Kimberlé W. Crenshaw
Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School
Ashley Singh writes on Crenshaw’s work, and gives recommendations for engagement with various aspects of the work.
Biography
“Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. She is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in critical race theory and in “intersectionality,” a term she coined to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice. Her studies, writing, and activism have identified key issues in the perpetuation of inequality, including the “school to prison pipeline” for African American children and the criminalization of behavior among Black teenage girls. Through the Columbia Law School African American Policy Forum (AAPF), which she co-founded, Crenshaw co-authored (with Andrea Ritchie) Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, which documented and drew attention to the killing of Black women and girls by police. Crenshaw and AAPF subsequently launched the #SayHerName campaign to call attention to police violence against Black women and girls.”
Find out more at the website of her think tank https://aapf.org/
“Crenshaw’s groundbreaking intersectionality work was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. She authored the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism in 2001, served as the rapporteur for the conference’s expert group on gender and race discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.”
This bio is a shortened version from her Columbia page, where some more of her achievements and projects are listed: https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/kimberle-w-crenshaw
(cover image via vox)
Recommendations
A narrative of her experiences in youth and work on ‘intersectionality’ from Professor Crenshaw herself in less than 5 minutes.
For casual engagement
Podcast “Intersectionality Matters!”
Some very topical discussions including on COVID-19 in different countries with multiple amazing people per conversation (authors, activists, academics, spiritual leaders…) and, well, the first couple minutes of her podcast sells the crucial reframing of the current state of affairs better than I can imitate. In no.18 the guests, writers Kiese Laymon, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Arundhati Roy, discuss the pandemic in the US and in India. They comment on the downfall and limits of the politicization of empathy, the dispensability of frontline workers being nothing new looking at whose lives are the first to be thrown away in recent wars, coronavirus related discrimination against Asian-Americans and how that sits with the complex institutional place of Asians in American society, and the murkiness in white liberal university students saying they are glad that the pandemic may wipe out some old white folk, amongst many other things. (Crenshaw even asks the writers what effect the pandemic may have on the storytelling of the future and whether this moment shifts the baseline of what counts as absurdity and horror.)
Recommended philosophy paper
This is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s landmark paper coining ‘intersectionality’.
The structure of the paper:
1. The antidiscrimination framework
The experience of intersectionality and the doctrinal response
The significance of doctrinal treatment of intersectionality
2. Ain’t we women?
3. When and where I enter: integrating an analysis of sexism into black liberation politics
4. Expanding feminist theory and anti-ractist politics by embracing the intersection
Note that a lot of great work in philosophy is published by people in departments that are not a Philosophy department. According to Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman in 2014, there are 5 black philosophers in academic posts at UK universities; the 3 women in that category (Gabriella Beckles‐Raymond, Patrice Haynes, and Katherine Harloe) are in the Theology faculty, Philosophy and Religious Studies Department and Classic faculty of their respective universities. There is major overlap between philosophy and many other departments, so when philosophy departments pick and choose what and who to include in their department they draw their own boundary of philosophy. Regardless, plenty of deeply philosophical work is found in neighbouring subjects.