Kimberlé Crenshaw: What is Critical Race Theory, Anyway?

Throughout history, the rules and practices of American democracy have contradicted the nation’s democratic ideals. Kimberlé Crenshaw has dedicated her career to developing inclusive legal frameworks to address some of our greatest democratic problems. As one of the foundational thinkers of Critical Race Theory, she sets the record straight on what the project is—and what it isn’t.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum and the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School. She serves on the legal faculty at both UCLA and Columbia University. She is one of the most cited scholars in legal history.

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Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:00:00] When you think about how much celebration happened when Barack Obama was elected, there was this sense that we had finally arrived at being a true democracy, that we had finally been able to erase the history of brutal suppression of full democratic participation, particularly of African Americans, as those who do not speak English as their first language, and so forth. But January 6th pulled the cover off of that fantasy.

Alex Lovit [00:00:36] Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host, Alex Lovit.

My guest today is Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw is a professor at both Colombia and UCLA’s law schools, and she’s the executive director of the African American Policy Forum where, among other things, she works on ending academic censorship and promoting freedom to learn, and drawing attention to Black women who have been victims of police violence. Her latest book is SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. And she also hosts her own podcast, Intersectionality Matters. Crenshaw is one of the foundational writers and thinkers in the field of Critical Race Theory. Unless you’re an academic scholar who studied Critical Race Theory in law school or grad school, you likely became aware of the term within the last few years, as the label has been applied—frequently inaccurately—to describe one side in the culture war over how Americans should remember our history, consider our diversity, and educate our children. But if we’re going to use the term Critical Race Theory, we should understand what it means and what it can teach us. And as you’ll hear from this conversation, we have a lot to learn from Kimberlé Crenshaw. For much of American history, our democratic ambitions have been in tension with our diversity. We called ourselves a democracy while we displaced Native Americans, while we held Black Americans in bondage, and while we treated many minority groups as second-class citizens. But facing up to our country’s worst acts doesn’t have to mean giving up on its highest aspirations. The US always has been diverse, and we always will be. Whether we’re going to be a diverse democracy, meaningfully addressing past and ongoing discrimination, while also uniting all our citizens in a shared commitment to democracy, freedom, and equality—well, that’s up to us. And this is where Kimberlé Crenshaw and Critical Race Theory can help. If we’re going to have laws and institutions that work for the benefit of everyone, we need to have a clear-eyed understanding of their biases. It’s easy to see the prejudice in legally mandated segregation. It’s harder to see the prejudice in, for example, university admissions policies that ban consideration of race, while evaluating based on a series of metrics that advantage White applicants over Black ones. But if we want to have a society that’s actually equitable, instead of just claiming to be, we can’t just ignore structural biases and hope they go away. These are difficult problems to think about and they can be difficult to talk about too. Crenshaw is a voice worth listening to, not just for her deep thinking, but also for communicating about these hard topics with warmth, empathy, and humor.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, welcome to The Context.

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:03:35] Thank you for having me.

Alex Lovit [00:03:36] It’s a genuine honor to have you. You’ve built a career as an interdisciplinary scholar, and you’ve also been a public intellectual, reaching a wide audience. And you’re one of the foundational thinkers developing the field of critical race theory. And in that you’ve expanded the boundaries of legal scholarship. So, your career has been wide ranging and influential both in and out of the academy, but law is where you started. And so, let’s start there. What made you want to be a lawyer in the first place?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:04:02] Oh my. So, when I think about the origins of my desire, I connected to the ways that my family elevated struggle for racial justice and lawyers in particular in that struggle. So, in my household on the walls growing up was a picture of Martin Luther King, a picture of Kennedy, and a picture of Thurgood Marshall. So, I knew growing up that these were important figures in what my family described as our collective striving to better our position as a people, to better our opportunities. And law was regarded in my family as a route to those ends. My mother used to take me around town and just narrate to me the different sites where things had happened to her growing up. The place that she was in a wading pool and it got drained while she was in the pool. The place where she was not able to sit in the center of the theater and instead was directed up to the peanut gallery, as they called it—the place where Black people were allowed to sit. And my parents and our whole family lived in Ohio, so this was informal kind of segregation. So, one of the things that my mother’s father gave her was a card that had the Ohio Public Accommodation statute printed on it. So, whenever she had these encounters, she would make sure that the proprietor knew that what they were doing was against the law. That, in turn, made many of their efforts to either sue or threaten to sue, if the proprietor didn’t cease this practice of segregation, easier because they were able to prove they knew that this was against the law, and they pursued it anyway. So, I grew up listening to these stories about how law had been a tool to deliver my mother and the family and the broader community from the insults and indignities of segregation. And so, it was somewhat natural that I would want to learn what I call the abracadabra. How does law do that? How do you grasp it to do this kind of work? That’s the longer story. The shorter one is my family always said I was argumentative. Always was asking, why does it have to be this way? Who said so? Is this consistent with past practice? So, I think it’s a little bit of the past family history, our immersion in the civil rights movement and my personality.

