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W O M E N A&A P E A C E

Kimberly Williams Crenshaw

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Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, JD.,is a civil rights activist and a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University Law School. She cofounded the African-American Policy Forum to highlight the centrality of gender in racial justice discourses and is a founding member of the Women’s Media Initiative. A 2005-2007 ACLU Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellow, Crenshaw is the founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory Workshop and co-editor of Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement.

The time just feels right for something big to happen, something new, something profound, something meaningful to turn our world around

And we are standing on the precipice of a new day where women can move from the ante-room to the board room, from being shackled in the house, to being installed in The White House.

It’s not about supplication, it’s about power. It’s not about asking, it’s about demanding. It’s not about convincing those who are currently in power, it’s about changing the very face of power itself.

I believe that women in power is absolutely essential, and that women in power is absolutely not enough.

What America learns here, is what it projects abroad. And when we project abroad effects everyone’s lives.

If we aren’t intersectional, some of us, the most vulnerable, are going to fall through the cracks.

When we don’t pay attention to the margins, when we don’t acknowledge the intersection, where the places of power overlap, we not only fail to see the women who fall between our movements, sometimes we pit our movements against each other.

The average sentence for someone convicted of raping a black woman is two years, and the sentence for raping a white woman is ten.

This is what happens when our movements are pitted against each other. Women lose. People of color lose. We all lose.

Women come from a whole range of backgrounds. If our visions of peace don’t include these differences, then our peace will be partial.

We can celebrate some of our victories but it is important for us to learn. It is important for us to move from images of women’s rights that look exclusive and exclusionary and to different ideas of how inclusion is supposed to look.

As long as we are imagining and fantasizing about a female President, why not fantasize about a truly intersectional feminist politics.

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