 Now it's official. Good evening. On behalf of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program, I want to welcome you all to Gustavus at Office College, if you're from not around these parts, and to the 2016 Moe lecture. I'm Martin Lang. I'm faculty in the Communication Studies Department, and I'm also very proud, especially on days like today, to be the director of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program here. GWSS at Gustavus is an interdisciplinary program that draws on expertise on faculty from across the spectrum of disciplines on the campus to study gender and sexuality in the context of a range of other categories of social difference, including race, class, nationality, religion, ability, age, and more. If your life is impacted by any of the categories that I just listed, then GWS could be or should be a place for you. So Gustavus students, I'll be signing major declaration forms at the edge of the stage at the end of the talk. Gustavus faculty, feel free to forward your course proposals to me directly. And if you're not from the campus, the program will happily accept your monetary donations to continue the excellent programming like this for generations to come. And if not, that at least say nice things about us when you go elsewhere. Before I introduce the person who's going to introduce the person, who you all came here to see, just a little bit of business, I have some thank yous to some of the people who helped to make this event happen. First of all, event services for all their tech setup. They won't get a chance to be acknowledged later. But if you would give a little round of applause to the crowd at the back and other places for their help today, thank you. I want to thank Dining Services, especially Margie Wilmert for hosting a lovely meal for us. Some of us anyway, sorry about that, just before this event. Marketing and communication, particularly Barb Larsen-Taylor, who's also in the back of the room for all their help to ensure that you learned about this event tonight. Round of applause please. The students and staff of the Diversity Center for all of your support in the preparations of the students and faculty of GWSS for creating an environment where this kind of thing can happen. It's really a wonderful place to be. And all the countless people I certainly have omitted from my thank yous who contributed to bringing this event to life, thank you very much. I'm very excited. I also need to thank Karen and Robert Moe, who endowed the lecture that bears their name in honor of their daughter, Chris Moe, who is a Gustavus alum. Bob Moe passed away quite recently. But I hope he would have been pleased to see the fruits of his family's work coming to life here on the stage. The Moe lecture allows GWSS to bring the brightest feminist minds to our little corner of the world to share their inspiration and their expertise. And it's really an incredibly rare resource. We have the envy of many other places for the kind of work that we're doing. So if you bump into a Moe or have a mind to send a thank you letter to somebody this year, let me know. I can tell you where to direct that. Karen deserves many thanks. But without further ado, I want to bring to the stage senior GWSS major, Leah Sol. Many of you probably know Leah Sol. She has quite a presence around campus this last couple of years. She's serving as the academic assistant this year for GWSS. She's also the co-coordinator of the Moe lecture this year. And last but not least, she's been the primary source of my sanity over the last four or five months. So Leah. It is an honor and a pleasure to welcome Professor Kimberly Crenshaw to Gustavus as the 2016 Moe lecturer. Professor Crenshaw is a leading authority in the area of civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law. She's a professor of law at UCLA and directs the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School, which she founded in 2011. Her original work on intersectionality, a theory that addresses how multiple identities and structures of power interact to create differential lived experiences of oppression has transformed numerous fields of study, activism, and public policy. Professor Crenshaw has worked extensively within the US on a variety of issues pertaining to gender and race, including violence against women, structural race inequality, and affirmative action. In 1996, she co-founded the African-American Policy Forum to house a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion. Her work on intersectionality has also traveled globally and was influential in drafting the Equality Clause in the South African Constitution. Professor Crenshaw also authored the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations World Conference on Racism. For all this impressive work, Professor Crenshaw has been recognized in many corners. She was recently awarded the Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. She was honored in March as one of Harvard Law School's women-inspiring change, and in the same month was recognized by Diverse Issues in Higher Education as one of the top 25 women in higher education. In 2015, she was featured in the Ebony Power 100, a list honoring contemporary feminist heroes in the black community, and was number one on Ms. Magazine's list of feminist heroes of 2015. I can certainly say that Professor Crenshaw tops my personal list of feminist heroes. As a gender women sexuality studies major, my understanding of feminism and social justice has been transformed by Professor Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality. It has given me the language to discuss identity and power with the nuance and complexity that these ideas require. Intersectionality has instilled in my feminism a sense of responsibility to carefully consider whom my activism serves and how it addresses multiple interconnecting systems of power. In short, Professor Crenshaw's work has pushed me to become a better activist, scholar, and feminist. Please join me in welcoming Professor Kimberle Crenshaw. Good evening. So first I have to give a deeper thanks than usual because the folks who brought me here have been working on that for about two years, and they've been so incredibly patient and understanding. I was all set to come here some time ago last year, and then I got an invitation to go to Selma to be there for the 50th anniversary. And that's just something that doesn't come along too often. And so my hosts were so gracious in saying, we'll have you back in some time in the future, which people don't always do. So I want to thank Lea, Barb and Martin, and everyone else who helped plan my trip here. I'm also aware that I'm standing here in Minnesota at a time when the eyes of the world are actually looking at Minnesota. I won't share with you how many times I've flown into something that is world changing. It would probably scare you if I told you that. But it did give me the opportunity to pay my respects last night. And it was kind of interesting. I don't know what I actually expected to see when I went to Paisley Park, but I was glad to have been there. And of course I can't start talking about the world without acknowledging what the world has just lost yesterday. But the typical ways of acknowledging it don't seem to do Prince Justice. Like I kind of don't want to say, so let's take a minute of silence. It just doesn't make sense for someone who has flooded our consciousness with sound, things that will never stop hearing. So I don't want to do, let's take a moment of silence. That doesn't make sense. So then I thought, why don't we do the opposite, right? And don't worry, I'm not gonna ask you to sing. But I want to take 10 seconds and fill this room with sound. And I'm thinking maybe the sound should be every song that we individually can think of that Prince gave us. And we'll just do it for 10 seconds. And we'll try to like do it as loud as we can. And it'll just be like a music tornado of everything to recognize who this purple God was. And if I had left knowing he was not gonna be with us, I would have had something purple. This is the closest I could get. Okay, so for 10 seconds, just throw it all out there. If you can't think of more than one song, just keep saying it over and over again, okay? All right, on the count of three, one, two, three. Purple, red. He's part of our soundtrack. A lot of you came into the soundtrack like way after I did, so I kind of go way back. You might start 10 years ago, 15 years ago. But we're all part of a community that has walked the planet when that musical genius was among us, so thank you for doing that with me. So this is a transitional moment in so many different ways. It's an election year for sure. But more importantly than that, it is the year where we have to decide what it means to have been post-racial. And notice I'm saying that in the past tense, right? Because maybe we thought we were post-racial when Barack Obama was elected. Maybe we still kept thinking we were post-racial when he was president while black. Maybe we continued to think we were kind of post-racial when all sorts of things started happening and the media finally had to say we still have a racial problem. But I think any remaining sense that we were post-racial is kind of gone with the presidential campaigns, with people basically making proposals that would have made folks 100 years ago a little puzzled. I think the question isn't now whether we are post-racial, but are we now post-post-racial? And if we are post-post-racial, what does that look like? What does it mean to have been through a period of time when we thought some major transformation in our society was afoot because a person was elected president of the United States who didn't look like anyone else who'd ever been in the White House. And now it turns out that, yeah, that was a singular moment. But what that moment was about wasn't nearly as much as people thought it was gonna be about, right? We gained a black president, we lost the only black senator we had at that time. I mean, that was sort of a good trade-off, I suppose, but it suggests that there was still a racial set of problems that would continue even after the White House became occupied by a black family. So there's a question of how we read backward where we've been over the last eight years and how we think about where we're gonna go next with the conversation that we've been having about race in American society. So some part of what I want to talk about tonight is ways of talking about things. I have a way of thinking about things, a way of engaging things, a way of talking about things. It's shaped by my overall intellectual commitments to critical race theory. Most specifically, it's shaped by my interest, my tool, which I call intersectionality. It's like a handy all-purpose thing. I take it out, I put it on, I see different things than I might have seen had I not been using that tool. So what I wanna talk about is how I've been seeing things over the last couple years, seeing things that might not seem to be things that a lot of my allies have been seeing. In particular, I've been seeing things that some of my allies in the anti-racist movement have been seeing differently than I do. And so I've been curious about why we see these things differently and have been talking about them and that talk has turned into some projects and that projects have turned into some movement. Some of them might be familiar, some might not be. I wanna talk