Alex Lovit [00:06:58] And so you attended Harvard Law School, and I read that you were interested in Harvard, in part, because of one professor there, Derrick Bell, who had had a celebrated career as a civil rights attorney for the NAACP. So, you showed up in law school excited to study with Derrick Bell, but then he ended up resigning in protest over Harvard’s failures to make additional minority hires. And if I have my story right, you were just a first-year student at the time and you were dissatisfied with Harvard’s response. Can you tell the story about the alternative course you organized?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:07:26] Yes. So, you know that adage that Elvis had left the building? That’s exactly what happened when I arrived at Harvard. Derrick Bell had left the spring before I matriculated. There were other students who came to Harvard as well because we wanted to study what Derrick Bell was teaching, namely the relationship between law and racial injustices over the history of this country in particular. So, when we got there and saw that he was no longer there, of course there was tremendous disappointment not being able to study with someone who had become an icon by that point. But even more disturbing was the recognition that the law school didn’t have any intention to replace his courses in any way whatsoever. And that was deeply disappointing to a whole cohort of students. We call ourselves the sort of post-civil rights generation. We watched it on television. We weren’t old enough to participate, but we were old enough to become part of, and in our own mind, the generational efforts to continue the process of dismantling racial segregation, both formal and informal, and remaking opportunity in a way that spoke to and opened doors for all of us. So, coming to Harvard and finding out that the school wasn’t interested in pursuing this educational mission that we thought should be a core mission to a post-civil rights law school, post-civil rights movement law school, we decided that, you know, we would approach the dean and express our dismay and work with him to correct the situation. His response was memorable because it was clear that he did not see this course as essential to the mission of the law school. In fact, he asked us point blank, what is so special about a course on constitutional law and minority issues that you can’t effectively learn through a traditional constitutional law class, and perhaps a legal aid placement? Second, when we said we want this opportunity to be used to recruit other people of color to the faculty, because at this point Derrick’s departure left only one other tenured faculty member of color. And the answer to both of those questions basically set the terms of our history at Harvard. He basically said the course wasn’t going to be taught, and there were no qualified people of color that were currently available to teach at Harvard Law School. It was shocking, partly because it came from a liberal dean. This was a liberal law school. We weren’t talking about the University of Texas that had a history of express segregation against African Americans in particular. And our dean was on the board of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. So, we thought we were talking to people on the same side of the line. And what that did for us was to show us that there were various lines that were being drawn. This was a line that was drawn between the aspiration of diversity, but in their mind, the reality of meritocracy. And there was no interrogation of how they defined merit, or whether a definition of merit that was established at the time that most African Americans who wanted to go to Harvard Law School couldn’t was appropriate. So that led us to what we called an alternative course. Once it was clear to us what the writing on the wall was, how the picture that we were seeing was rationalized, it also became an imperative for us to paint a different story. So, we pulled all our resources together, we scoured the country for people who were teaching constitutional law and minority issues, people who were writing in the field asking new kinds of questions. And we invited each of them to campus for one session of the alternative course. And we got independent study credit from some of the sympathetic faculty members and launched what is in many ways the beginning of critical race theory. We all were studying out of the same text, we were asking some of the same questions. We were engaging in conversations with junior faculty members who eventually would become colleagues in critical race theory a few years later.

Alex Lovit [00:12:06] And you were saying that this alternative course was one of the foundational—I mean, a lot of people refer to it as kind of the origin of critical race theory (CRT). As a body of scholarly work, CRT has long been influential in academic circles and also inspirational for some political activists, but most Americans have become familiar with the term in the last few years as it’s become attacked. And a lot of those attacks, I think, are in bad faith. And I want to start by asking what CRT actually is. So, with apologies for asking you to summarize a complex body of work in a few short sentences, and also with a disclaimer for our listeners that will only be scratching the surface here. I’d like to ask you to describe what you see as the central concepts or insights of critical race theory.

