Renowned legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw visited Duke Sunday afternoon to discuss her theory of intersectionality in the context of recent threats to education and democracy.
Crenshaw holds positions as the Promise Institute chair in human rights at the University of California, Los Angeles and as the Isador and Seville Sulzbacher professor at Columbia Law School. She is considered a leading authority on civil rights and Black feminist legal theory and was recently named the most cited woman legal scholar in the history of the law.
“We are looking at efforts to not just demonize a couple of ideas, but to demonize entire fields of study, demonize higher education, demonize public education and demonize public, institutional values,” Crenshaw said. “The notion that a public can be served or should be served is under assault right now.”
Crenshaw is best known for coining the term “intersectionality,” which she originally used to describe “the various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural, political and representational aspects of violence against women of color.” The term has since taken on a larger significance, representing how systems of inequality based on identity intersect to create unique experiences and discriminatory dynamics.
She has also been instrumental in shaping the legal development of critical race theory, which has been center stage in the political discourse in recent years as right-wing politicians have sought to ban the framework from being used in public education curricula across the nation.
In addition to her teaching roles, Crenshaw serves as the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, as well as the founder and executive director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School.
She was joined onstage in Page Auditorium by Mary Armstrong, Graduate School ‘89 and Graduate School ‘95 and Charles A. Dana professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies and English at Lafayette College, who moderated the conversation.
The event was hosted by the Alice M. Baldwin Scholars Program as the 19th annual installment of its Jean Fox O’Barr Distinguished Speaker Series. It was co-sponsored by the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, the Department of African and African American Studies, the Muglia Family Foundation, the Center for Multicultural Affairs, the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, Student Involvement and Leadership, the Duke University Centennial, QuadEx and the Women’s Center.
Origin of intersectionality
Crenshaw first spoke about her journey to developing the intersectional framework, which began during her time as a student at Harvard Law School in the 1980s. She recalled being involved in the movement to get the university to diversify its faculty and student body, which was faced with much administrative opposition.
“We found institutions that really weren’t prepared to do anything differently than to give us a seat,” Crenshaw said. “They weren’t prepared to rethink their curriculum … to think about admissions … to think about what … rethinking those things would mean in terms of who’s qualified to come to Harvard Law School to teach.”
Crenshaw began to delve deeper into the way discrimination can compound in her graduate studies. She examined a court case that dealt with hiring discrimination against Black women by General Motors, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors.
The Black woman who filed suit found it difficult to prove her case because technically the auto manufacturer was not discriminating on grounds of race or gender — GM hired Black men to work on the factory floor and white women to work in the office. However, there was no space for Black women, so the company's hiring practices discriminated against those with that specific intersection of identities.
“My objective was to come up with some kind of a remedial strategy — some way to get them from their limited conception of what racism looked like and their limited conception of what sexism looked like to where those conceptions actually came together,” Crenshaw said.
She landed on intersectionality as an approach, framing it as “a legal conceptualization of the existing protections of Title XII” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
She noted that since then, the idea of intersectionality has “gone in many, many different directions, some of them really illuminating and exciting and welcome, some puzzling and infuriating.”
Intersectionality in education today
Most of Crenshaw’s remarks about how the framework of intersectionality has evolved and been incorporated into contemporary political discourse were directed toward the issue of “saving education.”
“At this point, 23 states have passed legislation limiting how race and racism can be taught, how other social justice-oriented ideas can be taught,” Crenshaw said. “Nearly 25 million schoolchildren are now being educated in these sort[s] of regimes.”
Crenshaw discussed how recent efforts targeting critical race theory and the teaching of African American studies in schools contribute to “patterns of erasure,” exacerbated by the national increase in book bannings.
She discussed the controversy around the College Board’s AP African Studies curriculum, which was targeted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on the grounds that it “push[es] an agenda on students.” The College Board released a revised curriculum first in February 2023, then again in December 2023, both of which appeared to acquiesce to many of DeSantis’s demands by removing key figures and concepts.
“This is our own institutions collapsing under the weight of this kind of authoritarian repression,” Crenshaw said.
She advocated for a response that makes use of economic pressure to force institutional action, drawing on the history of boycotts as a political strategy during the Civil Rights Movement.
“The pressure has to be everywhere, otherwise we’re going to have an apartheid education system,” Crenshaw said. “We can’t allow them to operate these two separate systems of knowledge creation.”
Crenshaw spoke about her current organizing work with Freedom to Learn, a grassroots movement that mobilizes to protect the inclusion of intersectionality, critical race theory, Black feminism, queer theory and other frameworks that address structural inequality in educational curricula.”
Freedom to Learn is coordinating its second annual Day of Action on May 3 as a kick-off to Freedom Summer 2024, which calls back to the advocacy work of civil rights activists 60 years earlier in the summer of 1964.
Crenshaw connected threats to education with threats to democracy as a whole, noting that the need for action is especially urgent in today’s polarized political atmosphere.
“January 6 should tell us that we cannot save our democracy without speaking to its racist underbelly,” she said. “We cannot save anti-racism without talking about its democratic implications.”
In response to a question about the role of private universities in responding to movements to ban critical race theory and limit the teaching of Black history, Crenshaw expressed her belief that private institutions are not currently doing enough to preserve educational integrity.
“I’ve been shocked at how quickly private institutions have gotten on board with whatever the constraints are that are often applied to public institutions,” she said.
Crenshaw referenced the recent Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action as an example where private universities exhibited “a refusal to fight.”
“There was a refusal to say, ‘we care enough about what we have produced. We care enough about the role that we play in the ecosystem … that we are willing to take the risk that eventually they might get around to sending us a letter,’” she said.
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Zoe Kolenovsky is a Trinity junior and news editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.