Kimberle Crenshaw

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Critical Race Studies

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency has been widely hailed as evidence that the United States is now a post-racial society, that we have fulfilled Dr. King’s dream that his children would one day be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. Yet such claims evade the questions of what post-racialism...

Very few theories have generated the kind of interdisciplinary and global engagement that marks the intellectual history of intersectionality. Yet, there has been very little effort to reflect upon precisely how intersectionality has moved across time, disciplines, issues, and geographic and national boundaries. Our failure to attend to intersectio...

Intersectional insights and frameworks are put into practice in a multitude of highly contested, complex, and unpredictable ways. We group such engagements with intersectionality into three loosely defined sets of practices: applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics; debates about the scope and content...

The structural and political dimensions of gender violence and mass incarceration are linked in multiple ways. The myriad causes and consequences of mass incarceration discussed herein call for increased attention to the interface between the dynamics that constitute race, gender, and class power, as well as to the way these dynamics converge and r...

One of the very few black women’s studies books is entitled All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave! (Hull et al. 1982). I have chosen this title as a point of departure in my efforts to develop a black feminist criticism2 because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as m...

Eines der sehr wenigen Bücher im Bereich der „Schwarzen Frauenforschung“ trägt den Titel Alle Frauen sind weiß, alle Schwarzen sind Männer, aber einige von uns sind mutig ! (Hull et al. 1982). Ich wähle diesen Titel als Ausgangspunkt für mein Vorhaben, einen kritischen Schwarzen Feminismus zu entwickeln – denn er zeigt die problematischen Konsequen...

Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. To overcome this difficulty, an original approach is suggested here: that of intersectionality. In the first part, the paper discusses stru...

Neither the gender aspects of racial discrimination nor the racial aspects of gender discrimination are fully comprehended within human rights discourses. Building on the growing recognition that race and gender discrimination are not mutually exclusive phenomena, this background paper forwards a provisional framework to identify various forms of s...

Tanto os aspectos de gênero da discriminação racial quanto os aspectos raciais da discriminação de gênero não são totalmente apreendidos pelos discursos dos direitos humanos. O presente documento, baseado no crescente reconhecimento de que as discriminações de raça e de gênero não são fenômenos mutuamente excludentes, propõe um modelo provisório pa...

For the last four decades, some form of "process" theory has dominated conventional constitutional theory, on the bench and in the academy. The organizing, usually implicit, background assumption is that the exercise of governmental power - whether by legislatures or courts - is to be tested for normative legitimacy against a set of procedures. Wri...

It is argued that the O. J. Simpson murder trial reflects impoverished discourse in America about social identity and power, particularly relating to race, gender, and class. The debate over the relevance and centrality of identity divides American society deeply because it is at the heart of the discrepancy between what America wants to be and wha...

Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand vio...

Recent works by neoconservatives and by Critical legal scholars have suggested that civil rights reforms have been an unsuccessful means of achieving racial equality in America. In this Article, Professor Crenshaw considers these critiques and analyzes the continuing role of racism in the subordination of Black Americans. The neoconservative emphas...

Spring 2010 Presenters January 25: Royce Barondes (University of Missouri School of Law), ABA Ratings of Federal District Court Judges and the Likelihood of a Shepard’s Warning Signal February 1: Stephanie Stern (Loyola University Chicago School of Law), The Inviolable Home: From Iconic Property to Relational Privacy in the Fourth Amendment Februar...