about all of them today. But one of the most important things that I wanna put on the table before we even get started is the idea of what post-racialism has contributed to some of the challenges that then in turn I've been trying to think about in terms of intersectionality. So post-racialism is the backdrop against which a lot of the projects that we've been involved in at the African American Policy Forum might be defined. We've been doing some work called Say Her Name that I'm gonna talk about in a bit. Say Her Name is a project that is situated alongside and within Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter itself is a project that runs against the assumption that those lives don't. Not necessarily declared that they don't, but acted in a way that they don't. Institutions making those lives matter less. Say Her Name is an effort to say not only Black Lives as defined by men or male-identified bodies, but by all lives that are circumscribed by anti-Black racism. So we've been talking about and lifting up some of the other bodies whose lives have been lost to state-sanctioned violence or whose bodies have been abused by officers who are rapists with badges. So Say Her Name is a project against the denial of post-racialism that these problems still exist. More broadly, Say Her Name is alongside of another project called Why We Can't Wait. And Why We Can't Wait is a set of projects that are engaged with some of the dominant ways of talking about racism that have excluded women and girls of color. The idea is women and girls of color cannot wait for racial justice to remember that they exist. That's also a project against the backdrop of post-racialism. So all of these ideas are ideas that we lift up and want to make part of our projects for thinking about race and racism in the 21st century. Now one of the things that race and racism is defined by and now becomes part of the dominant conversation about race is the distinction between what was traditionally or pushed out of the conversation in post-racialism and what was in it. So what was pushed out of the conversation is any notion that racism still explains any part of our social terrain. What was not pushed out was the idea that race explains part of our social terrain. So you might be scratching your head. How can you have a post-racialism that says racism is no longer explanatory, but race is explanatory? Well, I'll give you some examples of it that you might find familiar. So when there's a debate about the police and any killing of an African-American, those who support the idea that there probably wasn't any kind of police brutality will usually resort to explanations like, blacks don't respect the police. Black men are overly aggressive. It's necessary to give police the benefit of the doubt because policing in those communities is particularly dangerous. Now, that's a racial explanation. Sometimes your most avid post-racialisms, people who support post-racialism, don't mind using a racial explanation to explain a particular kind of disparate outcome. That's a distinction between saying we can't talk about race versus we can't talk about racism. Those folks talk about race. They just don't think that what they're saying is racist. So when you have a formula that says, okay, there's certain racial differences, differences in the attitude people have, the willingness to work, their respect for the police, that's a conversation about racial difference. What it's not is a conversation about racial power. So when you have assertions of racial difference as an explanation for a racial inequality that doesn't have any acknowledgement about racial power, namely the history of racial discrimination, its current embodiment in a lot of our institutions, in our culture, when that's not part of the equation, you effectively have an argument that says individuals and groups are responsible for the things that happen to them. These are not structural problems. They're not institutional problems. They're individual level problems. And the solution to an individual level problem is an individual level solution. So it's not a matter of legal reform. It's not a matter of institutional reform. It's not a matter of new rules to constrain, new possibilities. It's only a matter of reshaping individuals so they can fit within the avenues that are available for them in society. This idea that racial difference is the problem, not racial discrimination, as I'm gonna talk about in a minute, is not a new idea. It's a very old idea. What's new about it, I wanna suggest, is the way that intersectional failures have made these ideas more palatable now than they ever have been in our recent history. I wanna suggest that these ideas that racial individual level differences are the differences that cause inequality, is an argument that defeated many aspects of the civil rights movement. And it's an argument that's come back into popularity in part because of the most recent breakthrough of the President of the United States. So it is a complicated argument. It's a controversial argument. I mean to be controversial tonight. I think we're in a controversial moment. And I actually wanna have it out. I wanna talk about it now that we're moving post-post-racialism. So I'm gonna just talk about the way we talk about some stuff tonight. And then end with some voices who really don't tend to get heard because we're doing all the talking. So I'm gonna try not to talk too much so you can hear some of these voices. So I wanna start by saying something about framing. This intersectionality basically is a frame. It's a way of challenging the existing ways that we think and talk about things and a way of offering new ways of framing those. So first we have to know a little something about framing. So here's a little exercise. This is call and response. So since we already did a little call and response, I think you're gonna be with me on this. So I'm gonna ask you, these cows here are sick cows. Who's responsible for them? The farmer. Thank you. The farmer is responsible for the sick cows. Now how do we know the farmer is responsible for the sick cows? Partly because of the way the picture frames the sickness of the cows, right? All you do is you see some cows grazing in the grass. I tell you they're sick. Your background understanding in our culture and our society is that farmers are responsible for their stuff. People are responsible for their own stuff, right? So if there's a social problem, generally our inference is that the ones who own them or are them are responsible for any problem that they might have. But if we changed our frame, it sometimes changes the analysis, right? It changes our sense of, well, why are the sick cows sick? It changes our sense about who should be responsible for doing something about it. It changes our idea about what happens to us. If the cows are allowed to remain sick, it changes our notion that this is a problem that we don't have to pay any attention to because it won't, in fact, us at all. So with this picture, how do we answer all those questions differently? Who's responsible for the sick cows? Now, the evolution. What happens if we just allow the cows to remain sick? What happens to us? We probably get sick. Who should do something about that? Us, right? And we can go on and on about what should be done, what are the kinds of strategies that need to happen in order to protect the sick cows, to protect the environment, and to protect ourselves. I want you to think about that analogy and now think about it as the way in which social problems are thought about. So the first picture, which just showed a dis-ease, some kind of problem. In that first picture, our assumption is, those who actually have the dis-ease are responsible for the dis-ease. And anything that's gonna happen in order to make it change doesn't involve us at all. We don't have to be worried about it. Now, if we think about that in terms of racial inequality, we might think that dis-ease is solely the responsibility of those who are dis-eased, those who are facing a whole range of racial disparities from health to education to employment to housing. We might think in this picture that it's their problem, right? So we generate explanations for it, right? Unwillingness to defer gratification. That's one of the classic ones that explains why we have social inequality. Inculcation of the wrong values, that's another one. Listening to the wrong music, that actually is kind of relevant given what we just started with, right? There was a whole societal conversation about how Princess Music was gonna undermine social values and we're gonna lose a generation to the kind of things that people listen to, right? Listen to too much hip-hop, listen to too much rap. Another explanation for why the cows might be sick and it's their own responsibility. Not enough bulls in the herd, right? That's another argument. It's a classic one, it's been around for a long time. So when we think about our social problems, we think about them like this, it's easy to say those problems are not our problems. But when we broaden it and we understand that in a social, historical, cultural space that is shaped and defined by racial power, by racial inequality, by institutions that were designed to create and perpetuate that, that these inequalities are part of an environment and that environment is part and parcel of the disease that we all have to be attended to. It also tells us that we cannot let these diseases continue and think that we are also unimpacted by that. So this is just a way in which we understand how frames tell us what kind of problem it is, who's responsible for it, who's got to do something different and what we can afford to do while we sit by and not let something happen. So now let's take what we've learned about frames and think about how frames have done a certain kind of work in how we think about racial inequality in this particular moment and what intersectionality has to do with it. So I wanna give three examples about how inequality, how racial injustice in particular has been misframed because of what I call intersectional erasures. The inability to think about systems of subordination is not being separate, but as often being overlapping. And our failure to address what's overlapping as being an avenue that takes us to the picture of the sick cows without any responsibility on all of us. So I'm basically trying to make an argument that intersectionality matters if we wanna move that frame from that narrow one to the broader one. