share interactive transcript request transcript/captions live captions
|
MyPlaylist
[AUDIO LOGO] ANYA CORETTA ENGLISH: Good evening, everyone. Welcome. My name is Anya Coretta English, and I'm a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. I'm so happy that you're here tonight, and it is especially great to see so many familiar faces. Before we begin, please join me in acknowledging the Indigenous peoples of all of the lands that we are on today.
Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogohono, the Cayuga Nation. The Gayogohono are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogohono dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogohono people, past and present, to these lands and waters.
Now for a few logistics. For those in the room, there is an ADA accessible restroom over in this corner to your left. We are collecting questions for tonight's speaker online using a QR code. For those folks online, that information is on your screen. If you are in person, you received a card when you entered with a QR code and URL on it. You can scan the QR code or go to slido-- S-L-I-D-O-- .com-- and input the code in order to submit your question. We will try to answer as many questions as possible tonight.
Now I'd like to share a little bit about the impact of tonight's speaker on me. When I arrived at this institution four years ago, I would never have imagined the growth and development that I have experienced. I have found that the most rewarding aspect of Cornell, where I have felt the most inspired and affirmed, was in the community I have been a part of and helped cultivate.
As an educational institution, Cornell's mission is to foster academic growth, but it has also imparted to me tremendous knowledge about community and my own identity. In my role as programming and outreach coordinator at Cornell's Gender Equity Resource Center, my work centers around the program "No, You're Not Overreacting," which offers an inclusive and empowering environment for women of color through discussion, community building, and prioritization of joy.
When I started this program, I believed I was only offering others a much needed sanctuary. What I could not have anticipated is the fundamental lessons that I myself have learned-- that identity builds community, and, in community, there is tremendous power. As we now celebrate and reflect on 50 years of gender equity at Cornell, such teachings could not be more relevant.
Today, on behalf of the committee, I am excited to welcome you to 2024's Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King's lifelong efforts towards racial and economic justice have been fundamental in guiding my worldview. I even bear the honor of being named after Coretta Scott King. And I seek to embody the principles of their work in everything I do.
I am especially grateful to share the stage with Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cornell alumna and Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia. I remember, in my first semester of higher education, I found myself in a new environment, daunting at times, but also filled with many learning moments. Up to that point, as a Black woman, the discrimination I experienced could not be encapsulated by any one ideology or school of thought.
It was not until I learned Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework of intersectionality that I finally discovered the language to articulate my reality. For me, the framework was everything. It gave truth, reason, and materiality to my lived experiences. Kimberlé Crenshaw's work has been so important to me. And I hope you enjoy the profound wisdom and insight of her lecture this evening. Now it is my honor to introduce Dr. Marla Love, Robert W. and Elizabeth C. Staley Dean of Students.
[APPLAUSE]
MARLA LOVE: Good evening. It is a wonderful-- it's wonderful to share space with you all here in Sage Chapel and our extended community online via livestream. We appreciate your presence and look forward to our collective engagement with tonight's guest speaker. With planning led by Cornell faculty, staff, and students, and Ithaca community members, the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration brings together the campus, Ithaca, Tompkins County, and, now with livestream, an international community to make accessible the life and legacy of Dr. King for contemporary times.
Past speakers have included those who directly worked with Dr. King and shared in the work of civil rights activism. This lecture has been given by scholars, activists, journalists, and religious leaders whose work is informed by and represents a continuation of Dr. King's legacy. These speakers have highlighted the continuity between past and present, providing a critical examination of King's work and its relevancy for today's struggles for justice.
Cornell University has a special connection to Dr. King, who visited campus and spoke from the Sage Chapel pulpit in November of 1960. A plaque hangs next to the pulpit on my left to memorialize his presence and sermon.
Let us remember that Dr. King's message was for more than a day or a month set aside to celebrate Black history. Our hope through this annual event you will see that the beloved community King spoke of has yet to come and signs abound globally that we are still grappling with the social issues that King and others were amplifying in the 1960s. They're appearing in similar and new forms.
This year, we are celebrating 50 years of the Gender Equity Resource Center, formerly known as the Women's Resource Center. We look back at the past and invite the future as we reflect on progress, advocacy, dedication, and determination for gender equity.
