Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

“Sexism isn't a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. It doesn't happen to black and white women the same way.”

“Censorship is certainly not the answer to controversial material and is inconsistent with our most basic constitutional values.”

“Justice Scalia was a person who effectively bludgeoned the life out of the living Constitution, the Constitution that gave us desegregation, that gave us women's rights, that gave us environmental protections and political access.”

“While many Americans agree that 'the system is rigged' economically, few are aware of the ways in which racial inequality has been structured and embedded in our society. This is why candid, fact-based discussions about racial inequality are so desperately needed.”

“Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.”

“I have a wonderful, diverse, and young staff at the AAPF who pretty much work around the clock trying to figure out how we promote the idea that social justice requires us to be intersectional in our thinking and in our scope of vision.”

“We're never going to come to a moment where all of us who claim to be feminists can agree about what the first priority of feminism is.”

“'Separate but unequal' didn't work in respect to race, it doesn't work in respect to gender, and it especially doesn't work when looking at the intersection of race and gender.”

“When people talked about O.J. Simpson being race-neutral, that was a race card. It just meant we don't think of him as black. But race-neutral is just like flesh-tone Band-aids. It's not neutral; it's white.”

“The way we imagine discrimination or disempowerment often is more complicated for people who are subjected to multiple forms of exclusion. The good news is that intersectionality provides us a way to see it.”

“Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.”

“To never think about race means that it doesn't really shape your life, or more specifically, the race that you have is not a burden to you.”

“We must all stand against both the continual, systematic, and structural racial inequities that normalize daily violence as well as against extreme acts of racial terror.”

“I think it's useful to recall that a lot of these statutes like 'disrupting the classroom' or 'disturbing the peace' have long been historically used to oppress and criminalize black people.”

“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.”

“'Formation' and 'Lemonade' speak to experiences that are too under-represented in our culture. But there are costs to certain forms of visibility. I don't think it is a bad thing to discuss what these costs are.”

“I think it's important for the American people to know that the position of originalism isn't itself an originalist position.”

“While white women and men of color also experience discrimination, all too often their experiences are taken as the only point of departure for all conversations about discrimination. Being front and center in conversations about racism or sexism is a complicated privilege that is often hard to see.”

“Ideally, schools should be supportive environments for students. Unfortunately, zero-tolerance policies tend to funnel vulnerable students out of schools and into prisons, low-income jobs, and poverty.”

“The struggle against patriarchy and racism must be substantively robust and inextricably intertwined.”