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about political arenas where there's intersectional erasure, research arenas where there's intersectional erasure and activism where there is intersectional erasure. So in the political arena, some of you recognize this picture, I'm sure. It is a picture that was taken in February, 2014 when the president announced an initiative long overdue, highly anticipated, welcome beyond measure to deal with racial inequalities that impacted communities of color. And in this particular instance, what seemed to be most salient was racism that impacted African-American boys. Part of the history of this was, as some of you might remember, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, the president said that we need something to tell African-American men and boys that they are valued in this society. We care about them, right? This jury verdict does not represent what America thinks and feels about its men and boys. And we've got to do something. He said, I'm gonna use my bully pulpit, no government programs, but I can use my bully pulpit to actually make a difference. So what came out of it was my brother's keeper. It was a recognition that men and boys of color are facing particular kinds of obstacles that undermine their futures, that make them more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to be killed, more likely to be underemployed. These are problems that the president says we need to address. And he was right. These are problems we need to address. The question is how to address it? The question is, what kind of problem is this? The question is, is it the narrow frame? The problem is them, and we're gonna help them by leading them in the right ways at an individual level, or was it the broader frame? Well, if we look at what the president said and we look at what my brother's keeper has gone on to do, men and boys are not framed as victims of racism, structural, institutional or individual. They might be victims of race performances but not racism. What are some of those race performances? They are the performances of living in single-headed households. They are the performances of not having strong father figures in the community. They're the performances of not investing in education but investing in a cool pose. It's all these ideas that boil down to there's some behavioral problems. They might be understandable where they come from but the way we fix them is to create mentorship programs, to create individual level interventions. So what's on the table is a lot of individual kind of stuff, a helping hand, a kind loving person, all that's important but what's not part of the conversation, what wasn't on the table is an understanding that this is all happening in the context of defunding public institutions, asset stripping of urban landscapes, the unleashing of the police force with diminished oversight from federal courts, the shifting of resources from service delivery to group management, the emphasis on individual punishment rather than institutional and structural reform. All these are background factors that are in the bigger picture, the clouds in the sky. So what this program really focuses on is the individuals, not the environment, not the context. The context is not mentioned. The racism, the racial power is not one of the things that MBK is trying to fix. It's trying to fix the boys inside the power dynamic. A lot of people sometimes use the idea of the miner's canary. Do you guys know the miner's canary, right? The little canaries that were on the miners when they went into the coal mines and the canaries would sometimes fall over dead. And that was like an early warning system. Get out of the mines with carbon but an oxide. They can't handle it, you can't. So the idea is that the mine is toxic for everybody, right? Everybody needs to get out. But the miner's canary is used here basically to say that the boys are in danger. So we gotta figure out how to help them. And often it's not getting them out of the mine. It's not getting anyone out of the mine. It's saying, well, maybe we need to help them a little bit, breathe a little bit better. Maybe some breathing devices. But we're not talking about taking everybody and moving them out of the mine. It's not a structural analysis. And how do we know it's not a structural analysis? Well, because everyone who's in the mine isn't included. So one of the reasons it's not a structural analysis is women and girls are not part of it. One of the reasons women and girls are not part of it is because it's not a structural analysis. So the reality is if the mine is toxic, it's toxic for everybody. But if we're not gonna focus on the toxicity of the mine, let's focus on the breathing apparatus of the canaries in it, right? So one reinforces the other. And the upshot of it is we don't have a robust set of interventions coming from a signature program from the White House to deal with racial inequality. Now, this is not a new idea. This is not a new conundrum. The whole idea that racial justice cannot be achieved unless we focus on individual level problems and individual level solutions has been around for a long time. The exclusion of women and girls from this initiative goes all the way back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in the late 60s famously argued that all of the institutional structural interventions in the world aren't gonna make a difference as long as the black community is distorted by something called matriarchy. What's matriarchy? Women being out of control, women trying to control, women defending themselves, women having their own money, their own jobs, women being leaders in their communities and their families. Moynihan said there might not be anything inherently wrong with the matriarchy, but in a society like ours that's based on the assumption that men lead everything, men represent everything. What happens to men is what is important. What happens to women is less important. In a society like that, when you have a community structure in which women have disproportionate power to what we think they should have, that's a problem. And that was such a problem that Moynihan said we should actually take the boys out of their families and put them in military schools, put them in armed forces. This was during the Vietnam War, by the way. So to save them, let's put them in harm's way because when we put them in those spaces, those are male spaces where they'll learn how to be the proper kind of men. So it's a particular kind of role assumption. If we make our African-American families into traditional patriarchal dominated families, if we enforce the normative values of patriarchy on the black community, that's the first step to racial equality. I say that's pretty non-intersectional to me, right? The idea that to fight against racial injustice, we have to embrace patriarchy, right? That's effectively the argument. Now that argument was, in my mind, kind of dead 50 years ago. To see it come back now is like Jason the 15th, you know, how many times are we gonna see this over and over and over again? So this idea of we save boys first, both reinforces lack of an institutional critique. It also erases what has to happen for racial inequality to actually happen, which means it has to be married with gender equality. It has to be married with a class critique. It's only if we erase all of the background in which females are paid less for the same work, where women are shut out of entire sectors of the workforce, where the standard worker is someone who's defined as someone who doesn't need childcare, where racial stratification among women mean that black women in Latinas end up having $5 a net worth. It's only within a structure that takes that all as a given that you can even wrap your head around thinking that you can have a racial justice agenda that doesn't include women and girls in it, right? So that's intersectional failure 101, and it's an intersectional failure that I have to say I'm really shocked that we're still dealing with. And it raises the question, who is the subject of intersectional failure now? When we can talk about boys in their future, and it is absolutely important, how can we fail to talk about girls in their future? And how can we move forward with this? Now, intersectionality, I'm gonna do a quick primer for those of you not in women and gender studies. Intersectionality is basically the idea that discrimination is often on the basis of race, gender, and other descriptive characteristics, not because the descriptive characteristics themselves make you a target, but because in a structure in which race, gender, class, sexual identity, gender, performance are subject to organizing rules of society, if you actually embody some of those characteristics, you are subject, not all the time, many of the times, to multiple forms of overlapping discrimination and inequality. That's what happened in Geography, it's a case I wrote about a long time ago, black women were basically trying to say, I'm discriminated against on the basis of being black women in an institution that hired whites and hired women, hired blacks and hired men, but the blacks who were hired were men and the women that were hired were white. In those contexts, black women were not able to be hired, they tried to make an argument, this is discrimination against us, this is race discrimination, the way black women experience race discrimination, this is gender discrimination, the way black women experience gender discrimination. The court said not so fast because what you're trying to do is combine two causes of action, you can't do that, violates the rules, you have to either say race discrimination or gender discrimination, can't throw them together, that's no fair, foul, preferential treatment, no one else gets to do that, why do you get to do it? No one else had to do it, but that didn't so much matter to the court. So this idea of intersectionality is both an idea that there are certain kinds of discrimination, certain kinds of structural inequalities that you're subject to, that's number one, but the real kicker is when the law is supposed to come and deliver you from that discrimination, it tells you to do it, it's to give you preferential treatment. I mean, that's what they call adding insult to injury. So I was writing about the law, but then as it turned out, it wasn't just the law that did that, it's not just the law that said, we can't pay attention to intersectionality, it was our allies, it was some of our allies in the feminist movement who framed questions of gender-based violence and other kinds of discrimination solely in terms of the way it's experienced by women who didn't also have a racial burden, and it was also often by men in our community who framed racial inequality in terms of what happens to bodies that are racialized but not that are female-made bodies. So the whole point was simply to say it's not just law that's the problem, it's us, but that was like 25 years ago, I'm not gonna say how much longer it was, it was probably more than that. What I found recently is that it is a continuous problem. We define a problem in gender-exclusive terms, it means that we assume that women and girls aren't facing those same things, as it turns out women and girls are facing them, but there's no data that's actually collected in order to create best practices so that when a moment like this comes along, a president who's willing to actually create a racial justice program, he doesn't really have a lot of information to dispel the initial mistake, which is that women and girls aren't facing any problems. So it becomes a circular problem. What we're in the middle now of is a cycle, a circular problem in which we are building on mistaken assumptions that started the whole exclusive focus on men and boys. And why are we in that moment? Partly because we don't really pay attention to claims that get made all the time. A lot of times people say, hey, you know, the reason why we have to have just these kind of programs is that men and boys just haven't worked across the board, everybody knows it, why are you even fighting about it? Well, we decided to look at some of the issues. And we found out, you know, as many times as people keep saying it, including Washington DC schools, for example, that because of some of the performance problems among men and boys of color, they're gonna have a whole new