Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

Relevant Work

## Biography

* Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw was born in Canton, Ohio in 1959.
* In 1981, Crenshaw received her BA in government and Africana Studies from Cornell University.
* In 1984, she received her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
* While at Harvard Law School, she was one of the founding organizers of the Critical Race Theory Workshop which originated the term.

## "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" (1989)

### **Background and Historical Context**

In this essay, Crenshaw contends that intersectional analysis can expand feminist and antiracist theory. Treating racial and sexual discrimination as mutually exclusive leads to a problematic theoretical tendency to think of all women as white and all Blacks as men, erasing the experiences of black women who are at these intersections of race and gender. Black women are at the center of her analysis, in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience within the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences. Crenshaw examines how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist politics.

### **Key Words and Terms**

**Intersectionality**- the theory that the overlap of various social identities, like race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual.
In a 2017 interview with Columbia Law School , Crenshaw stated "Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things."

### **Key Quotations**

“These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure.
Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating "women's experience" or "the Black experience" into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast” (140).

"Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination" (149).

*DeGraffenreid, Moore,* and *Travenol* are doctrinal manifestations of a common political and theoretical approach to discrimination which operates to marginalize Black women. Unable to grasp the importance of Black women's intersectional experiences, not only courts, but feminist and civil rights thinkers as well have treated Black women in ways that deny both the unique compoundedness of their situation and the centrality of their experiences to the larger classes of women and Blacks. Black women are regarded either as too much like women or Blacks and the compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective experiences of either group or as too different, in which case Black women's Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist agendas" (150).

"In much of feminist theory and, to some extent, in antiracist politics, this framework is reflected in the belief that sexism or racism can be meaningfully discussed without paying attention to the lives of those other than the race-, gender- or class-privileged. As a result, both feminist theory and antiracist politics have been organized, in part, around the equation of racism with what happens to the Black middle-class or to Black men, and the equation of sexism with what happens to white women" (152).

"The value of feminist theory to Black women is diminished because it evolves from a white racial context that is seldom acknowledged. Not only are women of color in fact overlooked, but their exclusion is reinforced when white women speak for and as women. The authoritative universal voice-usually white male subjectivity masquerading as non-racial, non-gendered objectivity—is merely transferred to those who, but for gender, share many of the same cultural, economic and social characteristics" (154).

### **Discussion**

#### Intersectionality

In the text, Crenshaw argues "Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated." (140). Intersectionality as an analytical tool is used to help understand multiple forms of oppression and encourages examination of how different systems of oppression intersect and affect groups of people in different ways, such as Crenshaw argues for black women.

### **Discussion Questions**

Crenshaw, in this essay that establishes the significance of the concept of "intersectionality," argues that [a] focuses on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon. (140)

What does Crenshaw mean (here an throughout) by "privilege" and "marginalization" and "distortion"?

To what extent should we understand Crenshaw's specific examples and specific institutional location as crucial for understanding the now regularly used term, "intersectionality"?

### **Major Criticism and Reception**

Barbara Tomlinson at the Department of Women's Studies at UC Santa Barbara has been critical of the applications of intersectional theory. She suggests that the common practice of using intersectionality to attack other ways of feminist thinking and the tendency of academics to critique intersectionality instead of using intersectionality as a tool to critique other conventional ways of thinking has been a misuse of the ideas it stands for.

## **Related Works**

* *Critical Race theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement* (editor), 1995.
* "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color," in *The Feminist Philosophy Reader*, Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo (eds.). New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 279–309.
* *Reaffirming Racism: The faulty logic of Colorblindness, Remedy and Diversity*, 2013
* *Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Over Policed and Under Protected*, African American Policy Forum, 2016.
* *The Race Track: Understanding and Challenging Structural Racism*, 2017.
* *On Intersectionality: Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw*, 2017.

## References

Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine,
Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. *University of Chicago Legal Forum,* *1989* (1) 139-167.
Retrieved from http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

Tomlinson, B. (2013). "To Tell the Truth and Not Get Trapped: Desire, Distance, and Intersectionality at the Scene of Argument". *Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society*. 38 (4) 993–1017. doi:10.1086/669571.