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:12:52] Critical race theory, I think it’s important to understand, is more of a prism. It’s a way of looking at conditions, less of a bag with lots of stuff in it. And I think that’s one of the ways in which the effort to misinform the public has done damage to what the project really is. Critical race theory is, first of all, an acknowledgment that race is not a natural or biological concept. It is something that is made and remade. It is a dynamic that has existed over time in the United States. As such, the idea that one can simply set race aside or be colorblind ignores the extent to which racial dynamics are constantly being remade over and over again. And law has historically played a central role in defining what we think race is, in determining what some of the consequences of being raced in a particular way are, and in neutralizing some of those institutional practices, so that it is easy for people to say, well, I didn’t have anything to do with this, so there is no responsibility on any of our parts to interrogate the constant outcomes around racial inequality. To take us back to the story out of which critical race theory came, we became critical of the way that the institutions simply disregarded the consequences of the pipeline to being a law professor function. It started with going to an elite institution, such as Harvard or Yale. Institutions that historically had not open their doors to women and had not open their doors fully to people of color until well into the 20th century. That became the predicate for determining who would be seen as qualified and who wasn’t. So right there, you have a grandfathering into the current period of exclusions of the past. Just acknowledging that is a critical act because, for the most part, our faculty members and our dean hadn’t even thought about that. They weren’t critically looking at the everyday practices that were taken for granted that also produced these ongoing exclusions. Beyond that was the question of, well, what are some of the other ways that lawyers have shown themselves to be tremendously resourceful, even revolutionary, in what they do? Brown vs. Board of Education was perhaps the most significant constitutional case that was decided in the 20th century. Who was behind that? Was it the lawyers who were products of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago? That’s not where the tremendously boundary shifting legal thinking was happening. It was happening somewhere else. Howard Law School, to be precise. So why weren’t the kinds of legal pathbreaking work deemed to be significant in creating new ideas about what was merit? Why was it that the same kind of legal problems, the same kind of legal analysis that people were doing throughout the 20th century that had nothing to do with the most critical democratic crises that we were facing, why was that considered to be the gold standard and not the kind of work that changed our lives? That’s what critical race theory was grounded in, asking those questions that no one was asking, poking at the assumption that our institutions were just naturally populated with mostly White people, mostly men. Rather than understanding these institutional practices that could be structured differently if we took seriously the values of inclusion, of democratic participation. So that’s just one little window into what critical race thinking is. It’s not this caricature of we’re better than you. It’s not this idea that there is a moral superiority and we’re just reversing the hierarchies. It’s not this idea of give us things that we don’t deserve. It’s an idea of taking a critical practice and asking the important questions. How did this come to be? What were the interests that were served? How does this align with some of our deepest values and where we’re seeing tension and contradiction, what does that require of us in terms of what should be done differently?

Alex Lovit [00:17:57] You’ve said a number of threads there that I’d like to pull on. One is the name critical race theory. And I’m hearing you use critical, the word critical in kind of the same sense as critical thinking. I also know there was a body of work, critical legal studies. Can you talk a little bit about where that word came from, where the term critical race theory came in?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:18:15] Well, critical legal studies was a movement that was in the ascendancy when we were at Harvard. It was a set of tools that allowed us to express what we thought all along was the truth, which was law is political. Law isn’t simply neutral with respect to a whole range of dynamics and interests. That’s not something you had to really tell any student of color who was remotely aware of the history of law and race in this country. However, in our classrooms, for the most part, some of the most compelling ways in which law had been used to shape enslavement and manifest destiny and genocide were not talked about. It’s as though these things just happened without a deep reckoning with the way that law had facilitated these things. So critical legal studies was a prism for asking fundamental questions about how law was conceptualized. What were some of the distributive consequences of legal rulemaking? What counts as legal reasoning and what is framed as political reasoning? And so, through those frameworks, we were interested in thinking about things like the Dred Scott case that effectively decided that people of African descent were so inferior that we were enslavable people. And as enslavable people, we could never be citizens. It’s hard to look at that and take seriously some of the assumptions that circulate about law. Of course that was political. Of course that was not neutral. Of course that created concrete material harms that then became part of the structure of American society. So critical legal studies was a set of tools, a set of conversations that we were familiar with. What we brought to it and what, interestingly enough, was sometimes an area of tension is turning those questions inward and asking, what does this then tell us about racial power? What does this tell us about how race is constructed? What does this tell us about the relationship between law and the things that are often framed as just-there features of American society? So, we thought we were just doing what they were doing. They were doing that with respect to class, and they were doing it with respect to gender. So, we thought, okay, we’ll do it with respect to race. And some people went along on the ride with us and thought, okay, that’s an interesting turn in our conversations. And it was a rich set of conversations and conferences and workshops and summer camps and all of that. But there were some people who were able to see how class relations are also constructed through legal means, but were not as willing to follow that conversation into thinking about race.