education kind of intervention, new schools, million dollar programs, mentorship, based on the idea that men and boys of color have it substantially worse. But we actually started looking at some of the data. One of the arguments is boys have low attendance and that's why we need to have focused programs. We actually looked at the data and guess what we found? It's the same, right? It's the same kind of challenge. Black girls have low attendance rates as well. They also said that satisfaction was lower. As it turns out, that's not true either. One data point after another consistently showed that the claim that it was the boys that are exceptionally poorly situated actually overlooked the fact that it's black students who are performing so poorly and Latinos simply beyond that, right? So this is a race problem that's being distorted in part because we're not paying attention to the particular ways that girls experience these problems. So the DC school situation is one in which the data don't support the argument and there's also the reality that some of the things that are happening to girls are not part of our discourse. African American girls are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system. Fastest growing population. It's a fact that just doesn't get repeated much. People don't know what to do with it. They don't have a frame for it so they don't talk about it and it doesn't become part of the national crisis, the things that we have to intervene on. We decided that we wanted to look at what's happening with girls in the school to prison pipeline because there was so much conversation about boys in the school to prison pipeline and we know that's really a problem but we assume that because we don't talk about the girls it's not a problem. So we decided let's look at the girls. We looked at the girls in New York and in Boston. So just as a quick way of reading this chart, the pictures on the left, the first picture is the population and the second picture is the discipline rates. So if you look at black girls in the first quadrant that's their population. If you look at the discipline rates that shows you how much more they're disciplined than anyone else in their cohort. So across the board, black girls are tremendously disproportionately disciplined as compared to all other girls and if you compare the chart from top to bottom you can see the relative difference between the disproportionality that black girls face and the disproportionality that their same race brothers face. So they're both disproportionately punished but the level of disproportionality actually among girls is greater. There's a greater spread between girls. You doesn't get talked about enough. Overall we found that black boys are three times more likely to be suspended. Black girls six times more likely than their white counterpart. It's a way of measuring discrimination that we don't typically talk about because we don't think about race as playing out between women. We just see it as between men and women being sort of secondary. This is what happens when we cast the intersectional lens and actually look at race discrimination between women. We asked women, we asked girls what happened in school and they told us about the stereotypes that are particular to women who are black, blacks who are women. Have an attitude. Hard to control. Opinionated. Loud. Rude. Not proper ladies. These are specific stereotypes against specific kind of women and they led to the disproportionate exclusion. This is the intersectional discrimination and the intersectional abandonment. There really isn't an agenda to deal with this problem. So no one is paying attention to it. Last area. Intersectional erasure in mobilizing movements. Black lives matter, we all know about it now. We all know how many black bodies have been killed by the police. What we don't know, what's not part of this movement is the number of women who have been killed by police. Black women are also killed by police. But it's really not part of our discourse. Partly because we don't envision them. So let me do this for a moment because we've been sitting here for a while and I want to roll into showing you a quick video and then I'm gonna sit down. But to get us ready for it, I want us to loosen up a little bit. So I want everyone just to put up one hand and when you hear a name that you don't know, I want you to put the name and put your hand down and it's gotta stay down, okay? So no popping back up, right? So everyone put one hand up please. Okay, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray. Okay, so we got about half the hands up. Natasha McKenna, Tanisha Anderson, Michelle Cusso, Maya Hall, okay. So about half of you knew all the men, no one knew all the women. The women's names that I mentioned are all women that were killed within a week to two weeks of all the men who were killed. Okay, this is telling us something about what frames allow us to see in Nazi, right? Women are also killed by police but we don't talk about them. We don't talk about them. We don't have a narrative to put them in. If you don't have a narrative, you forget the facts, right? If the facts don't fit the frame, you can't remember the facts, right? So say her name quite frankly is simply a way of talking about all the different circumstances in which black women have lost their life to police. Some of these names you might know but many of them you don't know. Black females as young as seven and as old as 93 have been killed by the police. Killed in the streets in their cars outside of their homes in their living rooms, in their bedrooms, in their beds. They've been killed by police who they raided their homes on mistaken warrants. They've been killed when they or their family members have sought help. They've been killed when the men that they were with were targeting, they've been killed when they are alone. They've been killed driving while black, shopping while black, having mental disabilities or an emotional crisis while black, being homeless or poor while black. They've been strangled to death, beaten to death, tasered to death and shotgun to death sometimes repeatedly at close range, sometimes in the back. The vast majority of them were unarmed and very few of them were engaging in anything that could remotely justify the use of deadly force. This picture you see here, Natasha McKenna who was tasered to death. A woman who was having a mental breakdown and asked for the police to come and give her help. They arrested her, put her in a cell, went to extract her with six men dressed in hazmat uniforms as you can see here. She was completely defenseless, nude. They handcuffed her to the door, told her that she was resisting. Threw her on the ground, tasered her one time, put her in a restraining chair, tasered her another time, handcuffed her to the restraining chair, tasered her a third time, put a hood on her and tasered her a fourth time. Everybody was acquitted, no one was even charged. And they released the video, you can see this if you want. They released the video to reinforce that the officers had acted professionally. Now, black women like black men share this vulnerability. They share the assumptions that they're superhuman, that they're undisciplined, that their very bodies put officers at risk. They share that. What they don't share is recognition. What they don't share is outrage. There are no marches for Natasha. She's not a name that we all know. Nobody is demanding any national moratorium on her behalf. Why? She's a woman. She's a black woman. She's not someone that fits within the narrative of racial abuse. She's not someone who fits in the narrative of gender abuse. So these are intersectional challenges to the way we think about our movements. When we think about rape and gender-based violence, do we think about the police? Here's a guy who, if we're to believe that the 13 women who came forward, a police officer on duty raped 13 black women. What made him think that he could get away with 13 black women? Let's just think about that for a moment. Shockingly, he was finally convicted for counts stemming from eight of those cases. Question is, is he just a bad cop or is this a structural problem? When we think about what makes black women vulnerable, the fact that they're part of the many of them are poor, many of them were homeless, many of them were involved in the street economy, and many of them had criminal records. Oklahoma has the highest rate of incarceration of women in the entire United States. Do we think that that had nothing to do with Daniel Holds-Claw's recognition that he could probably abuse these women and nobody would ever believe him? So vulnerability to one thing makes you vulnerable to something else. This is a particular aspect, an intersectional way in which some women are subject to particular forms of gender-based violence. It's just not part of our movement. Why? Who is it happening to? It's happening to black women. So we have been on a mission to raise awareness of these issues across the United States. You've had 10 town halls across the U.S. What are these deciding to do to tell the story of what is missing? Where are our failures to build movements, anti-racist movements that include all the ways that gender shapes how racism experience, and anti-racist movements that reflect every aspect of racial disempowerment. So these have involved stories of individuals who have been willing to come forward and to shape the public will to lift up the visibility of these issues so that we can achieve accountability. So I'm going to play in conclusion the video that this might happen. Seriously targeted our lives. My partner is Mexican Palestinian fighting a life sentence for her brother right now. And we're targeted and it takes a lot of courage to stand up. So this point of this exercise is to notice you're not alone and we're doing this together. Even when you're physically alone, be right there with you. Be right there with you. They say life is a game of chess, but no one's man enough to treat us like queens, ladies. Remember, you are queens and no matter how hard they try, they can never break the royalty out of you, pick your crowns up. This one's for me, because a woman should this one is for the death of my innocence and the birth of my womanhood that will never be stolen from me. Cheers. Basically began with the observation that the common sense conversation that we've been having in communities of color, the common sense conversation that says men and boys are the primary object of racism. Women and girls are doing okay. Women and girls don't need any particular intervention. Women and girls don't need studies. They don't need resources. They don't need programs. So how are we gonna work together to make sure that girls and women do not have to wait for the attention they deserve? Well, one of the ways we do it is we don't wait to start talking. We don't wait to get an invitation from the White House or from the caucus to come and tell our stories. We can create spaces to tell our stories. We can find commissioners to hear the stories. We can find experts who have experienced the stories. We can find young women who embody those stories and have overcome them. We can do that ourselves. So that's what we've started to do. You didn't come here for a show. If you did, you're in the wrong place. You came here for real life and for real strategies for change, for systemic change. Well, you have some educators here who are