Honorary doctorate Kimberlé Crenshaw

Professor Gleider Hernandez and professor Elise Muir explain in the laudatio why professor Kimberlé Crenshaw was awarded an honorary doctorate by KU Leuven.

Transcript video

Kimberlé Crenshaw (60) is one of the leading voices in the field of equality and discrimination. Last year, she earned a spot in Prospect Magazine’s top ten of the world’s most important minds, alongside climate activist Greta Thunberg and philosopher and KU Leuven honorary doctor Martha Nussbaum and, among others. She gives this interview from her office in the African American Policy Forum in New York, a think tank founded by Crenshaw herself, aimed at fighting structural inequality. Over the course of an hour, she openly shares her thoughts on race, racism and law. It’s clear that she’s no stranger to doing so: she's a well-known speaker thanks to her work as a lawyer and activist, as an authority on the Black feminist legal theory, and as a professor of civil rights on both coasts of the US, at UCLA and Columbia University.

It’s been three decades since she conceived the idea that would define her career, Crenshaw says. “As a young scholar, I wanted to know how gender and race-based discrimination differs between genders. I had noticed that the different committees on diversity and inclusion at the university were operating as completely separate entities: those on gender diversity didn't deal with race, and those on race didn't deal with gender. So how could one ever specifically consider the situation of black women? This got me thinking about whether law – anti-discrimination law in particular – was doing the same thing.”

Crenshaw went to work with cases on the discrimination of black women on the labour market. “Unsurprisingly”, she found the exact same problem: black women often lost their cases because they get the rough end of both sticks. “Many judges didn't seem to realise that discrimination on the basis of a combination of gender and race was in fact being protected by the existing anti-discrimination law. Black women couldn't prove racist discrimination by a company because black men were hired. And they couldn't prove gender discrimination because white women were hired.”

“So what I did was articulate a framework that allowed all of these misfirings to come together, and I called it intersectionality. It’s a word picture, a very simple analogy to talk about a very complex reality – apparently too complex for some judges. The intersections are the crossroads between various sensitivities, such as background, gender, handicap, sexual orientation. Intersectionality is not a ready-made formula, and it’s not about adding as many features as possible. The intersectional perspective basically says: let's look at the actual dynamic that is creating the inequality so we can deepen our analysis of what's actually happening.”

Complex

Intersectionality quickly became a standard notion in studies on the unique situation of vulnerable groups. This includes fields outside of law, in social sciences for instance, and countries outside of the US. It found its way to the constitution of South Africa and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Even the current Flemish legislation embodies the spirit of intersectionality when it talks about discrimination on the basis of one or more grounds.

Doesn’t taking into account all these different sensitivities make implementing a policy on inclusion a whole lot harder? “Well, look, life is complex. When it comes to tax policy, when it comes to coordinating economic policy: that's a complexity, and people do it, because it's important. I often think that the frustration of some policy makers and politicians with the so-called complexity about equality is actually a frustration about the fact that the very conversation is one that has to be had."

“The question remains: if we want to enhance equality, do we need to pay attention to the way differences might get in the way of equality, or is the best route to enhance equality not to pay attention to differences at all? Some are in favour of the latter approach, of a colour-blind perspective. My view is clearly the first one: these differences exist and they’re already factors at play. And if we understand that differences make a difference – in one's access to help, to education, to healthcare – we can't limit ourselves to just a few big categories. We have to be aware that an immigrant woman and a white woman will have different experiences.”

Kimberlé Crenshaw is of African American descent and a woman herself. Did her experience guide her towards this career path? “Have I ever experienced discrimination, you mean? Oh, yes! I am currently writing a book about it, my memoir from an intersectional perspective. I write about many of the experiences I had growing up as a young African American girl in the mid-twentieth century, a time when a lot of things were being called into question: the limitations of race, of gender, of class,... The time when black people were excluded from the voting booth, and women were excluded from almost any profession that they might have wanted to pursue was still very much a part of our contemporary history. I was raised by people who were born one generation out of slavery, and born only five years after women were given the right to vote.”

“So my trajectory was pretty much hardwired. My interest was always connected to the way that I was reading the way the world read me. Ideas follow the bodies that are impacted by them. I’ve always questioned the way inequality is rationalised time and again. How it's made to appear to be just the way things have to be. So I had to ask: 'Well, who said so?!'”

Crenshaw mentions the deeply polarised climate in the United States of President Trump, where toxic masculinity rules. “And it's not just toxic masculinity. There's toxic whiteness happening. There's toxic Americanism happening. The American judiciary even facilitates some of this toxicity because of its direct relationship with the political arena.”

Obviously there are people who oppose Trump, says Crenshaw. Once example is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC for short, the progressive Congresswoman with Latino roots who frequently turns her guns on Trump – and vice versa. “I'm not really surprised that the progressives are stepping forward. What surprises me is the split between progressives and moderates. A significant section of the political elite feel that there is too much of the AOC-phenomenon, too much mobilisation around gender-justice and xenophobia. They feel that this has driven a cohort of the electorate away from the traditional Democratic Party. They believe that the way forward is to tap down the talk about gender, race and class, and just talk in generalisable terms: colour-blind, gender-blind,... They denounce identity politics among progressives, all while many of the Trump voters are the quintessential example of identitarians in politics.”

“Obama’s election was an important milestone for certain groups of the population, but one can't overlook the polarisation that this created as well. Trump’s election was born out of resentment and a sense of loss that many Americans who see politics as a zero-sum-game experienced; a game in which victory for one means certain loss for the other. We need to get underneath the symbolism in politics and actually have real agendas and debates about substantive issues. But I'm not very hopeful that things will soon change. Populism is everywhere these days. I think the election at the end of this year will be the most important election of my lifetime.”

On scholars

Has Crenshaw ever considered politics herself? “No! (laughs) It's always been important for me to sort of speak the truths as I understand them. Part of the occupational hazard of thinking in intersectional ways is that often you take issue with your allies. That’s hard to do for a politician. I've had moments of disagreement with feminists and with antiracists, but for me they're not relationship-ending debates. They're debates, nothing more, nothing less!”

Kimberlé Crenshaw is receiving the honorary doctorate from KU Leuven because she, as the laudatio states, effortlessly bridges the gap between academia and society. We already mentioned the African American Policy Forum, that often organises very specific initiatives for the most vulnerable groups in society. There was the recent #SayHerName campaign, for instance, drawing attention to police violence against Black women. Does Crenshaw think that more scholars should take a stance, away from the sidelines? “I think you have to be very careful about making prescriptions across groups, professions and activities about what they ‘should do’. This, in some ways, counters what it is that we say we're about: maximising the human capacity to pursue your interests, your life passions.”

“My view is simple: every person who sees and believes that the society they want is not yet that society, has a responsibility to think about how their own actions contribute to the gap between the society that they believe ought to be and the one that is. Transformation doesn't happen simply by wishing it to be the case.”

Interview: Wouter Verbeylen, translation: Shana Michiels