Alex Lovit [00:21:45] So I want to ask about the historical context. So, you’re talking about this period that a lot of these ideas are swirling, and you’re really founding the core principles of critical race theory. And it hasn’t been a static concept in that, you know, there’s been continued work, but we’re talking about the 1980s here, when you were first arriving in law school. And you talked about being of the post-civil rights movement generation, that you grew up seeing those stories, you grew up with Martin Luther King Jr. on your wall. But by the time you were arriving in law school, the terrain had shifted a little bit. The limitations of the legal strategy of pursuing integration were becoming apparent, as courts were less willing to enforce integration through bussing in public schools. There was insistence that we not just look at disparities of racial impact, but you need to demonstrate racist intent. Is that how you understand the historical legal context of what you were fighting against?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:22:37] Well, when I matriculated into Harvard, we were in a period of what I eventually wrote about as retrenchment. The constant delivery of new legal rights, the idea that we were on an always-upward expanding trajectory towards change was being arrested at that very time. I was in my last year of college when Ronald Reagan was elected. Quickly thereafter, the court, which was already in the process of pulling back and shifting, shifted even more. Bakke had been decided a few years earlier, which delivered a message that racial reckoning around the institutions that had discriminated and had segregated was not a justification that could be used by institutions to try to further open up opportunities for people of color. The rationale for affirmative action could not be we are remedying segregation in schools, we are remedying the fact that there are so few people of color who serve people of color communities like doctors and lawyers. And we’re certainly not remedying the professional segregation that is a product of this past. None of those could be utilized as justifications for affirmative action. It was only diversity. So even when diversity was introduced, it was introduced apart from the history of discrimination and institutional exclusion that we were witnessing in the second generation after the civil rights movement. So being in law school at the very time that the law is going about its business of pulling back from some of the broader conceptualizations of what racial justice and integration could be and narrowing it to: we are correcting for individual decisions that are bigoted. Already at that time, the whole notion of institutional discrimination and structural inequality—robust concepts that had been around for decades—was already being pushed off the table. So, we’re sitting in law school classrooms where teachers are teaching us Washington vs. Davis, which basically says it doesn’t matter that the state, in this case D.C., may have contributed to dramatic disparities in educational access. This same institution can use academic features to determine who can be a police officer in a largely Black city. We’re sitting there and we’re hearing this being discussed as that is the definition of discrimination, whether someone is out to get you, rather than whether someone has put your group in a position for generations and then relies upon that group status as a basis for distributing vital opportunities in the future. And we’re witnessing how the conversation is limited, and it’s narrowing, and it means that a whole host of discriminatory conditions are never going to be adjudicated. So, you’re sitting there while, you know, the Titanic is sinking and you’re asking questions like, well, how did this happen? Where is the iceberg that is sinking this? Aren’t there any lifeboats for us? How do we narrate what has happened? So, it was very much a temporal product of what was happening at that time. And then that temporal product is a prism that allows us to see the secondary and tertiary consequences that are playing out as we speak.

Alex Lovit [00:26:52] It seems like circumstances that would tend to make one critical.

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:26:56] Exactly, yes.

Alex Lovit [00:26:56] So in some ways, you’re talking about a retrenchment of civil rights law beginning in the 1980s. And in some ways, that retrenchment has continued right through the current day, including last year the Supreme Court banned consideration of race in admissions decisions for higher education. But the basic argument here is that the schools should make admissions decisions based on merit rather than race. But there’s no universally agreed upon standard for merit, and schools can consider all sorts of factors—test scores, GPA, but also geographic diversity, athletic ability, legacy admissions, and on and on. You attended selective institutions as a student, and you now teach at a couple of selective institutions. How do you think these kinds of universities should be thinking about admissions decisions? How should they be thinking about this concept of merit?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:27:44] Well, I mentioned Bakke a few minutes ago, and I want to go back just to uncover the road not taken and perhaps the road we should return to now. There are many of us, since that time, who made the argument that pursuing a diversity rationale and not interrogating the baseline assumptions that the existing definition of merit—test scores, interviews, Advanced Placement courses—without interrogating whether those are repositories of unjustified advantage and disadvantage. The response for decades has been, if it’s not broken, we don’t need to fix it. We’re basically getting what we need through diversity, even though that’s not the basic rationale. And even though we all can see that the traditional way of defining merit, especially through standardized tests, these measures are flawed and predictably produce certain outcomes that then require a diversity rationale to try to make up for them. Now we’re at a point where we can revisit that question—How do we go about addressing the fact that, for example, SATs and LSATs are framed in such a way the whole process of deciding which questions to ask and which questions not are already pre-tested? So, it is known which groups score higher on some questions as opposed to others. The process of doing that often means that questions that students of color score higher on are taken out of the test, and those in which men score higher on or White people score higher on typically stay in the test. So, it’s not as though this test is some race-neutral measurement. They are very race-aware about these outcomes and they’re not natural. So, what should be done about that? There’s a lot of creative thinking about how you go about creating a meritocracy. One thing you don’t do is rely on standardized tests because when you do that, that standard is based on something. It’s not in heaven. It’s based on the planet Earth and on specific people with specific biographies. So, at minimum, we have to step away from these standardized test approaches and come up with other ways of measuring the potential of scores of people whose potential has never been effectively measured. I like to remind people that Martin Luther King, who is largely regarded as the most gifted orator of the 20th century, scored in the bottom quintile in his verbal test. We’re not talking math. We’re talking about the thing he was brilliant at. Standardized tests were unable to capture. So, there are millions of ways that this story should cause us to think far more critically about what’s happening in higher education, especially when we begin to see the distributive consequences of the Supreme Court’s case this summer. One of the big cases that happened before the Harvard case was the University of Michigan affirmative action case. And the question was whether giving 20 diversity points to students of color was too many points and whether it constituted reverse discrimination. But as the noted psychologist Claude Steele often asked, it’s not whether 20 points was too many, are 20 points too little? When you look at all of the things that University of Michigan gave applicants points for: going to a school that has AP courses, just going to that school, being a legacy admit, going to a school in a rural area as opposed to an urban area. When you look at all those points, the majority of those points are most likely to be points that applicants who are White are likely to have, and least likely to be points that students of color can have, especially Black and Latinx students. So, there are racial imbalances, racial disadvantages in what many college admissions officers do on a day-to-day basis. That is institutional. That is structural. When affirmative action then is framed as preferential treatment, it’s taking all those things as a given. It’s erasing the racial work that those kinds of institutional practices do. And then on top of it, when the Supreme Court then brushes over efforts to pay attention to that with a colorblind brush, it both removes awareness that there’s racial work going on in everyday practices and removes the tools to disembed these things from our everyday practices. That’s what is so deeply disturbing. It’s not only that efforts to remove these biases are now clouded with the air of unconstitutionality, but even to talk about these embedded inequalities is seen as race-baiting or, worse still, doing critical race theory.