generously offering education and for you to learn from girls of color and their experiences. As recently as October 2nd, when I got arrested with 12 other people as a part of the Ferguson 13, nine of us were women, four of us were men that were out and got arrested just for speaking up, just for chanting, this is what democracy looks like. Nine of us were women. And then as we moved on and we realized that there was work to be done, we started to try to get around the organizing tables. So we formed my organization, Malina Activist United, which is Entirely Women. And we realized that that dorm wasn't so open. The door to the street was wide open. They were willing, and I say they as a community, were willing to have us sacrifice our bodies, were willing to have us sacrifice our lives. Never got pulled off the front line as a woman, but at the table, that dorm was closed. And even more so, we have to be out here because if we don't speak for the women that are getting killed down as black women, then who will? History has shown us that if the mouths of the oppressed don't speak up, then no one will speak up for you. The way God taught us to be was not to dress in girl clothes. So I was locked in an attic. I remember being locked in an attic for two weeks and she would come and slide bread underneath the dorm. She would say, you're gonna learn that as long as you think you're an animal and wanna appear in the streets, this is how we treat you. And that day was my redefining moment. I put all my clothes in a suitcase. We lived in a three-story home. I tied all my bed sheets and I said, this is it. And I jumped out the window and I remember hitting the floor but when I hit that floor, I felt so free. Free of pain, free of neglect and free of shame because I refused to live in that. And oftentimes a lot of the people who said they loved me, they didn't understand me. So how can you love someone who you don't understand? I had no faith in the foster care system. I saw no care. When I was eight, they didn't help me. So I didn't believe they'll help me now but my mom needed help. I saw my mother relapsing. I met with the case worker and I started to tell her my situation. Before I could finish, she asked me how old was I? I told her 17. She asked me, when will you be turning 18? I told her August. Her response went from apparent willingness to help to we'll see what I can do. I wanted you to think about the time in your life when you're moving forward or backwards or staying in the same position and the hinge of your balance of what one person wants to do for you. That was a very common place that you would be in the foster care system. So we were hidden. So I didn't go to welfare because I didn't want no one to know I was homeless because the first thing they're gonna do is where you chill. I couldn't go down to get the housing authority to help me because the first thing I'll wear are your kids. My kids were my responsibility. They were my, and they were gonna remain that way. So yes, we struggled probably a little bit more. I could have went and got help but that would have messed up our whole family. Raves of native women and girls is so high upon my travel lens that during a group discussion with young girls, the question was asked, what would you do if you were raped? A young native girl stood up and said, well, my mom and I already talked about that, that when I'm raped, we won't report it because we know nothing will happen and we don't want to cause problems for our family. The reality of this 14-year-old girl wasn't a matter of if she's raped, but when. And criminalization is held between all of us. Women, we get beat for no reason. I was raped when I was nine years old. Nobody was there when I was raped. Nobody helped me and when I went to the cops, they did nothing. The man is still running the streets. I don't see why the justice system has, you let rapists and you let people that hurt children out on the streets. A guy killed my brother when I was 15, about seven years ago and they released him. They acquitted him after five years of being in jail. You let killers and rapists on the streets but you enslaved young people when the lady shot off warning shots in Florida for 25 years. As a racial issue, I didn't want to. Until I followed some cases down the road a couple months later, a white woman went to go buy drugs from the projects. She got thrown from a window. The city paid her an enormous amount of money, made sure she was taken care of. She's still living to this day. A little while later, a woman's dog got shot by the police. They immediately fired the police officer. Immediately gave her, compensated her and said their apologies. You want to know what they said to me? Well, you close your eyes and you will see exactly what they said to me. Nothing. I went down to the mayor's office, we rallied, they wanted to get us arrested. The superintendent of the police, he said the shooting was justified. How is the murder of a young black woman justified? It's not. That is innocent. You tell me what a justice is in that. Went to trial. Four of us went to trial. Me, Denise Brown, Renata Hill, Tarene Dandridge, we went to trial. Before trial, they kept a lot of evidence out of trial. They letting us to talk about our backgrounds from some of us being raped to police brutality, police harassment. Men harassing us, they wouldn't allow us to talk about it and try to justify why we reacted the way we reacted. The media dehumanized us. They called us vultures, a wolf pack of lesbians. We had no chance. We was found guilty before we even went to trial. And one thing I wanted to talk about today, is thinking about in all the story, really powerful stories and testimonies we've heard that oftentimes women, in addition to doing these things, are responsible for care-taking, right? So, you know, while we're being harassed by those construction workers, we're walking home, rushing home often to feed our brothers and sisters that we're responsible for, right? So while we're dealing with being immigrants, xenophobia, the oppression that comes along with maybe being undocumented, we're also running with our mothers to the doctor's office to be translators, right? So while young moms are dealing with being young moms, we're also cleaning up beer bottles maybe from our uncle, making sure people are coming in safe at night. And this often adds, you know, undue pressure in our own lives, right? Potentially, you know, pushing us out of school, forcing us to get jobs, second, third jobs, working late into the night while we're still responsible for care-taking. I spent a big part of this summer interviewing the black woman in my family for this book I'm working on, on familial relationships with trauma, sexual violence, language, and food. I never heard the words rape or sexual violence or sexual assault in my house as a child, though I saw the effects of it on the faces of my mother and my aunties. So I asked my grandmother directly about her experience of rape and sexual violence. My grandma's in a wheelchair now, so she had me wheel her around to the side of the house. There she, I kneeled down and my grandma told me a story about the white format at her job and what he did to her. She told me a story about the white man who owned the house she cleaned and what he did to her. She told me a story about her black father and what he did to her. She told me a story about her black uncle and what he did to her. She told me stories about the white, black, and Mexican men who worked on the line at her chicken plant and what they did to her. She told me stories about the deacons at the church, men we all looked up to and what they did to her. And finally, she told me stories about what her husband, My grandfather did to her, and when she stopped talking, she forced a fake smile, and she rubbed my back, and she told me, I'm okay, Key, I'm okay. For the first time in my life, I took my grandma's hand off my back, I held it, and I told her, no, you're not. I loved, I told her, I love you so much, Grandmama, but I know you're not okay. Black girls like black boys scar, black women like black men scar. Wow, the national negligence and communal lack of love are responsible for that scarring. We can't do anything going forward until we reckon with the call, shape, and neglect of those scars, because those scars are real, and we are responsible. As these issues, nurturing has to begin by centering the lives of women and girls in settings where families, their public officials, and others understand the contours of the lives that otherwise would be written off. So I hope this video uplifts those experiences, the barriers that women and girls of color face across the plateau, and that it helps create an agenda that leaves no person of color in and outside the quest for racial justice. I really can't think of a better time than now to create a new inheritance for our sons, our daughters, every child in our community born today, not a better legacy than the one that we can foster that supports an inclusive vision of racial justice, one that tends to the needs that genuinely embraces all of us. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Crenshaw. That was powerful in moving, and I'm excited that y'all are still here and have a chance to interact with Professor Crenshaw now. So we're gonna open the microphones up for questions and perhaps answers, at least for reflection. Conversation, conversation, yeah. And perhaps even a little testimony if it feels appropriate. So we're gonna leave the mics in the stands if you wouldn't mind queuing up here to speak at one of the mics and we'll just alternate back and forth between them. And feel free to jump on. Maybe we can have two or three at a time so we can just create more of a chorus of conversation rather than just dialogue between me and you all. I don't know, Professor Crenshaw, if you spent a lot of time in Minnesota, but this is the Minnesota way, it'll take only three or four minutes. I thought as much. Thinking about it. You know, we can talk about a few things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, come on in. This might be my first time being nervous speaking. You are a hero to me. So it's an honor to be this close to you. So I do educational programming around relationship violence and sexual assault and gender issues. And I work very closely with the transgender community as well. And obviously when you're talking about sexual violence, race needs to be a part of that conversation as well. So as an individual that holds not only a racial but a gender privilege, I oftentimes get pushed back about that when I'm trying to have these conversations. Do you have any insight or advice on how I can continue to bridge that gap while acknowledging my privilege? Okay, that's a good question. Any others to pair up? Convo? All right, I'll let you guys simmer a little bit. You know what? I tend to think about that from the vantage point of when I first started writing from the position of the person without the privilege and how I wanted some of my colleagues with privilege to respond. And it's actually a little different from how some people thought about it. So I wrote Mapping the Margins after maybe two years of doing a lot of anti-violence work in context where there was almost always a debate about the extent to which the white feminist framework was capacious enough to be responsive to the ways that women of color experience violence. And there were, you know, obviously