Gender equity is not a singular or finished product. It is an ongoing, evolving mission that must examine multiple forms of exclusion. And who better than Kimberlé Crenshaw to map out the urgency and guide us tonight. May tonight reawaken Dr. King's still relevant call to attend to the disrepair of our structures.
So allow me to introduce our commemoration speaker, Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, class of 1981. Professor Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law Schools and founder and executive director of the African-American Policy Forum. She received her JD from Harvard, Master of Laws from University of Wisconsin, and her bachelor's from Cornell University.
A leading authority in the area of civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law, her work is foundational in two fields of study that have come to be known by terms she coined-- critical race theory and intersectionality. She is also known for raising awareness about police violence against Black women with #SayHerName.
Crenshaw serves on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science and on the board of the Sundance Institute. She has received achievement awards from Planned Parenthood, the National ERA Coalition, and the Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Association. She was voted one of the 10 most important thinkers in the world by Prospect magazine.
She received the 2021 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women's Section of the Association of American Law Schools. Most recently, Professor Crenshaw was named the recipient of the 2021 Association of American Law's Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and to the Legal Profession. She is a senior non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute and an inductee to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Political and Social Science.
Now more than ever, Crenshaw's work is relevant and necessary to understanding and addressing systems of oppression, and at a time when some are seeking to limit teaching about oppression, to defund DEI programs, and to shut down gender, race and ethnic studies departments within public education. Crenshaw's work recognizes that there can be no liberation without truth telling around past and present oppression. And she challenges us to recognize that working towards Dr. King's vision of beloved community requires advancing justice and civil rights at the intersection of race and gender. Please join me in welcoming Kimberlé Crenshaw.
[APPLAUSE]
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Well, thank you, Anya and Dr. Love, for that very warm introduction on a very chilly day here in Ithaca. And thank you to the entire Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Committee here at Cornell and in Ithaca for inviting me back home. It has been a full day, a wonderful day, and a day of some amazing surprises.
I was so happy to see Dean Turner. It truly was like coming home to see her. And to see my sorors of Delta Sigma Theta and a very special surprise that I was given by my home chapter. So in addition to all the wonderful good feelings one feels to be home, to have a very special hug from family, there's nothing like it. So thank you so much.
For so many reasons, it's such a special honor to be standing here to commemorate the man who stood there 64 years ago. It would be an unparalleled honor to do so at any place where Dr. King held forth, but to do so here at Cornell, an institution that was pivotal in creating the pathway for my own development and more broadly in the development of prisms to better understand this world in order to change it, this moment is heavy with meaning for me.
And it's even more urgent and meaningful to be here at my alma mater standing where Dr. King stood, speaking about the many legacies of democratic inclusion in this year of free speech at Cornell. As President Martha Pollack, invoking the words of the late Justice Cardozo, recently explained, quote, "Free expression is important because it is the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom." Allow me to say amen to that.
Somewhat eerily I find myself standing on the bones of Ezra Cornell, who famously said, in founding this place, that "This university's mission is to exist for any person and any study." Of course, Cornell was among the first of the elite institutions to take seriously the "any person, any study" mandate. From its inception, Cornell opened its doors to those who were traditionally marginalized and to others who were excluded from higher education. And like other institutions, Cornell struggled sometimes with itself to make those promises real.
I also stand here today just steps away from Willard Straight Hall where Black and Brown students, a generation before my time, expressed their grievances during a student takeover, a takeover where a courageous university president, James Perkins, sought to resolve the tension without recrimination, without repression and without bloodshed. President Perkins took a stand that secured Cornell's unique imprint not only on Africana studies and university life, but on the production of new knowledge and on the assurances of democracy in this country more broadly.
And yet-- and yet, on such an august occasion as this, and as symbolically meaningful as this invitation is to me, I find myself distraught, disappointed, and disillusioned. The mounting challenges we face in protecting Cornell's legacy and the many failures to transform these rituals and gestures into a vigorous defense of free thinking about anti-racism, about social justice, about academic freedom, feel, at times, almost too much to bear.
Those of us who are in the business of knowledge production now live in institutions that are under assault. We are holders of ideas that have been labeled too dangerous to be taught, too divisive to be uttered, too scandalous for our children to hear. Ideas, disciplines, and knowledge that were produced by opening up the gates to non-traditional students have been gentrified, distorted, and censored, all as part of an effort to return the center of gravity in this country to an earlier time, a time when speaking out about the legacies of American disempowerment was misframed as heretical, radical, and anti-American.