Alex Lovit [00:33:26] Well, let’s talk a little bit about the University of Michigan because I think that’s a way of talking about both the legal standards, but also the kind of political challenge. So, I was actually a student at the University of Michigan at the time that affirmative action survived the Supreme Court. And then there was a statewide ballot initiative asking, should the university ban consideration of race? And that passed. You know, the citizens of Michigan chose to end race conscious admissions at public institutions in the state. As I was a student there, I did notice there was a precipitous drop in minority enrollment. And there’s an appealing colorblind idea. You know, this idea of racism is bad. And the way to stop discrimination on race is to stop discriminating on race. So, you know, let’s stop thinking about race. Let’s just ban consideration. What’s wrong with that way of thinking about race?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:34:14] So I often like to ask people, let’s compare that argument to asbestos. We have built our institutions using this toxic substance. Perhaps it wasn’t known at the time that it was used that it was toxic. Perhaps there was no intention to actually harm people using this, but now we’ve come to recognize and understand that this material in our institution actually is toxic. It undermines the well-being of us in this institution. It causes brown lung disease and a host of other problems. Now, we don’t say to those institutions that want to rid themselves of this toxic substance that they’re contributing to the toxicity by actually naming asbestos as a problem. Nor do we say that the technicians who can come in and say, all right, here’s an X-ray of your institution. Here is where this substance is embedded. Here is how you’re breathing it in every day even though you don’t know it. And here’s how you can disengage, dismantle, pull it out and rebuild your institution without this substance. To say to those institutions and to the technicians, you are the problem, not the asbestos, makes no sense at all. I mean, even a kid would say that’s a backwards way of thinking about how to rid ourselves of a problem. Don’t think about it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t theorize about it. Don’t engage practical steps to remove it. That wouldn’t make sense at all when it comes to something that we really cared to get rid of. Yet this is effectively what the argument is with respect to race and racism. The idea is we can solve racism by not talking about it. We can solve racism by acting as though it doesn’t exist. We can solve the legacy of our past by assuming that our past wasn’t the past, and that the contemporary legacy only exists as long as we’re willing to see it and name it. So, the appeal to colorblindness is an appeal to closing our eyes to a set of conditions as a way of dealing with it. Anyone who has had any problem health-wise or anything else knows the path to wellness is not through saying, I’m going to ignore that. That’s the path to disaster. And effectively, colorblindness is putting us on that pathway to disaster. And this is not just for people of color. It’s a pathway toward disaster for our democracy itself.