actually different points of view about what should be done with that critique. There were some who made the move. You should be an expert on my experience and you should say something about it. Actually, that wasn't my position. I didn't want that. What I wanted was space. What I wanted was the handing of a baton or at least showing it to me where I could figure out where I could grab on to it and remake the conversation to the extent that I thought it was necessary to make clear what difference my difference made. Because I wasn't really about just add my name to the list and I'm happy, right? I wanted a more substantive engagement on the issues where I thought it really mattered. Some of them were clear differences and some of them actually were not. And so my point was, let's create the space, the conversation, the camaraderie, the trust that's necessary for me to trust that when I start telling you where my differences are, where the analytical consequence of those differences is made clear that you will take that up and move with it. So I wanted space, right? I didn't want them to fill the space with more of their talking. And that to me is how I think about other moments like this, right? It's a question about how does this framework accommodate and address transgender issues, immigrant issues, women who are differently abled. There are a range of ways in which intersectionality plays out. I think the project is an ongoing developmental and coalitional one. And the question is, how do we create the space for those new articulations to come to fore? So sometimes it's being more quiet. Sometimes it's saying, this is the degree to it that I can understand, I can think beyond where I'm at, but of course I can't think completely into another space and I shouldn't. You should think into the space in the way that it is organic and responsive and open and politically uplifting. So that's kind of how I think about it. Now, at the end of the day, it's always about what the actual argument is about, right? Because sometimes we do say stupid things and we just have to own it, yeah. I'm Shannon Miller. I'm chair of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at Minnesota State, Mankato. I'm also a black lesbian mother. And I'm just curious, I hope you hear, feel my question and where it's coming from. Where I see intersectionality and how it's misused as almost post-racial. So intersectionality is post-racial and how racism is missed out of intersectionality. So being someone who studies multiple identities, holding these multiple identities, I find myself, particularly in gender and women's studies spaces, pushing for the racism and race and intersectionality and getting this, well, we can look at other identities and how they intersect, but missing the piece, the foundation on race and racism. Or the post-racial racism in gender and women's studies is saying if I just name a race, then I'm doing intersectionality, so. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. That's not how I think about intersectionality. You know, so, but I will say that I recognize that move. I will say that I've seen it and can kind of give you a whole set of stories about it being made in, to me. Like, you know, you're not intersectional because you're talking about structural racism and I was like, I think to talk about structural racism, you have to be intersectional. That's what a structured inequality looks like. It's structured through, you know, a matrix of power and you need to be comfortable talking about that. So I recognize it, I don't agree with it. I think what is challenging is what do we make of the fact that it happens? Is it a problem with intersectionality? Is it a problem with the constant desire to escape racism? More particularly the constant desire to escape anti-black racism, that's a real distinction in our capacity to talk about race. Is it simply the fact that all theories and concepts and ideas are multibly open to lots of different deployments? That's, you know, what ideas, you know, do a lot. So I'm not overly stressed by it. I kind of see people using all sorts of things for to shut down conversations. A case in point that also implicates intersectionality. A lot of new conversation about class. We should have, you know, class-based interventions. These arguments are often deployed to suppress race. We don't wanna talk about race, let's talk about class. Moment race is off the table, those folks who wanna talk about class are gone too. You know, so I think that, and that's of course not saying anything about the value of a class critique, the value of an understanding of economic formation, the value of understanding the history of capitalism, the fact that it's sometimes used to suppress something else doesn't mean that that stuff isn't all right. It just means people are using it like they use any number of ideas, often as aggressive ways of shutting down other ideas. So for me, you know, the move is simply to use intersectionality back, right? To say no intersectionality is not non-racial, it's not post-racial, it's a particular way of thinking about race. That's, in my view, what intersectionality brings to that conversation. Thank you for being here. Thank you. So as a woman of color, I've dealt with discrimination throughout my entire life. I know what to do, I know how to react. When I draw, where I draw blank is when I face discrimination and racism from people of color and women of color who are in very much the same or similar situations to me. And I like don't understand it and don't know what to do about that and why it's happening. So tell me more about what you don't understand about it. I get not knowing what to do, but... So I feel like it's... I think it's internalized oppression. So you understand it? I do understand it, but... Okay. Okay. I just don't know what to do about it. Okay, all right. Good, I thought we were going back further. Okay, so now we're on the same page. Yeah, okay. I get it too. I get it too. From allies, people who ought to be allies, from students, from colleagues. So when we say we live in a society that's structured in a hierarchical way, it means that it's structured, right? It means that even those of us who are situated in particular subordinate ways in relationship to others can also reproduce that to others. Actually what I'm interested in along those lines is what does intersectionality bring to internalized racism? Like we know as people of color that we often perform certain distancing moves with each other or we reject in people that look like us things that we've been told we are in order to feel better about ourselves. I mean that's kind of one on one. I'm kind of interested in, does it play out any differently among women? You know, what are the different and more limited ways in which women gain value in society? From the time we're kids, little girls, we know that cuteness makes a big difference in what life is like for us. We know where we rank with respect to a whole lot of other women. We know what society values as pretty and desirable and what society does not. And we often perform our value against other women who are either below us or above us, right? We wanna be friends, we wanna distance. We think we're cuter than we think they who counts, right? And I think those ways of performing what we consider to be value are actually somewhat uniquely framed around our embodiment. Embodiment that often can't be performed around by being an athlete or being popular or something like that. So I kind of think that there's some space now to think more about internalized oppression when it's looked at through race, gender lens, I think even gender performance. There's a lot of ways in which all the hierarchies that play out actually are in some ways aggregated and thus aggravates the intra-racism, intra-sexism that we experience. Which is all to say, it's really not surprising that we have it to figure out how to navigate around it. There needs to be much more visibility about when it's playing out. We need to have names for it. It's a little wooden right now, it's inter-racism, right? I think we need to have more like, that's doing the nae nae or that's specific forms of it. Because you fight power by being able to name it. So people have a frame for it, you see it, you call it out and people go, oh, I wasn't meaning that move, right? So for me, that's one of the things that, when I see a pattern happening over and over and over, I name things. So I try to put a name to it, right? I think it's a collective project that I would see us all engage in. In terms of personally, how to handle it without names is often hard to get people to attend to it. I mean, that's just the reality. I find the deeper problem that I have is internalizing what happened. I'll often go through five different explanations before the more obvious one is one that I can feel comfortable accepting. And I wanna get to a point where I can get there faster and not really carry the burden of the repudiation because that's a repudiation that actually hurts more than the repudiation that you've been taught to experience or expect through your entire life. So I don't know if that's helpful, other than I can say, I feel you, I see it, I think we should work to name it. Hi, I'm a student here and I'm involved in some campus organizations that deal with big overwhelming problems. And I guess I'm just wondering, what do you do to stay inspired and what do you do to keep moving forward in the face of massive societal issues? Yeah, so I get on planes and go to places like here to see bright, shiny faces like yours who spend a Friday night in a room like this who really wanna talk about issues like the ones we've talked about. I mean, as long as there are people who see these issues as things that really do make a difference in your day, that really do call upon your time and more of you, it keeps me inspired. So there are five of you here, I'd be expires. Like five people wanted to talk about this. It's really important. The fact that there's a whole lot more than five of you, I've got some inspiration to last for about six months. So this is a good thing. So that keeps me inspired. In fact, now having done this for a long time, seeing former students actually come back and tell me amazing things that they've done and things that they've done that were structured onto things that we worked on and talked about, being able to pick up the phone and talk to someone and say, I have a problem. I have a student who's looking for that kind of thing, building a network of transformation, the network of possibilities. There's nothing quite as satisfying as that. Now, would I like to see the real-time possibilities of a lot of this stuff actually being moving our society? Yeah, I would like to see that quickly. But I have to say this conversation here with women and girls of color. In the last year, the White House has had a major convening on women and girls of color. Not quite in the frame that I would like, but they did it and wouldn't have done it were it not for women across the country standing up and insisting. Just last month, there was an announcement that there's gonna be, the NOVA Foundation is gonna spend $90 million on women and girls of color. This is a foundation that used to spend a lot along with a lot of other foundations. Their vision of women and girls of color was not one that had a USA zip code. So the whole idea that, lift half the sky, educate a girl