Kimberlé Crenshaw Headlines WGS 30th Anniversary

To kick-off the 30^th anniversary of Women’s and Gender Studies this year at Lafayette, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law, will deliver the keynote address at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 17, in Colton Chapel. The title of her talk is “The Charleston Imperative: The Challenge and Promise of Intersectional Feminism.”

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, Crenshaw’s articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review and Southern California Law Review. She is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop, and the co-editor of the volume, Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Crenshaw has lectured widely on race matters, addressing audiences across the country, as well as in Europe, India, Africa, and South America.

A specialist on race and gender equality, she has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on “Intersectionality” was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. Crenshaw authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nation’s World Conference on Racism (WCAR), served as the rapporteur for the conference’s Expert Group on Gender and Race Discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration.

Crenshaw has worked extensively on a variety of issues pertaining to gender and race in the domestic arena including violence against women, structural racial inequality, and affirmative action.  She has served as a member of the National Science Foundation’s committee to research violence against women and has consulted with leading foundations, social justice organizations, and corporations to advance their race and gender equity initiatives.

In 1996, she co-founded the African American Policy Forum to house a variety of projects designed to deliver research-based strategies to better advance social inclusion.  Among the forum’s projects are the Affirmative Action Research and Policy Consortium and the Multiracial Literacy and Leadership Initiative.  With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Crenshaw facilitates the Bellagio Project, an international network of scholars working in the field of social inclusion from five continents. Currently, she serves as committee chair for the U.S.-Brazil Joint Action Plan to Promote Racial and Ethnic Equality, an initiative of the U.S. State Department, and is director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, which she founded in 2011.

A founding member of the Women’s Media Initiative, Crenshaw writes for Ms. Magazine, the Nation and other print media, and has appeared as a regular commentator on “The Tavis Smiley Show,” NPR, and MSNBC.

Recent Articles by Crenshaw:

• “The Girls Obama Forgot” (New York Times)
• “From Private Violence to Mass Incarceration: Thinking Intersectionally About Women, Race, and Social Control” (UCLA Law Review)
•  “Black Girls Matter” (The Feminist Wire)
•  “Some of the worst racist tragedies in history have been perfectly legal”: Kimberlé Crenshaw on Eric Garner, Broken Windows and police impunity (Salon.com)