Alex Lovit [00:37:13] Well, let’s talk about that. I want to talk about democracy. The Kettering Foundation’s mission is to promote inclusive democracies, and both inclusive and democracy are essential parts of that phrase. And there’s some tension there. So, we’re just talking an example of a democratic election in the state of Michigan that made a decision that you disagreed with. It might be late in the conversation to be asking this, but what are your thoughts on democracy? You a fan?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:37:36] Of course I’m a fan of the ideals of democracy. I’m a critic of the practices of democracy, particularly in a society such as ours, where the basic rules of democracy were shaped in a way to maintain the power of a particular faction in our country. The reason that Donald Trump is former President Trump and potentially future President Trump is because of the Electoral College, is because of the particular way our Constitution distributes political power. This is part of our history, of a country that was built through a compromise with contradictions. It was built in a way that ensured the ability of slaveholding states to be able to protect their interests. It was built with suspicion towards direct democracy, towards mob rule through a ballot, but mob rule not against discrete and insular minorities, but mob rule against elites, against those with power and with wealth. We’ve been on a trajectory to try to minimize those early choices as much as possible. We’ve been all about trying to remove the stigma of democratic participation that has been attached to those whose citizenship has always been contested. That’s people of African descent. That is immigrants. That is, you know, people who are descendants from Mexico. This is all been part of the short and contested history over democratic participation. We thought we were in an upward trajectory around it. When you think about how much celebration happened when Barack Obama was elected, there was the sense that we had finally arrived at being a true democracy. That we had finally been able to erase the history of brutal suppression of full democratic participation, particularly of African Americans, as those who do not speak English as their first language, and so forth. But January 6th pulled the cover off of that fantasy. And I think we don’t really think about January 6th in the full way that we should, which is that was as much about race retrenchment as it was about undermining our government institutions. If you think about the story of the stolen election. If you think seriously and listen closely to the claim that we want our country back. If you look at the places where the fiction of a stolen election really gained traction, we’re talking Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee. There’s one thing that all these places have in common. They’re the places where voters of color gave the election to President Biden. So that argument that these are suspect voters, these are suspect places, we need to go there, be there, that is all part of that very old story of redemption, of taking the vote back from the freedmen, of making sure that people of color are not playing a significant, determinative role in this democracy. And our inability to connect those dots—unless we can confront that fully and wholly in the time that we have, we’re walking into another situation where racialized patterns of vote suppression and vote denial from the past will once again shape our contemporary politics and extend well into the future. People have to connect the dots between the threats of anti-democracy, of authoritarianism and the repression that we experience as a country, as a people, in the past.

Alex Lovit [00:41:59] So I want to ask about your work to push for a more inclusive society and democracy within the context of a democracy. So, you’ve written for both academic and popular audiences, you’ve done organizing, and of course, as a lawyer, you also have the skill set to engage in litigation. So which is to say you’ve got a lot of strategic tools at your disposal. So, if your overall goal is to promote a more equitable society, how do you think about these strategic decisions about how to use your time and energy and talents?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:42:28] That’s a very, very interesting question because to me it feels seamless. It’s more of a question of what tool is selected for the audience that I’m speaking to. I see the work that I do as an academic in terms of studying and elevating questions that typically are taken for granted. I see the work as providing prisms that others can adapt and use for the various purposes that they are analyzing a set of issues. And I see myself as learning from conversations that people are having back with me about intersectionality, for example. The work that I do in the broader community was grounded in my experience during the Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas hearings when there was so much confusion, particularly among civil rights communities, racial and gender justice stakeholders, about what they were witnessing and, in particular, where allegiance should be offered. When Anita Hill came forward and talked about sexual harassment, first of all, most people hadn’t heard of what sexual harassment was. Second of all, many members of the African American community had already been primed to understand the assault on Black men for sexual impropriety all the way to assaults as presumptively or potentially a false accusation, which across history has been embraced in our understanding of lynching, which for the most part was not even about those allegations, but that was the general framework that was used to justify horrific violence and tied the hands of those outside of the regions of the country where this dehumanizing and brutal practice occurred. So, it was a deep part of our culture to understand and to be suspicious. And when Clarence Thomas himself said that this was a high-tech lynching, it secured the support of probably millions of African Americans who were at best ambivalent and some who were deeply critical. What we didn’t have access to was the history of Black women. The fact that sexual harassment was actually a product of Black female plaintiffs taking the history of being sexually abused in work, which is what enslavement was, and recognizing that that kind of experience isn’t just life. It isn’t just, oh, the birds and the bees. It’s discrimination. Because this history was not known, because Rosa Parks’s history of being a rape crisis advocate before she sat down in Montgomery, because all that wasn’t known, it was harder for Anita Hill’s story to be understood, to be heard, and for her testimony to be taken seriously. So, we ended up with a debacle in which sexual harassment was not seen as of interest to African Americans and African American women in particular. We ended up affirming an African American who, yes, identified as one, but his decisions were deeply damaging to the civil rights movement and to civil rights, per se. So, as I witnessed that, along with my co-founder, Luke Harris, we knew that we could do academic work until the cows come home, but what also needed to be attended to is sharing this information and these suppressed histories with stakeholders in racial and gender justice. So, our goal was to create an organization that would be—I sometimes frame it as a lazy Susan. We take some of the challenges that are so difficult to work through and bring it into the laboratory and historicize the issues, provide the analogies that people can use. We’ve even drawn cartoons. So, the idea is to take ideas that help illuminate the challenges that we face and make them far more accessible to stakeholders in hopes that with this information, they are better able to participate in the process of defending civil rights, race and gender justice, and pushing back against efforts to render all of these things that we’re currently fighting, simply products that exist in the past and not things that shape our lives right here, right now.