and educate her family. All this stuff applied over there. It never was something that people talked about here. That's changed in less than two years. African American Congresswomen last month announced that there was gonna be a caucus on black women and girls. That's unprecedented. So these are changes that the changing discourse has made possible. That's tremendously efficacious. Just the fact that some people refuse to shut up, made certain things possible. So if they start yelling, I can only guess what might happen. So all that's inspiring to me. A junior student, GWS student here, and something that I noticed in the video, specifically talking about the struggles that black women face. My question really, I'm asking how existing as a black woman in a space like a stavis where the commonality or the solidarity within those specific experiences just aren't there. How do you find solidarity or how do you find a mode of space that will actually push forward that action when people can just get tired of listening to you and tell you to shut up, especially when you don't have people standing with you in solidarity all the time? Yeah, yeah. You guys ask questions that are like, yeah, tell me, I'm trying to figure that out too. I mean, I teach at Columbia Law School. Yeah. You know, so. I mean, it's kind of like, yeah, that's kind of a challenge. Yeah, go ahead. So I think you guys are kind of seeing how you exist, right? You say it because you believe it. You write it because you know it's true. You do it despite the fact that there aren't existing frames to let you do it. You fashion together the space that you need in order to situate your project where you are. So my work on critical race theory, intersectionality, it was all a product of thinking, okay, the institution that I exist in has people who do the work that they do from their vantage point. It's not really called from their vantage point, but it is from their vantage point. If that's what they do, then I'm gonna do the same thing. And sort of committing to that and sticking with it when it's not easy, right? There are people who say, you know, you should fly with all the other geese in that direction because you're flying over there. You don't get picked off. But you know, the reality is I couldn't fly that way. And so I wouldn't have been a good flyer in that pack if that's what they're called, whatever it is when they fly it, flock. But it also meant that it was easier for me to find the other people who are flying my direction, right? So yeah, it's the truth that in an institution or in spaces where you're kind of singularly doing the work, or at least it feels like it, it does feel isolating. The good news is that if you continue doing it and you represent what it is you do in a powerful way, it draws people to your work and people that are doing some of the same stuff gets drawn to you. So, you know, the group will never be large. I mean, critical race theory at its height was, you know, no more than maybe 60 people, but they transformed, you know, legal education, partly because it was tight. You know, if you found your way to a critical race theory workshop, it was like going through the bushes, you're right? Chopping up, like everybody got to the clearing and they were really happy to be there and really contributed everything they had to making that project work. So yeah, in our individual institutions, we were often one of one or one of two, but the collective collaborative was that much stronger because we actually invested everything into making the intellectual project one that had deep roots, intellectual roots, institutional roots in that lived. So, you know, it's not a story of like, just say it this way and everybody will jump behind you. It's not quite like that, but saying it and sticking with it and putting your gut into it, because, you know, at the end of the day, if you're a gut, you know, motivated person, that's always there for you, right? It's my source, more than anything. I'm not intellectual because I like to just sit and think, you know, I've got, there are things that I feel and I wanna put words to it and I wanna figure out how to make it make sense and speak to other people. As long as that's there, you know, I think that's the groundwork that allows you to continue to exist and thrive. Hi, I'm currently working on a fiction story where one of the main characters is a black woman, a woman of color. And I just, as someone who doesn't have that perspective, I was just wondering if you knew like, what were the major, what are the major problems currently with representation of women of color and fiction? Do you have any thoughts about that or? Okay, that's an interesting question. You know I do law, right? Yeah, I was just wondering if you had any thoughts or I knew that was an earlier area, but. You know, nothing, I don't have, so I don't have thoughts about like things that I, if we were having drinks together, I would say, hey, you know, so and so and so, but just, you know, basically try to pontificate on something when I'm sure there are people here in the audience who have much more expertise on it, I would feel kind of weird saying that. But I think it's a good question. So I'll say one little itty bitty thing. Who's got some thoughts about this? I see something. Now we have a conversation going. Can you hear? Yeah, I can hear. Okay, come here. And let's be honest. I mean, that's almost always the first reaction. But then let's also be honest when stuff gets produced and there are no women of color in it, we sometimes get pissed. So, you know, I mean, it's a hard question. I do think it's a hard, it's a hard question. I mean, you know, we live in a society in which the productive, you know, capacities for imagination, the productive, I mean, being able to produce, get out, publish is tremendously disproportionately distributed. You know, there are very few people who produce and have that production get out and it's often not, you know, the most underrepresented people. So the long run, of course, we want more productive capacity. The short run is, you know, stuff is happening while we're waiting for it. So, I do wanna, I do want, I mean, that's why I say I don't have an answer but I see what the problem is. I think the problem is a significant one. And to be honest, it's also not helped. See, I said, I'm not gonna say anything. This is the problem when you get me talking. It's not helped when some of the things that are produced by people of color reproduce the very stereotypes that we get pissed about when other people do it. And, you know, if we just look around at some of the stuff that's out there, you know, watching BET is not necessarily better than some of the other stuff. I mean, I get as mad about some of the stuff I see that's produced by people who look like me as I get mad about stuff that's not. So, I do think there's a conversation about, so how do we even know the characters that we know, partly because they're represented by certain tropes that get reproduced over and over again. So, we learn to consume certain signifiers around race and around race and gender. That's just part of what it is. I mean, anybody now can do cookie. Regardless of their color, and everybody'll know. I mean, if y'all know who cookie is, I know what you've been watching. That characterization is something that many of us enjoy, but we also know it's producing certain representational tropes that now are gonna be firmly part of the culture and there will be cookies from now on in, and any number of people will reproduce them and do it. So, I enjoy it and it's a guilty thing because I know that I'm looking at something that is in some ways a representational problem. I mean, and so it's just real. And like I said, I don't know the answer to it, but I do wanna affirm that that's an initial reaction and that's a worry that I think is a real worry. Yeah, go ahead. Conversation. So, I have a question. Yeah. In intersectionality, in doing it, is it appropriate sometimes, and is it a good way to do intersectionality by saying this is where I need to step back from it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. I mean, that was a little bit of our conversation, right? Sometimes it is important to step back. Even when people are calling you to step forward, right? Because there are often disagreements even within communities about who should speak and what should they speak about and what their responsibilities are. So, I agree with that. I do think that there is no safe harbor really. At the end of the day, you've got to simply take into account different ways of being unresponsive and just figure out what is the course of action that you most believe you can support. And yeah. Yeah, yeah, and that makes me think about representation. Yeah. Like, when does representation matter? Does it always matter? Like, can we keep pushing for representation? Like, is that okay? Do you think? I think it's okay. Yeah. I think, yeah, I'd like to see more representation. And what do we do about the interracial, intergender stuff that we were just talking about early when the people who are producing the representations that we think are like, no, not that, or do we ask them to step back too? I mean, there are a few people I want to ask to step back. You know? Like, really? No, but you know. Mike, sorry. Thank you for giving this presentation. It's been very enlightening. One of the things that I found most, I guess appalling is the most appropriate word I can put on it is the section of your presentation that focused on police brutality in regards to black women and the lack of media coverage surrounding that issue. I was wondering what you think, this is another, I think, question. I'm sorry about that, but what you think is the best approach for us as consumers to kind of change that norm, change that like, tendency in the media. Thank you. Thanks for that question. So we just have, so our Say Her Name campaign was our way of trying to figure out a simple way to begin, which is, you know, an imperative, Say Her Name, which means you've got to go know her name, which means you've got to actually look to find who they are and they're not going to be given to you. So actually that's a great segue because we have Say Her Name stuff out there. We created a report that has as many names that we could find in the context in which these women were killed. The idea being you need a frame, you need a narrative around which to understand what makes certain women vulnerable to police violence, what are some of the factors. So the report actually has other names and the stories but beyond that, we created a word puzzle that has the names of dozens of black women killed by the police, but you actually have to look at it. You remember those puzzles that you used to have a kid and you circle the name? We wanted that to symbolize, you've got to work for it. It's not as though it's just going to be handed to you. You have to take it upon yourself to actually look and try to find it. I'm telling you it happens, but the media are not going to tell you that it happens which means that you've got to take the extra step, exercise some serious agency and trying to be part of the Say Her Name movement. So as consumers and as activists, we have to be critical and know that the spaces in between the stories are the stories, not just the stories that we get. For any of you who watch Confirmation, I've got some stories to tell you about that. But