Kimberly
Williams Crenshaw
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to Quotes from Women, Power & Peace
 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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