Alex Lovit [00:47:52] You mentioned intersectionality there, which we haven’t really talked much about, which is, as I understand it as a legal concept, a critique of narrow legal definitions of discrimination that sort of allowed consideration of racial discrimination or gender discrimination, but not how those things intersected. But then you’re also talking about, with Anita Hill, the need for a kind of a political movement to make the public more aware of intersectionality as well. So, I think that’s a good example of how your work crosses the boundaries.

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:48:20] So, I so wish that I could just take you on the road with me because so many people have such a hard time explaining exactly what you just explained. Intersectionality becomes all sorts of unidentifiable things that go thump in the night in the hands of those who are using intersectionality as a framework to, as one person says, put all kinds of insanities in these concepts—intersectionality, critical race theory—or decry it so much that even those who know what intersectionality actually is are willing to marginalize or silence it because it’s been so politicized. This is something that happened with the College Board when Governor DeSantis said that a course that has intersectionality in it is a course that violates the anti-woke act. This assault on ideas, as you said earlier, bad faith, assault on ideas is actually undermining our literacy. It is reversing progress that we’ve been making to finding ways to conceptualize experiences that had otherwise fallen through the cracks. Black women’s experiences of sexual abuse over the course of history had fallen through the conceptual cracks of anti-racism and of feminism. Intersectionality, Black feminism helps bring it back to fore. You cannot address a problem that you cannot name, and if you can’t name it, you don’t see it. And if you don’t see it, it just continues to exist. So, part of the intentional effort to defame certain ideas is part of the pushback against broadening our civil rights and social justice projects and processes. And a lot of the work that we find ourselves having to do now is just going back to square one—this is what intersectionality is, this is what it isn’t, this is why it should matter if you care about social justice, you care about a fully integrated idea of feminism, you care about whether the fight against police brutality includes the way that women are subject to police violence, particularly forms of police violence that track anti-Blackness. We have to have frameworks to see more clearly, to create more inclusive approaches to some of our social problems.

Alex Lovit [00:50:58] You’re mentioning there one aspect of intersectionality is a lack of attention to how women have been affected by police violence, which has often been viewed as an issue that only affects Black men. And that’s the organization that you lead, the African American Policy Forum. That’s one of the campaigns that you’ve been engaged in the last few years is the Say Her Name campaign. And I wonder if you could just say a little bit about what you’re hoping to accomplish with that work and, you know, what that work is.

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:51:24] Say Her Name was a chant that turned into an imperative, that turned into a hashtag, that turned into a movement. And now it’s also a play, a book, and a network. Say Her Name was what we were chanting when our organization, AAPF, attended the rally for Eric Garner after the failure to indict the officer who held him in a chokehold until he died. And that was around the time that there were several other cases of African American men who had been killed by the police. And so, the outrage and the trauma drove millions of us to the streets. So, we joined likewise being exasperated and outraged that these injustices continue to happen. We attended the march with a banner that had the names and pictures of many Black women who had been killed by the police. One, Michelle Cusseaux, who had been killed five days after Mike Brown had been killed. Michelle was killed when the police were sent to her home on a mental health call, and she refused to let them in, and one of the officers decided that he was going to break into her home and encountered her in her vestibule, and within minutes had shot her through the heart. His claim was she was holding a hammer because she was, at the time, changing her locks, and the look on her face gave him the impression that he and the six officers with him were in danger of losing their lives. There was no protest for her across the country. There was just Fran’s decision to take her coffin to City Hall. That’s how we saw that a Black woman had been killed because her mother had taken her coffin to City Hall. So, as we held up Michelle Cusseaux’s name, we started seeing other Black women who had been killed by the police and there were no marches, there was really very little media coverage even when there was video of the woman getting killed. Natasha McKenna was a Black woman who was jailed also on a mental health call. She was brought out of her cell nude by a half-dozen men in hazmat uniforms, handcuffed to a restraining chair, hooded and tasered multiple times, and she died from that. So where was the outrage about what was happening to Black women? Where were their names? Why weren’t they being called? So, we were saying, say her name. Say her name as we chant and protest and we say Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, we wanted to say Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, India Kager. We wanted these names to be elevated and the response was what we took into account when we decided to move into a network. Some people were glad that we were saying their names because they didn’t know Black women were also killed. Some people were just shocked. And some people were annoyed that we were bringing women into this conversation. And that’s why we said, as long as this is about anti-Black police violence, it needs to be a gender inclusive reckoning with the scope of anti-Black police violence that happens to people in varied ways that sometimes reflect their gender situation. So, Black women being killed when they’re with their children. Black women being killed when they are calling for help. Black women being killed when there’s a domestic violence disturbance. Black women killed when they’re driving while Black. Having a mental disability while Black. Just doing pretty much anything while Black. That is an experience of Black women’s lives as well as other Black bodies. So, Say Her Name is an effort to lift up this reality, to reach out to the family members, especially the mothers and daughters and sisters of Black women killed by the police, to provide them a space of solace, of comfort, of support because, for the most part, our inability to say these names means that our communities don’t show up for them in the way that they show up for others. Their stories aren’t told in the way that other stories are told, and that leaves them sometimes inferring that they’re the only family that experienced a woman being killed by the police, or that there was something exceptionally problematic about their loved ones whose lives were stolen. So, bringing them together allows them to see they’re not alone, that there was nothing exceptional about their daughter or mother that warranted this kind of life-ending intervention from the police. And that also their lives can go on. A lot of the mothers say that the first time they laughed again or enjoyed themselves again was in the company of other mothers because they were given permission. And it was also okay if those moments of laughter suddenly turned to moments of tears because that’s what the space is like. So, we’ve been curating this space for them for eight years and Say Her Name: Stories of Police Violence in Public Silence is a book that tells each of their stories, and also provides inspiration for bearing witness to what’s happening to people who fall through the cracks.

