let everything happen to you
Intersectionality- Kimberlé Crenshaw
/
0 Comments
I went to a Feminist Ethics and Social Theory conference (FEAST) in Clearwater, Florida this October and I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw speak. It was above and beyond and an emotional experience to say the least. I've bullet-pointed the main pieces of her movement and activism work in order to have more people check it out and be in support of such a pivotal, pressing issue in the United States.
- Intersectionality (or intersectionalism) is the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.
- The African American Policy Forum has been an instrumental voice in the national dialogue centered on the inclusion of girls in racial justice policies and initiatives. Kimberlé's work has been vital in shaping the conversation on the limitations of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative.
7:00
•We know that both African American boys
and girls confront serious racial barriers – including failing schools,
unwarranted forms of criminalization and impoverished communities. We know that
compared to all girls Black girls have the worst rates of suspension, juvenile
detention, and homicide. Moreover, we know that the gender specific ways in
which they experience sexual harassment, teen pregnancy and other familial
burdens are seldom focused on in the quest for racial justice. So moving
forward we must target these issues because they are central to developing the
systematic and structural solutions necessary to dismantle the obstacles that
Black girls face on a day-to-day basis.
- At the end of the day, we have to be as concerned about the experiences of single Black women who raise their kids on welfare as we are about the disproportionate number of Black men who are incarcerated. We must care as much about Black women who are the victims of domestic violence as we do about Black boys caught up in the drug trade. We must emphasize the fact that Black women on average make less money and have less wealth than both white women and Black men in the United States as much as we focus on the ways in which Black men (and women) are disproportionately excluded from many traditional professions.
- If the Black community walks down this path, we can reshape our rhetorical understanding of what it means to be an endangered Black person in a way that embraces the experiences of both boys and girls; and we can pursue a cosmopolitan vision of racial justice that embraces all of us.
- A well conceived broadly based vision of racial justice should embrace the need for adequate health care measures and childcare for teen mothers. It should increase support for girls sexually abused in and outside of school. It should heighten awareness of what constitutes sexual harassment and what it takes to effectively eliminate it. But, in no way should it endorse the idea that the nuclear family represents the only healthy family formation in modern America.
•Institutionalized racism affects all
Black Americans; and Black girls are in crisis too. It is as simple as that. -Dr.
Luke Harris
(AAPF)
#BLACKGIRLSMATTER
*Data
released by the Department of Education for the 2011–2012 school year revealed that while Black males were suspended more than three times as often as their
white counterparts, Black girls were suspended six times as often. -AAPF
Full interview here.
And, finally, I am reminded by the poem by Langston Hughes:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Full interview here.
And, finally, I am reminded by the poem by Langston Hughes:
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
like a heavy load.
About Post Author