Today's political attacks on this new knowledge travels under the guise of attacking critical race theory. These attacks are not unprecedented. Indeed, as public enemy number one, Dr. King was surveilled, harassed, and ultimately killed for his insistence that the only path to a true multiracial democracy was through making good on the promises made by the Declaration of Independence and by our Constitution.
King's demand that our nation and people reckon with the scourge of racism in all its manifestations-- interpersonal, institutional, and structural-- is not some secret known only to scholars who are well versed in his work. Right there in Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, he preached that America lived in a state of social economic deficit and the time had come to cash the promissory note that for too long had been returned to us marked "insufficient funds."
Every year we commemorate Dr. King's vision, sacrifice and faith, as if by enacting those words alone, our nation is being made better. Given the reverence in which Dr. King is held, what then should we make of the fact that today, the very factions that sought to contain and discredit him, that labeled him the most significant threat to America, have risen again?
What shall we do in the face of a campaign against woke that has galvanized wealthy oligarchs, right-wing campaigns and dangerous extremists to demonize and suppress the visions of a truly integrated society that King fought and died for? What does it tell us that in the so-called "war against woke," that Dr. King's speeches, advocacy, positions are now censurable under laws banning so-called critical race theory or divisive concepts?
What must we make of the fact that Moms for Liberty and other so-called parents' rights groups armed with such anti-CRT legislation petitioned state governments to ban a children's book telling Dr. King's life story because it was, and I quote, "anti-American"? How do we think Dr. King would position himself relative to these so-called divisive concepts that 23 states have enacted?
What would he make of the ideas that were censured and banned from K through 12 and higher education classrooms in the name of eliminating wokeness, that 40% of the books banned were written by or featured primary characters that are people of color? This is despite the fact that only 5% of all fiction books published in the United States are by authors of color.
What would Dr. King say to us today if he had lived to see these laws depriving 22 million children across the country, half of all children in public schools, from learning about the conditions that inspired his "I Have a Dream" speech? What indeed would he have to say to all of this?
Well, I stand here today to share with you some good news. We don't have to guess what Dr. King would say, let alone what he would do if he were in our shoes. Facing eerily similar sieges in his own time, Dr. King made clear precisely where he'd cast his lot and precisely how he would talk back to the so-called allies, the moderates, the liberals, the others who rationalize a do nothing minimalist response to the rising twin tides of racism and fascism.
I submit to you that Dr. King was actually a critical race theorist before there was a name for it. In our current moment, Dr. King has been gentrified out of his own martyrdom, commandeered to wage war against his own legacy. We do not see the common threads that tie Dr. King's legacy and our present political reality together because too many stories that would connect them have not yet been told.
It would be impossible, in the brief time I have with you tonight, to fully paint a picture of what it is like to live a life through a prism shaped by Dr. King's true legacy, the one that has been nurtured for decades by the insights and the courage of legions of folks who've committed to speaking truth to power, folks who held forth here at Cornell University. Perhaps illuminating for students, however, is the story of how I became a critical race theorist, following his footsteps.
Tonight, I want to draw on my experiences as a child of race men and women in the 20th century, as a Cornell student, as a founder of critical race theory, and as a backtalker in the so-called war on woke. My overarching hope is that by the end of our journey, you take away the tools and language necessary to connect the dots between the continuing scourge of racism and related forms of injustice and why we must understand that the fight to preserve our democracy and the fight against suppression are one and the same. We cannot win one without the other.
So what I'm going to share with you tonight is some excerpts from a project that I'm working on now. It's called My Memoir.
[LAUGHTER]
It's called Notes From a Backtalker. Now, I will have to date myself to tell you the first story. I am among those, probably a few in this space, clearly an overwhelming minority, who were alive and sentient human beings when Martin Luther King walked this Earth.
A telephone call in the middle of dinner brought the news that would shatter our bullish investment in the idea that freedom was just around the corner. "Crenshaw residence," I remember mom singing into the phone, and then almost immediately she sharply sucked in her breath, like being hit by shrapnel. "Killed? How? When? Oh, my God, Walt, Dr. King was assassinated today in Memphis."
