6 Cimi
White Rhythmic World-Bridger
On the Loom Mayá*
Grandmother Spider weaves –
Replicating Tessellations of
Birth – Death – Rebirth
Hallowed Patterns intricate
Holding Codes of Origin
Holding Codes of Destiny
Descending all to Earth
Soul spins a Body visible
Held by Threads invisible
By Gravitation bound
To Life’s sacred Ground.
©Kleomichele
Leeds
*Tzolk’in:
Sacred Mayan Calendar -- Pieces of the Sun/Count of Days, the Tzolk’in is a sacred
radio-genetic resonant transformer reflecting the creation codes of the Cosmos
in 260 units containing all possible permutations of 13 Tones and 20 Hieroglyphs.
Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, JD, LL.M.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born 1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a full-time professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues. Crenshaw is also the founder of Columbia Law School's Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) and the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), as well as the president of the Berlin-based Center for Intersectional Justice (CIJ).
Crenshaw is known for the introduction and development of intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination. Her scholarship was also essential in the development of intersectional feminism as a subcategory of intersectional theory: it examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination to which women are subject due to their ethnicity, sexuality and economic background.
Early life and education
Born in Canton, Ohio in 1959, to parents Marian and Walter Clarence Crenshaw, Jr., she attended Canton McKinley High School. She received a bachelor's degree in government and Africana studies from Cornell University in 1981, where she was a member of the Quill and Dagger senior Honors' Society. She received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984, and the next year, an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she was a William H. Hastie Fellow, and law clerk to Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Shirley Abrahamson.
Career
Following completion of her LL.M, Crenshaw joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law in 1986. She is a founder of the field of critical race theory, and a lecturer on civil rights, critical race studies, and constitutional law. At UCLA she currently teaches four classes with no requisites; her courses are Advanced Critical Race Theory, Civil Rights, Intersectional Perspectives on Race, Gender and the Criminalization of Women & Girls, and Race, Law and Representation. In 1991 and 1994, she was elected professor of the year by matriculating students. In 1995, Crenshaw was appointed as full professor at Columbia Law School, where she is the founder and director of the Center for Intersectionality & Social Policy Studies, established in 2011. At Columbia, Crenshaw's courses include an Intersectionalities Workshop and an Intersectionalities Workshop centered around Civil Rights.
In 1996, she co-founded and executive directed the nonprofit think tank and information clearinghouse, the African American Policy Forum, which focuses on "dismantling structural inequality" and "advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of all human rights, both in the U.S. and internationally." Its mission is to build bridges between scholarly research and public discourse in addressing inequality and discrimination. Crenshaw has been awarded the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil, and in 2008, she was awarded an in-residence fellowship at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford University.
In 1991, she assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill at the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
In 2001, she wrote the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), helped to facilitate the addition of gender in its Conference Declaration, served as a member of the National Science Foundation's Committee to Research Violence Against Women and the National Research Council panel on Research on Violence Against Women. Crenshaw was a member of the Domestic Strategy Group at the Aspen Institute from 1992-1995, the Women's Media Initiative, and is a regular commentator on NPR's The Tavis Smiley Show.
Influence
Her work has been cited as influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the Constitution of South Africa.
Crenshaw gave an hour-long lecture to a maximum-capacity crowd of attendees at Rapaporte Treasure Hall. She explained the role intersectionality plays in modern society. After a three-day celebration of her work, Brandeis University President Ron Liebowitz presented Crenshaw with the Toby Gittler award at a ceremony following a lecture in December.
She was invited to moderate a Sexual Harassment Panel hosted by Women in Animation and The Animation Guild, Local 839. Crenshaw discussed the history of harassment in the workplace and transitioned the discussion to how it plays a role in today's work environments. The other panelists agreed. There have been many protective measures placed to combat sexual harassment in the workplace but many issues remain to be resolved for a complete settlement of the problem at hand.
She contributed the piece "Traffic at the Crossroads: Multiple Oppressions" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.
She attended the Women of the World festival which took place from 8–13 March 2016 at the Southbank Centre in London, England. She delivered a keynote speech on the unique challenges facing women of color in the struggle for gender equality, racial justice and well-being. A key challenge is police brutality against black women. She highlighted the #SayHerName campaign which is aimed at uplifting the stories of black women killed by the police.
Intersectionality
Crenshaw introduced the theory of intersectionality to feminist theory in 1989 by becoming the first person to use this word in the context of feminism. It is speculated that the official introduction of intersectionality was in her groundbreaking 1989 paper written for the University of Chicago Legal Forum, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Anti-racist Politics". In her work, Crenshaw discusses Black feminism, and argues that the experience of being a black woman cannot be understood in terms of being black and of being a woman considered independently, but must include the interactions, which frequently reinforce each other.