Alex Lovit [00:57:20] And these are powerful stories. You’ve just told them powerfully. They’re also told in the book and told in a variety of formats. You’ve used poetry, a play, as you mentioned, songs, music to raise awareness and draw attention. And I want to ask about this in part because the Kettering Foundation is investing in art as a political tool to advance democracy. So, we’ve talked about your academic scholarship, we’ve talked about your organizing work. How do you think about art as a tool for advancing your goals?

Kimberlé Crenshaw [00:57:47] This year we did something at the Sundance Festival that really captures how we think about art. We’ve been hosting the Story of Us: The Big Conversation. We started it right after January 6th to basically say that that story that we saw unfolding at the Capitol is a product of a particular narrow story of who we are as a people, what makes us American, what has been part of our history of struggle over democracy. And part of the reason why we can still hear people say, this is my country, not yours, is that the cinematic story of who we are has not lifted up the end of reconstruction, for example, has not lifted up the possibilities of widespread coalition between laborers and farmers, between Black workers and White labor unions. We haven’t really seen it and that in part distorts who we are and what our possibilities are. So, we’ve been having this conversation with independent filmmakers and artists because we realize the importance of narrative, the importance of the other ways we express who we are to being able to attend to our democracy. This last year, we thought it was important to put a conversation about book bans into the same experience of performing some of the content of the books that are being banned. So, we went back and forth between setting the stage for book bans, letting people know that we have the highest rate of book banning that we’ve had in generations, letting people know that in 23 states the way that our race history can be taught and talked about is subject now to legislation. Giving people the facts, but then allowing people to experience the brilliance, the wisdom, the insight, the moving dimensions of much of the material that’s being banned. So, we had readers, actors, actually read from the book Caste. Aunjanue Ellis, who is starring in Origins, read from that book. We had Malcolm Martin characters read from Letter from the Birmingham Jail and the Ballot or the Bullet. We had Toni Morrison embodied both as explaining what she was trying to do with The Bluest Eye, the second most banned book in 2023, and someone actually embodying the character in The Bluest Eye. And we went back and forth. That is our version of artivism, moving people with insight and with feeling. People can understand what the issue is and feel what the issue is. That’s our theory about what the civil rights movement was about. That’s what marriage equality was appealing to. That’s what feminism did. It married how we think and how we feel as a precondition for action. That’s what we’re constantly trying to do, always innovating, always working with artists as well as academics and activists.

Alex Lovit [01:01:19] Kimberlé Crenshaw, you truly are an inspiration. Thank you for joining us on The Context.

Kimberlé Crenshaw [01:01:23] Alex, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Alex Lovit [01:01:31] The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. The opinions expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers. I’m Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the Foundation. Other people who help make this show possible include Isabel Pergande on research assistance, and George Drake Jr. on episode production. Kettering’s Director of Communications is Melinda Gilmore. Visit kettering.org to learn more about the foundation or to subscribe to our newsletter. If you have comments about this podcast, email thecontext@kettering.org. If you’re enjoying the show, don’t forget to subscribe. And if you’d like to help spread the word, rate or review us, which will help tell the algorithm about us. Or tell a friend, and maybe they’ll tell a friend, and they’ll tell a friend. We’ll be back in this feed with more conversations about democracy in a couple of weeks.