Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw

Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American legal scholar and civil rights advocate who teaches at UCLA and Columbia and is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. Kimberlé attended convenings at the Bellagio Center in 1995 and in 2007, and a residency in 2022. She developed the concept of “intersectionality” in the late 1980s to describe how overlapping social identities like race and gender relate to systems of discrimination.

I’m returning to Bellagio to write what I’m calling a memoir of my relationship with my own history—of being born into the eye of the storm in the mid-20th century, with social upheavals around race, then gender, then sexuality. A lot of people think that we academics come up with concepts first and then apply them to the world, but intellectualizing is the endpoint of experience, and those temporal moments I’ve moved through are the material that I weave into my work.

My first time at Bellagio, in 1995, was for a conference on free speech, and its role in creating inhospitable environments. There were 18 of us, including future Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan, and future president of Columbia University Lee Bollinger—leading theorists in critical race theory, First Amendment theory, and social justice. Most of our conversations were based on a model of free speech in which the truly problematic things were fairly narrow in scope. We had no idea what was coming in terms of the internet, misinformation, and the erosion of democratic norms. I’d love to listen again to those conversations. How might they be different today?

Afterwards, four of us—myself, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and Richard Delgado—combined articles we’d been working on into a book, Words That Wound. There are laws that interrupt the free flow of words to defend economic, security, and reputational interests; we argued the same exceptions should be applicable for racial and personal security interests. For a while in the 1990s there was an interesting (and intense) debate about it, but it took until #MeToo raised similar gender- and race-based issues to revive those discussions. And maybe the most interesting thing related to that first conference is the relative silence of those who argued back then that the best response to offensive speech is more speech, now that critics of critical race theory are using state legislatures and school boards to banish ideas.

It was clear that we weren’t outliers, and instead were part of a global conversation about perfecting democracy through paying attention to its many imperfections.
Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw
Advocate, American Civil Rights, Leading Scholar, Critical Race Theory, and Professor, UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School

Leading up to the World Conference on Racism in Durban in 2001, I’d been building a global network of women who were keen that we didn’t leave that stage without dealing with the ways in which racism plays out across gender. Afterwards, we continued to bring together people working in social justice as the Global Affirmative Action Research and Policy Network. In 2007, again at Bellagio, they were from Brazil, France, India, South Africa, and the U.S.— “democratic” countries with entrenched hierarchies, whose different ways of defending the status quo had so much in common despite their distinct histories. It was clear that we weren’t outliers, and instead were part of a global conversation about perfecting democracy through paying attention to its many imperfections.

It’s astonishing that our government—my government—has recently framed work that I and thousands of others have been developing over decades as “un-American”. It shows what happens when mainstream media amplifies those who misuse the public square for their own purposes. I want to reclaim this terrain as one of the great legacies of the civil rights movement, and of human rights around the world. We can’t let these ideas be misinformed out of existence.

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Dr. Crenshaw was a writer in residence at Bellagio in April 2022.

The African-American Policy Forum has further resources for those who want to learn more about intersectionality and critical race theory, and also has a number of upcoming virtual and in-person events.

You can connect with Dr. Crenshaw on Twitter or you can watch her TED Talk on The Urgency of Intersectionality.