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Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines' research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1252/thumbnail.jpg

For more than twenty years, scholars, activists, educators, and lawyers – inside and outside of the United States – have employed the concept of intersectionality both to describe problems of inequality and to fashion concrete solutions. In particular, as the Washington Post reported recently, "the term has been used by social activists as both a rallying cry for more expansive progressive movements and a chastisement for their limitations." Drawing on black feminist and critical legal theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of intersectionality, a term she coined to speak to the multiple social forces, social identities, and ideological instruments through which power and disadvantage are expressed and legitimized. In this comprehensive and accessible introduction to Crenshaw's work, readers will find key essays and articles that have defined the concept of intersectionality, collected together for the first time. The book includes a sweeping new introduction by Crenshaw as well as prefaces that contextualize each of the chapters. For anyone interested in movement politics and advocacy, or in racial justice and gender equity, On Intersectionality will be compulsory reading from one of the most brilliant theorists of our time. ; https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1254/thumbnail.jpg

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 rearticulate themselves within institutional settings to manufacture social punishment and human suffering. Beyond addressing the convergences between private and public power that constitute the intersectional dimensions of social control, this Article addresses political failures within the antiracism and antiviolence movements that may contribute to the legitimacy of the contemporary punishment culture, both ideologically and materially.

I am pleased to be a part of this symposium honoring Catharine MacKinnon's groundbreaking work as a feminist theorist, legal advocate, and global activist. This invitation not only presents the opportunity to examine the interface between dominance theory and intersectionality, but also the occasion to delve further into the vexed rhetorical politics surrounding feminism and antiracism. By now the fact that there has been a contested relationship between antiracism and feminism is almost axiomatic.1 Yet as with most things that have become matters of common knowledge, there is a risk that generalizations can metastasize into hardened conclusions that obscure rather than illuminate important dynamics among people, theories, and movements.

With the passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative ("MCRI"), Michigan joins California and Washington to constitute the new postaffirmative action frontier. For proponents such as Ward Connerly, affirmative action is on the edge of extinction. Connerly plans to carry his campaign against what he calls "racial preferences" to eight states in 2008, scoring a decisive Super-Tuesday repudiation of a social policy that he portrays as the contemporary face of racial discrimination. On the other side of the issue, proponents of affirmative action are struggling to regroup, fearful that the confluence of lukewarm support among Democratic allies, messy presidential politics and a menacing Supreme Court may spell the end of affirmative action as we know it. Of course predictions of the untimely departure of affirmative action have been wrong before. Indeed, the Supreme Court's surprising decision in Grutter v. Bollinger caught runaway circuit judges and trigger happy pundits celebrating the demise of affirmative action a little too soon.

Like the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings a few months before, the Rodney King beating, the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who "restrained" him and the subsequent civil unrest in Los Angeles flashed Race across the national consciousness and the gaze of American culture momentarily froze there. Pieces of everyday racial dynamics briefly seemed clear, then faded from view, replaced by presidential politics and natural disasters. This Essay examines in more depth what was exposed during the momentary national focus on Rodney King. Two main events – the acquittal of the police officers who beat King and the civil unrest in Los Angeles following the verdict – serve as starting points for an analysis of the ideological and symbolic intertwining of race and power in American culture. This Essay explicates the 'outlines of a critical race theory, focusing not solely on the Rodney King incident, but considering more broadly how racial power generally is produced, mediated and legitimated – an approach that seeks to connect developments in diverse arenas in which race and power are contested.

I would like to thank Anita Hill and express my deep respect to her for having the courage to shatter the silence on sexual harassment. I am certain that I speak for millions of women in saying that I have been inspired and renewed by her strength and integrity. I have looked forward to addressing you tonight on a critical issue at this very important juncture in our political history. Sexual harassment has captured our attention over the last several weeks and has of course galvanized women in a way that scarcely could have been imagined only a few short months ago. The issue I want to address tonight, however, is at once narrower and broader than sexual harassment. Focusing on the intersections of race and gender, I want to highlight the racial dimensions of sexual harassment of African-American women.

I would like to thank Anita Hill and express my deep respect to her for having the courage to shatter the silence on sexual harassment. I am certain that I speak for millions of women in saying that I have been inspired and renewed by her strength and integrity. I have looked forward to addressing you tonight on a critical issue at this very important juncture in our political history. Sexual harassment has captured our attention over the last several weeks and has of course galvanized women in a way that scarcely could have been imagined only a few short months ago. The issue I want to address tonight, however, is at once narrower and broader than sexual harassment. Focusing on the intersections of race and gender, I want to highlight the racial dimensions of sexual harassment of African-American women.

