors commending President Obama on the efforts of the White House, private philanthropy, and social justice organizations they still urge the inclusion of females to the initiative. The realignment would be important to reflect the values of inclusion, equal opportunity and shared fate that have propelled our historic struggle for racial justice forward.

The letter is signed by a multitude of diverse males with different lifestyles to include scholars, recently incarcerated, taxi drivers, pastors, college students, fathers of sons, fathers of daughters and more. All the men believing that the girls within the communities that these men share homes, schools, recreational areas share a fate with one another and believe that the initiative is lacking in focus if that focus does not include both males and females of color.

Intersectionality

Kimberle Crenshaw introduced the theory of intersectionality to feminist theory in the 1980s.[7] Although the concept of intersectionality was not new it was not formally recognized until Crenshaw’s theory. Her inspiration for the theory started while she was still in college and she realized that the gender aspect of race was extremely underdeveloped. The realization came after she noticed at the school she was attending that there were classes offered that addressed both race and gender issues. The courses available discussed women in only literature and poetry classes while men were discussed in serious politics and economics.[8] Crenshaw has received multiple degrees in law including her LL.M. (Masters in Law) and J.D.(Professional Doctorate degree in Law).[9] So her focus on intersectionality is more so focused on how the law responds to issues that include gender and race discrimination. The particular challenge in law is that antidiscrimination laws look at gender and race separately and consequently African American women and other women of color experience overlapping forms of discrimination and the law unaware of how to combine the two leave these women with no justice.[10] Antidiscrimination laws and the justice systems attempt for a remedy to discrimination is limited and operates on a singular axes when one flows into another a complete and understandable definition has not been written in law therefore when the issue of intersectionality is presented in the court of law if one form of discrimination cannot be proved without the other than there is no law broken. The law defines discrimination of singular cases where you can only be discriminated based one thing or the other so when enforcing the law they go solely by the definition and if discrimination cannot be proved based on the single definition of one discrimination or the other then there is no crime committed.

She brings up the case DeGraffenreid v. General Motors in multiple writings, interviews, and lectures where a group of African American women went to court with the argument that they were receiving compound discrimination. Only men were given jobs in the factory allowing opportunities for African American men and women were seen as appropriate hires for office and secretarial jobs but only white women were being hired so in a nutshell there left no opportunities for African American women to seek employment in that company. When the courts heard the argument they asked the women to prove the fact that they were discriminated against by race and gender separately. Since African American men were being employed that disproved racial discrimination and since white women were being employed that disproved gender discrimination. The courts unable to find a medium and not wanting to seem as if they were allotting African American women special privilege over everyone else the case was dismissed and the women were not granted success.[11]

Some accounts that Crenshaw refers to when addressing the theory of intersectionality are:

Publications

She has published works on civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law.

Books

Published: May 1 1996 It is a compilation of some of the most important writings that formed and sustained the Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) movement. The book includes articles from Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Anthony Cook, Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others. All of the articles add something to CRT, and read independently, add significant portions to the CRT movement.

Published: June 5, 2012 This book provides readers with an introduction to Kimberle Crenshaw’s work. She provides essays and articles that help define the concept of intersectionality. She provides insight from the Central Park jogger, Anita Hill’s testimony against now Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and other significant matters of public interest.

Published: July 30 2013

Published: June 4, 2013

Published: Upcoming publication This is a report based on new reviews of national data and personal interviews with young women in Boston and New York. What started out as just a report we anticipate the book and how it will perform the same task to readers expressing why black girls cannot be abandoned at the margins.

Crenshaw is responding to the tendency within identity politics to overlook or silence intra-group differences, a dynamic repeated throughout anti-racist and feminist movements to the detriment of black women. Crenshaw explores the simultaneously raced and gendered dimensions of violence against women of color (specifically by looking at responses to domestic violence and rape) to draw attention to the way the specificity of black women’s experiences of violence is ignored, overlooked, misrepresented, and/or silenced. Crenshaw focuses on both the structural and political aspects of intersectionality with regards to rape and domestic abuse and uses this analysis of violence against women of color to highlight the importance of intersectionality and of engaging with issues like violence against women through an intersectional lens.

References

Sources

External links

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