Prof. Kimberlé Crenshaw is known for introducing the term ‘intersectionality’. She is a leading civil rights activist and professor at Columbia Law School and the UCLA School of Law. Crenshaw is a big name in the legal world and a leading figure for all intersectional feminists and activists. During this evening she will be interviewed in-depth and talk about her groundbreaking and globally influential work on intersectionality and where her research is heading. 

Crenshaw is in the Netherlands at the invitation of Bureau Clara Wichmann. On the 11th of  June in Rode Hoed, she will be interviewed by Aldith Hunkar and open to questions from the audience. In addition, Dutch activists will explain what Crenshaw’s legacy means to them and how they deal with the themes in their daily work.

ABOUT CRENSHAW

As a lawyer, Crenshaw found that law and legislation do stand up for minorities from the point of view of race or sex – but always from a one-sided perspective. In her article Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, she uses a court case to describe how black women have fewer privileges within the law than white women or black and white men.

Crenshaw described this with the term intersectionality. Intersectionality is the theory that the institutional effect of prejudices and old patterns around our social identities intersect and reinforce each other. Crenshaw calls for a radical revision of the concept of diversity: not one-dimensional, but overlapping identities (gender & race & sexuality & religion & nationality etc) are decisive for the way in which discrimination takes place in our society. The theory shows that one-dimensional non-discrimination policy and law is bad for women with different overlapping social identities, because in practice it makes a lot of difference whether you are a white heterosexual woman or a black lesbian woman.

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