The paper attempted to mitigate the widespread misconception that the intersectional experience is solely due to the sum of racism and sexism. According to Crenshaw, the concept of intersectionality predates her work, citing "antecedents" as old as 19th American black feminists Anna Julia Cooper and Maria Stewart, followed by Angela Davis and Deborah King in the 20th century : "In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender, or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race. So this is in continuity with that." Her inspiration for the theory began during her college years, when she realized that the gender aspect of race was extremely underdeveloped, although the school she was attending offered many classes that addressed both race and gender issues. In particuliar, women were only discussed in literature and poetry classes, while men were also discussed in serious politics and economics.
Crenshaw's focus on intersectionality views how the law responds to issues that include gender and race discrimination. The particular challenge in law is that antidiscrimination laws look at gender and race separately and consequently African-American women and other women of color experience overlapping forms of discrimination and the law without knowing how to combine the two, leaving these women without justice. Antidiscrimination laws and the justice system's attempt for a remedy to discrimination is limited and operates on a singular axis; when one flows into another a complete and understandable definition has not been written in law. Therefore when the issue of intersectionality is presented in the court of law, if one form of discrimination cannot be proved without the other, no law has been broken. The law defines discrimination of singular cases where one can only be discriminated against based on either race or gender.
Crenshaw often refers to the case DeGraffenreid v. General Motors as an inspiration in writing, interviews, and lectures. In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, a group of African-American women argued that they were subjected to compound discrimination which excluded them from employment opportunities. They contended that although women were eligible for office and secretarial jobs, in practice such positions were only offered to white women, barring African-American women from seeking employment in the company. The courts weighed the allegations of race and gender discrimination separately, finding that the employment of African-American male factory workers disproved racial discrimination, and the employment of white female office workers disproved gender discrimination. The court declined to consider compound discrimination, and dismissed the case.
Crenshaw also discusses intersectionality in connection to her experience as part of the 1991 legal team for Anita Hill, the woman who accused then- Supreme Court Nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The case drew two crowds expressing contrasting views: white feminists in support of Hill and the opposing members of the African-American community that supported Clarence Thomas. The two lines of argument focused on the rights of women and Hill's experience of being violated as a woman, on the one hand, and on the other the appeal to forgive Thomas or turn a blind eye to his conduct due to his opportunity to become only the second African American to serve on the United States Supreme Court.
Crenshaw argued that with these two groups rising up against one another during this case, Anita Hill lost her voice as a black woman. She had been unintentionally chosen to support the women's side of things, silencing her racial contribution to the issue. "It was like one of these moments where you literally feel that you have been kicked out of your community, all because you are trying to introduce and talk about the way that African American women have experienced sexual harassment and violence. It was a defining moment." "Many women who talk about the Anita Hill thing," Crenshaw adds, "they celebrate what's happened with women in general…. So sexual harassment is now recognized; what's not doing as well is the recognition of black women's unique experiences with discrimination."
Critical reception
Upon appointing Crenshaw to Columbia Law School, law school dean Lance Liebman described Crenshaw as a "leading law scholar" who "has shed important light on central issues of civil rights law."
Awards and honors
1985: William H. Hastie Fellow
1991: Professor of the Year, UCLA School of Law
1994: Professor of the Year, UCLA School of Law
2007; Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil
2008: recipient of Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship
2008: Fellow, Center for Advanced Behavioral Studies in the Social Sciences, Stanford University
2015: No. 1 Most Inspiring Feminist, Ms. Magazine
2015: "Power 100" Ebony Magazine
2016: Outstanding Scholar Award, Fellows of the American Bar Foundation
2017: Gittler Prize
Publications
She has published works on civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law.
Books
Critical Race theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, May 1, 1996.
Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment
The Race Track:Understanding and Challenging Structural Racism, July 30, 2013
Reaffirming Racism:The faulty logic of Colorblindness, Remedy and Diversity, 2013
Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Over Policed and Under Protected. 2016.
Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color.
On Intersectionality: Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw.*
CIMI
Kin 6: White Rhythmic World-Bridger
I organize in order to equalize
Balancing opportunity
I seal the store of death
With the rhythmic tone of equality
I am guided by my own power doubled.
When all is equalized and unified, then we will live in a constant harmonic convergence.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2017-2018.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Anahata Chakra (Silio Plasma)
