Intersectionality should be used as a prism to understand how power works, prominent civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw said during a Purdue virtual lecture series on Wednesday.
“It’s a way of seeing a lot more than a way of being,” said Crenshaw.
Crenshaw, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and Columbia Law School, is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. She is best known for developing critical racial theory after coining the term “intersectionality,” an idea developed by the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s.
Intersectionality serves as a framework for understanding how a person or group with multiple identities can be affected by various forms of discrimination that can increase one another.
The event was part of the Intersectionality Speaker Series sponsored by the Brock Wilson Center for Women in Management in Purdue. The series aims to highlight the effects of intersectionality on men and women through narrative.
The discussion was led by Dr. Meara Habashi, Professor at the Krannert School of Management and Director of the Brock-Wilson Center, moderated.
Intersectionality is at the core of the # SayHerName movement, according to Crenshaw. The movement, fueled by the murder of Breonna Taylor, designed to raise awareness of black women killed by the police, was developed by Crenshaw and her colleagues.
Realizing that many Americans were unaware of the police brutality against black women, they sought to change the conversation.
“It told us we had to step in directly to say the names of women and girls and men and boys,” Crenshaw said.
Throughout the discussion, Crenshaw urged the alignment of unique ideas; The oppressive institutions that sustain these ideas should be the focus of the test. She used as an example the former President Trump’s ordinance aimed at critical racial theory.
“The idea that it’s the ideas that divide, not the structural inequalities that the ideas articulate so people can address them, reminded me a lot of the way the civil rights movement was phrased as divisive,” Crenshaw said .
Crenshaw stressed the need for communities and institutions to be fully mobilized to take concrete action.
“Just think about it,” said Crenshaw. “Would there have been a Montgomery bus boycott if all this energies had been picked up on Twitter or Facebook?”
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