"Who's that," Dad demanded reaching for the receiver. "It's Dad," she said, shoving the phone into my father's hand. His father. My brother jumped up to turn on the radio. There were no TVs in the kitchen back then. So he turned to WHBC, our local station. We'd already missed the details of the shooting, but it was the shocking use of the past tense to speak of Dr. King that stabbed us in the heart.
Martin Luther King was 39 years old, was in Memphis to support the sanitation workers, had been a proponent of nonviolence, led the Montgomery bus boycott, was the father of four children. In the millisecond that it took for a bullet to rip into his skull, his story, his being, his future was made past, and with it, were the legion of hopes that were riding on his vision, his belief that a violently imposed racial order could be transformed by its opposite.
There were many people who were not at all sure of the capacity of this nation to see the humanity of those it had enslaved, skeptics who doubted whether there were any means by which these dreams could ever be realized. But if anyone could carry this message, convince people of its possibility, soften the shell of white supremacy that blinded those afflicted by it, it would be King himself.
There had been doubts, but there was also hope. For many there seemed no other way. And yet, even this messenger-- this messenger could not survive. Killing King killed a little piece of everyone who allowed themselves to believe in the possibility.
The radio commentator speculated in a hushed voice about what King's death would mean for the Civil Rights Movement. "Dr. King had given his life," he said, "not just to make Negroes better, but to make the country better. He is a martyr." I did not know that word-- "martyr."
It careened around my head trying to find its meaning in the context of my family's heartbreak, our mourning for someone we only knew through the television. Our sense that this was personal, that something was lost-- no, not lost, something had been taken. Something had been ripped away. Not from the world, but from us, from the we that was rising. Martyr, I learned, was something more than a body murdered. It was hope destroyed.
My dad was the one who had hoped. I saw how much that day. I'd never seen him cry, or even heard his voice break, or watch his shoulders fold forward with grief like he did that day. As his tears fell, he would just shake his head in wounded disbelief. Mom's tears were flowing, too, but somehow differently from dad's. Against all she knew, she dared to believe the man that J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, had called the most dangerous man in America, might actually live.
She had dared to believe that the sheer beauty of his oratory, his ability to capture the strivings of tens of millions of African-Americans, his calm and respectable demeanor might have been enough to save him. But mom's epitaph to MLK, repeated many times over the decades since, revealed her epiphany or perhaps rediscovery. A people underfoot rising up are dangerous, no matter how peaceful or spiritual they are, so long as remaining underfoot is a primary directive of the society in which they live.
I was overwhelmed lost in the sadness, the unfairness, the fear. That morning, it seemed I can hear the entire neighborhood crying. Massive grief erupted across the nation. Black people, who had placed so much hope in Dr. King's message of inclusion, of non-violence, and pursuit of our rightful place in the nation and in the world, were suddenly ripped out of space and time, transported to a special purgatory, a place of emotional and material misery in which the brightest hope had been snuffed out.
The scale of the crisis was not yet legible to the rest of America, but it was to us. In Canton, young Black activists directed schoolchildren to Jerusalem Baptist Church for a hastily organized memorial service. Crowded into pews, everyone was speechless when the activists asked if anyone had anything to say about Dr. King. No one moved. No one from high school, junior high school or grade school. The silence stretched on and on. Seemingly, everybody was waiting for somebody to say something and no one would.
By this time, my insides were spewing molten lava. It was simply unbearable that he could be taken like this so suddenly, so permanently was bad enough, but how could we allow ourselves to sit in silence in the face of it? Were we really going to say nothing, do nothing in the face of this? What was that word? Martyrdom?
The churning blew up, and before I thought better of it, I was on my feet. The entire church, from the pulpit to the balcony, was staring at a skinny, bespectacled third-grade girl. I knew what forced me to stand up-- that word, martyr. But once I jumped up and the emotion left me without words, I was silently panicking, tearing through the files in my head of the only public speaking I'd ever done-- children's Easter resuscitations, scratches of scripture spoken over dinner, phrases, sayings, random bits of anything. Nothing fit.