the basic point is that if there is more demand to say their names, if we make it part of the practice, then the practice will actually drive greater accountability. We started Say Her Name. We were in marches in New York and in Los Angeles and the names were part of the chance. The names of the men were part of the chance and so then we would start chanting women's names and people would look at us like we were crazy. What are you talking about? So some people gave us the big thumbs up. Thanks for including the women. Others were just aghast. I mean they would come and look at the posters like how can this be? And we're like yes it can be, because this is not just about the police against hypermasculinity. This is not just the framing of modern day lynching. It is modern day lynching through different kinds of ways in which certain bodies are made vulnerable. It's not all just male. So once we started saying it, people started joining in and giving us names and writing to us, did you know about this case? Did you know about that case? So the two things that I wanna say, be aggressive in finding the information. And number two, share the information once you find it. It's a whole new world now with digital media. This report that we made would not have been possible because there is no database that collects all the information and those newspapers that do collect the information often don't report what happens to women because they don't know what to do with it. So we had to rely on family members who posted things, lawyers who posted things. It was basically a democratically produced piece of information. So join us in that. The African-American policy form is online. We like people to come and look at our stuff, sign up. We'll flood your email with all the stuff that we can find and that's effectively the way we're building the movement outward. Hi. We have time for two more questions. Okay. So I am from Sweden and when we're talking about sharing, I wonder if you have any international perspective or if you have any international cooperation because I know from my own experience with friends and just news and things like that that the discrimination towards black populations throughout Europe and Scandinavia is increasing. And so, and they don't have quite the same kind of community as the African-American community. And so I'm just wondering if there's any cooperation or any future ideas like, yeah. Okay, thanks. I've been to Sweden a few times. I give talks in Sweden. I've noted, I don't, I could be tired, but one of the things that was so interesting when I got to Sweden is that my host was asking me if I wanted to kind of take a tour of wherever I was to learn about how, you know, what race was like. I mean, what outsiders were like. And in the process, she kept using the word blackheads. And I was like, wow, that's interesting. I've never heard of that being the term for black people. And she was like, no, it's not black people. It's everybody who's not Swedish. I mean, everybody who's not blonde, you know, basically folks who hail from the South or historically must have hail from the South. I was like, man, that's a version of whiteness that I've just never quite seen before. I was amazed about it. But that said, it was very interesting just to see how, you know, we all know race is socially constructed, it's marked differently in different places. So, you know, the racial structures of discourse and how people were represented or applied to people who in this country would never be seen as a racial other. So I just kinda, I mean, I won't say it blew my mind, but it was really interesting to see it play out in a place where I was looking at most of the people and I saw, you know, I saw white people. And obviously there were distinctions. I understand that now, you know, it was like maybe several years ago since I've been there, with immigration and with, you know, the refugee crisis and a whole range of things that the questions around race have become heightened. I think it is a potentially explosive situation, in part because in European academic discourse, the framing around race is highly contested. This is the case with respect to intersectionality. I went to a conference one time, intersectionality, 20 years of intersectionality. And the debate was, we like intersectionality, but we're not so sure about this race stuff. So can we kinda take the ideas and apply them and work with them without having to take that baggage crap that comes from the United States? So it was really interesting because, you know, I didn't ask to go there. I mean, I mean, I was invited. And so I think one of the challenges is that because the dominant sensibility is that race is not something that's endemic to Europe, the resistance to some of the conceptual and political tools that have been developed in other contexts like UK, South Africa, United States, that are robustly about race are really, really contested. So now that the race problem has, you know, the wool has been ripped off, I think it's really drawing the question whether those demands are gonna come from, you know, society and how they're gonna get translated through the academy. The reason why I exist and many scholars of color and women exist is that the academy here was expanding at a time when all these movements were coming up. And so spaces were made, not a lot, but spaces were made for, you know, scholars of color and women to be part of it. The European academy is smaller, tighter, more traditional, more patriarchal, more white. So whether that will actually develop into intellectual projects is one question. And then whether there is a political movement is actually a connected one, but a slightly different question. So yeah, I'm interested to see how it's gonna unfold there. Yep. My question was related to one of your early points and the thing about how racial difference and inequality without talking about racial power creates like an individual response of blame. And I was, something that I made a connection to with some of my classes is the focus on particularly US capitalism on individual. Like if you work hard enough, you should be doing this. It's your fault that you're poor, things like that. Do you think that plays into the way that race is talked about as well? Absolutely, absolutely. Like, you know, so the most, I won't say the most significant, but one of the myths that gets deployed against the argument that we still are living in a post-segregationist, post-slavery society is the myth of individualism, is the idea that people get what they work hard for. And it's a myth that people believe even as they're experiencing privileges that have been passed down to them, right? So you can believe that, you know, I got this education because I worked hard even though dad took out a loan on our house to get it and other people don't even have a house to take it out on, right? So, you know, well, I'll make a pitch too about tomorrow. So tomorrow we're gonna have a structural racism training and it is a simulation where we play this game called the Structural, the Unequal Opportunity Race. For those of you who haven't seen it, there is a video on our website. It's also on YouTube. It's called the Unequal Opportunity Race. And has anyone seen it? Oh, so you guys have seen it. So it's basically a way of telling the story. It's a way of telling a story that we live in a society in which several, several generations of people running around the track have happened before people of color were even able to get in the race. And as they come into the race, all these other structural barriers get in the way that make it difficult for the race to be fair. We basically used it as a way of saying, paying attention to the obstacles that are on the track that affect some groups as opposed to others is not preferential treatment. Removing those obstacles is not reverse discrimination. Actually failing to remove those obstacles, that's discrimination. So the whole point is to sort of historicize precisely the point you're making. So I have found that even though people see the track and kind of get into it, until they're actually on the track, until they're actually running in the race lane that they're in, they really don't have answers to the questions about, so how come my grandfather came here in 1935 with nothing and he made them and these people couldn't? You can know it, but until you actually, even in a simulated way, are standing there waiting for the baton to get passed to you and it's not coming, right? Because grandma didn't get social security because she was black or Latino and she was in one of the two professions that were excluded from it. Or dad didn't get a veteran's loan because none of the communities that were allowing people to move in accepted black people in it. I mean, they gotta sort of figure out how they're in the stream of history and the stuff they get wasn't simply the product of someone else's hard work. Hard work has something to do with it, but it doesn't have everything to do with it. So the game tries to tell that. The last thing I'll say is this. This stuff is controversial, you know, thinking. So much that there's an effort afoot now to suppress this conversation. So our track metaphor, it was what I call it, was shown in Black History Month, Assembly in Rykel County, Virginia. Apparently to two large groups like this to talk about, so what does this tell us about current inequality? How can we talk about it differently? Did I say this was Virginia? Let me say it again. In Rykel County, Virginia is a suburb of Richmond, Virginia. Y'all know Richmond, Virginia, the cradle of the Confederacy. They're still like all over town, all the Confederate soldiers. I mean, this is a place that's living its history, right? So this is an attempt to historicize that history. One of the students told her grandfather who was an activist in town who immediately called Fox News. Fox News told this story and called it a white guilt video. It's being shown to your children. You know, you gotta do something about it so that these parents call up and say, why are you showing my kid a white guilt video on the school board? They said, oh, we didn't mean to, we're sorry. So they issued an apology for showing the unequal opportunity raise and said that should never have happened. We're never gonna show that again. They banned the video. Now, we're talking an education arena, right? You don't have to like everything. You can disagree or something, but to say we're gonna ban any conversation about structural inequality because it makes some of the students feel bad. What kind of society are we educating our young people to participate in when a video gets banned because it makes people feel bad? I mean, really? So I say all that to say, A, it's important to have skills to talk about precisely the issue you raised. B, it's important to realize that that conversation is now a conversation that some people rightly feel that they can suppress. I say that to say that in some states like Arizona, they've actually created a law to ban ethnic studies because they say it promotes interracial resentment, right? Colonialism doesn't promote interracial. But talking about it as a problem does. So we've gotta be prepared to resist that. Thank you very much. Thanks again, Professor Crenshaw. Again, if you're moved by what you heard here tonight or if these are interesting things to talk about, major declaration forms right over here. Step right up.