Sounding the Alarm on the Demonizing of Ideas

There were few empty seats at Duke’s Page Auditorium March 24 when Kimberlé Crenshaw, arguably the nation’s leading authority on Critical Race Theory, sounded a warning and call for action to address the ongoing attacks on public education.

“We’re at a moment where, what we are confronting…we’re looking at efforts to not just demonize a couple of ideas,” Crenshaw said, “But to demonize the entirety of our entire field of study, to demonize higher education, demonize public education and demonize public institutional values, the very notion of public service…is under assault right now.”

Crenshaw is widely credited with coining the terms “Critical Race Theory” and “intersectionality” – terms that have evolved into academic disciplines in university classrooms.

Crenshaw spoke at the 19^th annual Jean Fox O’Barr Distinguished Speaker Series, and participated in an hourlong conversation with Duke alumnus Mary Armstrong, who chairs Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Lafayette College.

A native of Canton, Ohio, Crenshaw attended Harvard Law School during the 1980s, a period marked by a student protest movement calling for more diversity among the student body and faculty. 

Harvard, Crenshaw said, “was notoriously white.” Nearly 20 years passed before Lani Guiner became the first woman of color granted tenure at Harvard Law School.

In law school Crenshaw was inspired by the case of Degraffenreid v General Motors, involving five Black women who in 1975 filed a lawsuit that claimed the car manufacturer engaged in “last hired-first fired” layoff policies that discriminated against  black women.

“I left Harvard, determined to figure out what was going on, that well-meaning people aren’t able to see,” Crenshaw said about the start of a scholarly journey that led to the development of intersectional theory: that Black women are discriminated against because of their race and their gender. She coined the term in a 1989 essay published by the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

At Duke, Crenshaw used as an example a brief video where a Black woman noted that a company may hire men of all colors on the factory floor, and white women in the office.

“So, on paper [the company] hires plenty of women,” and “men of color,” but if you’re a woman of color…well, then maybe they won't hire me. That’s intersectionality…And on top of that, if you’re trans or gay, or differently abled it’s compounded.”

Crenshaw holds academic appointments at the law schools at both UCLA and Columbia and is an acclaimed expert on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, along with race, racism and the law. She was recently named the most cited woman legal scholar in law.

The acclaimed scholar is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, a gender and racial justice legal think tank, and the founder and executive director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School.

Crenshaw told the Duke audience that there is a “fundamental crisis in education right now.”

“And it's abundantly clear that this is not simply about the next election,” she explained, later adding that the attacks pose “a generational threat.”

She said America is “still deeply racialized” even while right wing supporters complain about identity politics and extol a colorblind society.

“January 6 should tell us that we cannot save our democracy without speaking to its racist underbelly,” Crenshaw said. “We should never talk about the challenge to our democracy without linking it to efforts to rollback any notion of racial inclusion and democracy. Those two things have to be interwoven together.”

Crenshaw is widely known for her development of the #SayHerName campaign to address police brutality and violence against Black women, following the 2015 death of Sandra Bland. The 28-year-old Black woman found dead in a Texas jail cell after she was arrested during a traffic stop.

Last year, Crenshaw spearheaded a petition signed by thousands of scholars, artists, activists, educators and concerned people who oppose “censoring critical content in public and higher education.” What followed was a full day of action where opponents of banned books read prohibited literature online and at in-person gatherings.

“We thought it would be important to take that energy and really focus on one day, where everybody can see everyone else who’s calling this for the BS that it is,” Crenshaw said.

With the upcoming 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, Crenshaw wants to take a page out of the Civil Rights Movement playbook and launch Freedom Summer 2024 on May 3, when the Freedom to Learn Network, which opposes book bans, gender studies and attacks on anti-racist education, will participate in a series of activities “over the course of the summer leading up to [the] November 2024 [election],” she said near the end of her conversation.

Crenshaw said institutions may collapse under the weight of authoritarian repression by remaining silent or becoming ambivalent about the value of diversity.

“This is not a moment where we can say, ‘Oh, we’re not the people who are doing the woke stuff. We’re not the people who are doing the critical race [theory],’” she said. 

“But it’s not about the label. It’s about the content of the ideas. It’s about the vision of American society that's embedded in these ideas. So, no amount of running…is going to allow us to escape the grasp of those who want to suppress the entire effort to rethink America.”