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Kimberle Crenshaw "Demarginalizing the Intersection" (1989) -…
Kimberle Crenshaw "Demarginalizing the Intersection" (1989)
Problem?
how Black women's legal experience gets overdetermined by white women's experience with descrimination
"“I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender” (140). the problem is legal framework and methodology can't understand that sex and race inform both the experiences;
"Intersectional" -- community groups; we use this term in writing/
who does/does not get included in "intersectionaliity"
Methodology:
“If any real efforts are to be made to free Black people of the constraints and conditions that characterize racial subordination, then theories and strategies purporting to reflect the Black community’s needs must include an analysis of sexism and patriarchy. Similarly, feminism must include an analysis of race if it hopes to express the aspirations of non-white women” (166). -- the work of freedom and liberation isn't going to get done without thinking about those made marginal by overlapping oppressions; the on-going exclusion of Black women endangers
all
"One way to approach the problem of intersectionality is to examine how courts frame and interpret the stories of Black women plaintiffs" (141) --
"Bottom-up" approaches
put the most endangered people first/at the center: start with who is at the "bottom"
Evidence
Legal cases
DeGraffenried v General motors (141): the seniority system of layoffs negatively impacted Black women
court says, "Plaintiffs have failed to cite any decisions which have stated that Black women are a special class" (141
"Because General motors did hire women" (142)
"“The courts refusal in DeGraffenreid to acknowledge that Black women encounter combined race and sex discrimination implies that the boundaries of sex and race discrimination doctrine are defined respectively by white women’s and Black men’s experiences” (143).
Moore v. Hughes Helicopters: promotions and how Black women were not promoted and the crisis of
evidence
(144)
shows the foundations of whiteness structuring sex-based discrimintation (145)
the problem of data and making cases (footnotes on 146)
Payne v Travenol: yes, there's race-based discrimination, but women can't represent Black men?
"It forces them to choose between specifically articulating the intersectional aspects of their subordination, therbey risking their abilityto represent Black men, or ignoring intersectionality to state a claim that would not lead to the exclusion of Black men"
Basement metaphor (metaphors are hempful in visualizing structures)
"Imagine a basement" (151)
"“As a result, both feminist theory and antiracist politics have been organized, in part, around the equation of racism with what happens to the Black middle-class or to Black men, and the equation of sexism with what happens to white women” (152). -- this shows the stakes of the analogy
Traffic analogy
even the methods we allegedly have for liberation are hung up on single-axis models
Way out
bottom up approaches. "collectively challenging the hierarchy rather than each discriminatee individually seeking to protect her source of privilege in the hierarchy" (145