Kimberlé Crenshaw in Sage Chapel (screen capture from video)
On Monday, February 19, Kimberlé Crenshaw ’81 delivered a talk entitled “The Urgency of Intersectional Justice.” Her talk follows an MLK talk by Stanford Law School Professor Richard Ford, who argued that if the Supreme Court strikes down race-based affirmative action, the black community should shift its focus from “diversity” to an interpretation of the 14th Amendment that emphasizes its original intent to benefit black people.
Since then, the Supreme Court in the Harvard and UNC cases struck down any discrimination on the basis of race in college admissions as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Now a half year later Crenshaw advances her own theories on how the law affects black people in the 21st Century. This year’s MLK lecture drew 400 in-person attendees and more than 840 virtual registrants from Cornell and the surrounding community.
The talk began with a land acknowledgment. Dean of Students Marla Love then explained the MLK Lecture and introduced Crenshaw.”We are still grappling with the social issues from that time,” said Love.
Crenshaw is a Law Professor at UCLA and Columbia. She coined the terms “intersectionality” and “critical race theory.” Love said that ”there can be no liberation without truth telling around past and present oppression.”
Crenshaw noted that she is “speaking of the many legacies of democratic inclusion in this year of free speech”
Cornell struggled, sometimes with itself, to implement the “any person, any study” mandate. Crenshaw cited the 1969 Straight Takeover and praised then-President James Perkins. “I find myself distraught, disappointed and disillusioned. The mounting challenges we face in protecting Cornell’s legacy and the many failures to transform [Cornell’s] rituals and gestures into a vigorous defense of free thinking about anti-racism, about social justice, about academic freedom,” said Crenshaw.
Appeal to Emotions
Unlike most law professors who give lectures at Cornell, most of Crenshaw’s talk was an appeal to emotions instead of resolving the inconsistencies between the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the Equal Protection Clause with Crenshaw’s views of Critical Race Theory.
Crewshaw views the debate over the future of race in America as a battle between the extremes of the advocates of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality on the one hand, against anti-Woke politicians who seek to preserve the nation’s current power structure on the other. Crenshaw did not discuss any middle ground.
“Today’s political attacks on this new knowledge travels under the banner of attacks on critical race theory,” said Crenshaw.
On the trend of red states to enact laws critical of CRT, Crenshaw said, “Given the reverence in which Dr. King is held, what then should we make of the fact that today, the very factions that sought to contain and discredit him, that labeled him the most significant threat to America, have risen again?”
“Facing eerily similar sieges in his own time, Dr. King made clear precisely where he’d cast his lot and precisely how he would talk back to the so-called allies, the moderates, the liberals, the others who rationalize a do nothing minimalist response to the rising twin tides of racism and fascism.” Dr. King was a critical race theorist before the term was invented.
Crenshaw is a “backtalker on the War on Woke.” She is writing a memoir called “Notes from a backtalker.” Most of her remarks were read from her draft.
She noted, “Killing King killed a little piece of everyone who allowed themselves to believe in the possibility” of justice.
Crenshaw arrived at Cornell in 1978, and heard the stories of the Straight Takeover. ASRC Director James Turner was very influential with Crenshaw. Crenshaw took Turner’s class on Black Political Theory her first semester at Cornell.
Producing New Knowledge
Crenshaw claims her work produced new knowledge, but she did not attempt to explain why her new viewpoint is better than other approaches.
“The knowledge producing function of this university did not include those living behind the veil.” Crenshaw’s government classes seem to justify and intellectualize and rationalize the injustices of society. She shuttled between the center of the campus on the Quad and the margins on Triphammer Road. She discovered Derrick Bell’s book, ”Race, Racism, and American Law,”
“Law, we had come to see, not only set the rules of the game, it shaped the relative power of the various contestants, building in advantage and disadvantage, sometimes cumulatively. A loss, for example, in what constituted unconstitutional discrimination would later ground another loss in what institutions could legitimately do to remedy that discrimination.”
“Critical race theory is not so much a thing, it’s a way of seeing and analyzing things, as a way of reading racial dynamics, a homegrown bottom-up toolkit derived from eyewitness accounts of the unwritten chapters of American history. And it is intersectional, a synthesis of many insights, experiences, and traditions born in the breach between American ideals and its lived realities.’
Crenshaw was critical of efforts to have the College Board drop intersectionality from its African American Advanced Placement Test.
“Intersectionality became my way of articulating what the courts could not see”
Crenshaw is speaking up for DEI staff and against their opponents.
“I cannot bring myself to believe in or agitate for trickle down justice with its promise that some of us can wait for equal treatment while others experience inclusion. Rejecting this marginalization of Black women’s expectations for communal support, I fully part ways with allies and travelers over the expulsion of women and other issues from our body politics.”
Crenshaw urged the audience to resist the impulse to go along to get along.
She spoke for a full hour reading from her memoir. She did not address why “intersectional justice” is currently urgent, only that her views are currently drawing increasing criticism.
Following the prepared speech
Shura Gat, Associate Dean of Students and Director of the Gender Equity Resource Center, then thanked the sponsors, speaker selection committee, and the fraternity and sorority members who volunteered to serve as ushers.
Prof. Riché Richardson of ASRC conducted the conversational Q&A. Richardson and Crenshaw celebrated the 93rd anniversary of the birth of Toni Morrison in Toni Morrison Hall the day before.
Richardson asked “what do we lose when black women are left out?”
Crenshaw responded by citing Toni Morrison as an example. Morrison had many stories involving intersectionality. “When those stories are censored, we are censoring brillantes”.
“It is odd to be fighting for something that was a partial remedy in the first place.” Crenshaw said of affirmative action. “Diversity was always a copy of a copy of a copy.” “What is offered instead is you can take race into account for the University’s interest to maintain a diverse student body. We get in to help [the University] to do its job better. We don’t get in to help us do our job better in the community in which we live.”
“Using race conscious means to circumvent [existing admissions criteria that are exclusionary] is not reverse discrimination at all, it is corrective. It is equitable,” claimed Crenshaw.
No questions from the audience were answered. Instead, the session concluded at 8:30 p.m. Cornell posted a video of her remarks.
Crenshaw participated in three events as part of Cornell’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration. In addition to this lecture, the Greater Ithaca Activities Center in Ithaca hosted a luncheon where Crenshaw engaged with local community leaders around the dangers of banning books, and Cornell Law School held a “fireside chat” where Crenshaw talked with two black law professors, India Thusi, and Gautam Hans, “around the legal history behind CRT and intersectionality, and the role of law in advancing social justice and civil rights.”
News Analysis
Using the MLK endowed lecture with Sage Chapel as a setting was a bold decision for Cornell. Dr. King was an ordained minister who preached forgiveness and fought for a color-blind society. Crenshaw unapologetically advocates the opposite view, casting society as a system of oppression by oppressors, and particularly seeking to elevate the role of black women. Yet, in her talk, Crenshaw did not show any basis for urgency to pursue intersectional justice.
Although Dean of Students Marla Love, Prof. Richardson and Director Shura Gat all had the opportunity to contextualize Crenshaw’s remarks in terms of what hope could be drawn for Jews, Asian-Americans or men; they failed to make any effort to do so. Indeed, unlike prior MLK Lectures, men were completely excluded from the program lineup.