At last, I must have downloaded something I'd heard the night before because soon I heard words coming out of my mouth that were not mine, words exhorting everyone not to let his death be the end of our freedom struggle. We had to pick up where he left off. We had to continue to walk in his footsteps. They can't kill his dream for us, not if we don't let them. I sat down, shocked.
[LAUGHTER]
The nerves that should have showed up before I jumped to my feet found me once I remembered who and where I was. For the rest of the service, I sat in disbelief that I had dared to say anything. The telephone was the Twitter of that era. So news of my speech arrived at the Crenshaw house long before I did.
[LAUGHTER]
By the time I climbed the front steps and came in the front door, my parents were waiting with open arms. "Come here, my little firebrand,"s my mom said, cupping her head with her hands to give me a kiss on the forehead. "There she is," my dad said, emerging from the bedroom, eyes brimming with tears. My dad swung me up above his head and brought me down into an embrace so tight I thought he might break me.
I cannot say what forced me to my feet that day at Jerusalem Baptist Church. What I can tell you is that the refusal to yield to the forces that sought to silence Dr. King entered into my consciousness and never left. Dr. King lost his life for what he thought, for the possibilities that he imagined for our nation, for his refusal to accept any limits of what America possibility could be. It was up to us to ensure that he did not die in vain.
Later, I would learn just how critical Dr. King's critique of America's society was, setting forth precisely the ideas that would lead to his censoring under anti-woke laws today. If this manufactured panic that demands critical thinking about racism is to be expunged from curricula and libraries continues, Dr. King's legacy may never be taught in our schools.
King observed that the doctrine of white supremacy was entrenched as a structural part of our culture. In nearly two dozen states and thousands of school districts, this speech would be suppressed. His understanding of structural racism would contradict North Dakota's newly minted edict that racism cannot be taught as anything more than an individual's prejudice and bias. King's March on Washington speech, calling on the nation to address the debt created by centuries of uncompensated labor, flies directly in the face of Oklahoma's prohibition of any idea that current generations bear any responsibility for the actions of their ancestors.
One of the most poignant passages from Dr. King's letter from a Birmingham jail is his explanation to his fellow clergymen of the anguish King's children felt when they learned that they could not go to Funtown with the other little boys and girls because it is a white-only amusement park. Teaching that fact could, in a state like New Hampshire, get one censured or even cost them their job under the state's divisive concepts law if it was deemed to promote the notion that both conscious and unconscious bias are the cause of Funtown's historic segregation.
This is not hyperbole. Shortly after New Hampshire passed that law, a local chapter of Moms for Liberty put up a $500 bounty to catch those contravening this law. As state courts work through the ramifications of state bans on freedom to learn, more is at stake. Some governments are exploring whether a deeper understanding of Dr. King's wider frame, one that extends racial justice to its many intersections with class and imperialism, is also impermissibly divisive.
Dr. King's invitation to rise up for a better tomorrow inspired me throughout my adolescence, and, in fact, was a large part of what brought me here to Cornell, where my education, both formal and informal, shaped the thinking that led me to critical race theory, and, in turn, to intersectionality.
Story two. I arrived at Cornell University during the fall of 1978, almost a decade after the infamous 1969 Black student takeover of Willard Straight Hall. As a generational cohort, we were the grandchildren of the Straight Hall activists. They passed on the stories of the intense negotiations that created the programs that brought us here, that nurtured our intellect, that acknowledged our culture and our unique aspirations like a special birthright in this place.
The guide that opened the door to the rich and rewarding exploration of the Black experience in America for me was Africana Center's Founding Director, Dr. James Turner. It was Dr. Turner who popularized the term "Africana" to reflect the broad study of the African diaspora through a transdisciplinary lens that stretched from the social sciences to the humanities.
I made a beeline for his course, Black political thought, during my first semester here. Dr. Turner opened our first class thusly, "What is the purpose of Black political thought? Who is the subject of our thinking? What is the relationship between how we think about the Black condition and what actions do we take to address it?"
These were questions that at once seemed absolutely essential, obvious, compelling. And at the same time, I'd never been in a class that began by pressing us to think about the journey we were beginning in relation to the here and now lives that we were actually living. Before that challenge, I'd come to accept education was a show and tell exercise. Students are shown information in order to regurgitate it back to their teachers.