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. I have chosen this title as a point of departure in my efforts to develop a Black feminist criticism because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis. In this talk, I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist politics.

In 1987, I was honored to write the Foreword for a special issue on the National Black Law Journal. The special issue featured papers on race, racism and democracy written by students in a UCLA seminar that I had tailored to facilitate the production of publishable work by students. The state of legal education for African American students at the time was far from idyllic. Indeed, the Foreword was inspired by a host of events that I had witnessed both as a student and as a colleague that underscored the varied and subtle ways that race continued to marginalize students of color in legal education, particularly in the classroom.

It is both an honor and a pleasure to write the Foreword for this issue of the National Black Law Journal. This project represents the culmination of a joint effort involving the NBLJ, Dean Susan Westerberg Prager and me. The project grew out of discussions that began in the Spring of 1987 in which we explored various ways that the law school could support the production of publishable student material for the Journal. I initially considered sponsoring interested students in independent research projects; however, a high level of student interest, an obvious overlap between proposed student topics, and my own interest in developing alternative pedagogical strategies combined to make a seminar the most attractive option. After receiving suggested themes for the proposed issue from Journal members, I attempted to develop a seminar that would reflect our substantive interests and that would also be responsive to some of the problems that I believe confront minority students in traditional classrooms. The seminar that resulted – "Minority Voting Rights and Majoritarian Domination" – reflected an effort to further three interrelated objectives: 1) to explore the successes and failures of the legal strategies developed to address political disenfranchisement on the basis of race; 2) to create an environment that presented an alternative to the traditional classroom experiences of minority students in majority-centered law schools; and 3) to provide a support structure specifically designed to produce publishable student material. In this Foreword, I will sketch my own view of some of the difficulties confronting minorities in the classroom and explain how the seminar was developed to address them. These views are impressions based on recollections and experiences that I have gathered from observing classroom dynamics from both sides of the law school podium. Although none of these ideas are based on empirical research, I hope nonetheless that they provide a basis for interpreting the seminar and that they may perhaps offer some ideas for further discussion.

Résumé Les discours féministes et antiracistes contemporains n'ont pas su repérer les points d'intersection du racisme et du patriarcat. Face à ces difficultés, cet article propose une approche originale : l'intersectionnalité. La première partie traite de l'intersectionnalité structurelle — de la manière dont le positionnement des femmes de couleur, à l'intersection de la race et du genre, rend leur expérience concrète de la violence conjugale, du viol et des mesures pour y remédier qualitativement différente de celle des femmes blanches. La seconde partie porte sur l'intersectionnalité politique : notamment la marginalisation de la question de la violence contre les femmes de couleur induite par les politiques féministes et antiracistes. Enfin, l'article conclut par l'examen des conséquences de l'approche intersectionnelle dans le champ plus large de la politique de l'identité contemporaine. *

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. Writing as critics of the basic framework of process theory, Professors Kimberli Crenshaw and Gary Peller discuss the contributions and constraints of a proceduralist constitutional law discourse. In light of direct democracy initiatives claiming the power of legislation, and a substantively conservative judiciary defining the "law," Professors Crenshaw and Peller suggest focusing on new ways that claims of the disempowered are articulated in constitutional doctrine.

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 of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm; and political interventions employing an intersectional lens. We propose a template for fusing these three levels of engagement with intersectionality into a field of intersectional studies that emphasizes collaboration and literacy rather than unity. Our objective here is not to offer pat resolutions to all questions about intersectional approaches but to spark further inquiry into the dynamics of intersectionality both as an academic frame and as a practical intervention in a world characterized by extreme inequalities. At the same time, we wish to zero in on some issues that we believe have occupied a privileged place in the field from the very start, as well as on key questions that will define the field in the future. To that end, we foreground the social dynamics and relations that constitute subjects, displacing what often seems like an undue emphasis on the subjects (and categories) themselves as the starting point of inquiry. We also situate the development and contestation of these focal points of intersectional studies within the politics of academic and social movements — which, we argue, are themselves deeply intersectional in nature and therefore must continually be interrogated as part of the intersectional project.