Kimberlé Crenshaw
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
(African American)
For this #matriarchmonday we recognize Kimberlé Crenshaw a widely known American Lawyer and civil rights advocate who graduated from Cornell University and later received her J.D from Harvard law school. Throughout her career Crenshaw has worked towards inclusivity amongst the courts in regards to the multiple identities that come with a person in which she describes as “Intersectionality” in her 1989 published paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. She is now one of the leading scholars in critical race theory and Intersectionality. In 1996, she co-founded the African American Policy Forum to house a variety of projects designed to better advance social inclusion.
Additionally, what Crenshaw has worked on range from issues pertaining to gender and race in the domestic area including violence against women, police brutality, structural racial inequality, and affirmative action. Currently, Crenshaw continues to address race and gender issues in the United States with focus on structural inequalities for people of color. Most recently, Crenshaw released her book Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines which addresses evident complicity of white supremacy in academic disciplines and challenges its readers to reconsider racial history and the role of colorblindness in a variety of studies in academia. Crenshaw continues to be an ally in her efforts to educate future generations on racial and gender inequalities and how the multiple roles we hold - through our race, gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or economic status - affect us all differently. Her work forces us to evaluate the way in which laws are implemented, or more specifically who those laws or institutions are directed towards, and consider ways to create a more equal and just society.
A Few of Her Works