After years of kitchen table talk, though, at home, this course was right up my alley. Black political thought is not static, disembodied contemplation of abstract propositions, Dr. Turner taught us. It is dynamically and contextually grounded in the specific experiences of the African diaspora. Black political thought engages the key questions of how we've come to be and how we determine and shape our future.
The other lesson I learned here at Cornell was that, for the most part, the knowledge producing mission of this and other universities did not necessarily include the imperative to understand and address the conditions faced by those of us born behind the veil, as Du Bois might call it. Behind the veil is where my Black family and millions of others were born. Behind the veil was where our sense of upward trajectory began. Behind the veil was where we launched our rising, our going somewhere beyond where we had come.
To the extent that the lived realities of the people I knew were touched upon at all in my government courses, these conditions were often framed as just their features of American life. In my government classes, I was exposed almost daily to theories and stories and concepts that were textbook examples of precisely the ways that universities helped justify, defend, and rationalize inequality.
In traversing two distinct intellectual worlds, I was stretched between two irreconcilable projects-- one dedicated to dismantling the injustices of the status quo and the other focused on shoring them up. Learning to navigate this tension, to sit with and integrate contradiction into my intellectual journey was a critical skill that I honed while shuttling between the center of the university here on the quad and the margins way over there at Triphammer Road.
Looking back some 43 years later, I am grateful for the education I received that steeled me for the rest of my career. It was here at Cornell, rummaging through Africana studies library collections, that I first came across the work of Derrick Bell. I was coming across his casebook, Race, Racism and American Law, which opened the possibilities to a fundamentally exhilarating engagement with the relationship between race and law. It was one that I was eager to be a part of.
In the title pages of the casebook, Bell prominently placed a photo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two African-American Olympians who, upon winning gold and bronze in the 200-meter race at the 1968 games, raised their fists in an act of solidarity with Black freedom struggles around the world. Infamously, for this courageous expression of symbolic speech, their careers were ruined.
Bell's inclusion of this photo was meta speech. It was situated inside the project, not at its margins. What it said to a whole generation of us is that we are here to study law, just like Carlos and Smith were there to run the race, and we're going to do it well just, like Smith and Carlos did. We're going to learn the rules, but we're going to have something to say when it facilitates our mistreatment and naturalizes our marginality.
This stance, to my mind, was how legal education could serve the imperatives that were laid before us by Dr. King. Bell's casebook was tangible proof that, as Dr. Turner taught, education is not just the development and teaching of factual information, but it's also the primary means for imbuing a people with social values, with political beliefs and a specific cultural character.
So it was, with much excitement, that I matriculated to Harvard, eager to study under Derrick Bell. However, by the time I arrived at Harvard in 1981, Bell had left the building, frustrated at the slow pace of integration, in particular of the faculty. A respected civil rights attorney, he'd been the first tenured Black professor and it seemed perhaps his colleagues were satisfied that he might be the only one.
And women were similarly in short supply. Among the courses that disappeared from Harvard law's catalog with his departure was his specialized seminar in race, racism, and American law. It was an absence that we decided we were not going to take lying down.
As a first-year, I jumped at the chance to join upperclassmen as we met with the dean to query, who is going to teach this knowledge to a new generation of students, those seeking to understand the problem of American law and race, and what is to be done to integrate this faculty? To our utter astonishment, the dean replied simply, "What is so special about this course that you cannot gain it from constitutional law and perhaps a legal aid placement?"
The dean's response was unsettling. Was he actually asking us students to tell him what we would be taught in a course that we're asking to get taught?
[LAUGHTER]
I'd heard of the Socratic method, but how could we engage him--
[LAUGHTER]
--without exposure to the materials being examined? The dean's next move, in response to our expectation that he use this vacancy to recruit faculty of color-- Harvard only had Professor Bell and only one female faculty member-- was, again, to push back. He admonished us and said, "In fact, there are very few qualified candidates of color to teach here." And then he dropped the bombshell. "Wouldn't you prefer an excellent white candidate to a mediocre Black one?" The dean had said the hidden part out loud.
[LAUGHTER]
There weren't any diverse folks on the faculty because the pool was so shallow. And just to reinforce that view, the school went on to hire 10-- 10 white males that year. Harnessing Dr. King's inheritance of resistance and galvanized by the lessons learned here at Cornell, I helped organize what we called an alternative course, identifying talented scholars of color across the country who would come to teach a chapter from Race, Racism, and American Law.
We refused the law school's offer of a three-week mini-course on legal practice taught by two leading civil rights attorneys, neither of whom were interested in joining the law faculty, and only one of whom would have integrated the faculty if he had. Our decision was controversial, to say the least. We were framed in The New York Times and other national papers as "reverse racists." Even our elders saw us as ungrateful.
What was puzzling to us was how they all could miss what was happening in plain sight. The fact that hiring 10 white males was not viewed as a racial problem, but that protesting the failure to hire one person of color was viewed as a racial problem told us everything we needed to know about how colorblind ideology could function to rationalize generations of structural exclusion.
Merit, we were being told, was tied to the biographies of those who were admitted to the club in the midst of segregation, who thought about and wrote about law completely apart from its role in propping up generations of segregation, and who were nowhere in the vicinity when brilliant strategies were determined to dismantle segregation.
Flash forward a few years and the critical mass of students and faculty that gathered together for that alternative course, along with others who we met in speakeasies and other venues over the next three years, came together in the summer of 1989 for a workshop that I called "New Developments in Critical Race Theory." There had not been old developments. I just called it that.
[LAUGHTER]
By then I joined the faculty at UCLA, having learned in real time how effectively colorblindness could mask continuing dimensions of exclusion and how the law, positioned as a neutral referee, was far, far from that. Law, we had come to see, not only set the rules of the game, it shaped the relative power of the various contestants, building in advantage and disadvantage, sometimes cumulatively. A loss, for example, in what constituted unconstitutional discrimination would later ground another loss in what institutions could legitimately do to remedy that discrimination.
Critical race theory's analysis explains why policies that are supposedly colorblind still produce racially disparate outcomes, why closing our eyes to toxicity left in the walls of the buildings that we inherit does not stop the deadly harms to the people who live in those spaces.
As such, critical race theory is not so much a thing, it's a way of seeing and analyzing things, as a way of reading racial dynamics, a homegrown bottom-up toolkit derived from eyewitness accounts of the unwritten chapters of American history. And it is intersectional, a synthesis of many insights, experiences, and traditions born in the breach between American ideals and its lived realities.
It was in between the margins of these experiences, hidden and obscured, that I approached my next reckoning, that which led me to intersectionality. As I concluded my time at the law school, I grappled with patterns of exclusion that I saw in advocacy and in the movements that had been organized around race and around gender. So after completing my JD degree, I thought I would take some time to identify how some of the dynamics that I'd witnessed at Cornell and at Harvard and early in my life were framed and interpreted by the law.
And that is when I came across Emma DeGraffenreid, a Black woman who sued her employer for excluding her on the basis of race and gender. Her employer, General Motors, denied liability, pointing out that they did hire women for clerical work, and they did hire Black people for heavy manufacturing jobs. The problem, of course, was that the women they hired were white and the Black people they hired were men.
The court agreed with the defendant, that Emma couldn't prove her claim without combining race and gender discrimination, which the court refused to permit her to do because, accordingly, it would open up Pandora's box, essentially allowing her to have two bites at the apple, two swings at the bat. That was not, according to the court, what Congress intended, and effectively put Black women-- wait for it-- in a preferred position--
[LAUGHTER]
--relative to everybody else. If they couldn't get their story told through a male-centered frame of race discrimination or a white-centered frame of gender discrimination, then they didn't have a story to tell.
My question was a different one. Why wasn't it obvious that Emma should be able to make a claim of compound disadvantage if that was what she was experiencing and other employees were not? Why was it OK for African-American men and white women to be the subjects of race and gender discrimination even if their stories were different, but not OK for Black women to represent race and gender discrimination even though their stories were different, after all they were equally different from each other. Something was going on here.
So it was from this observation, drawn from employment discrimination cases like DeGraffenreid, and observed from my firsthand experiences navigating institutional and political tensions between racial justice and gender justice that intersectionality was born. I proposed it as a way of seeing the particular contours of how these employment regimes, segregated by race and by gender, impacted pitted Black women, while conventional legal analysis robbed them of their story.
Intersectionality was offered not as a grand theory but simply as a metaphor, a template to trace discriminatory policies to their interface with real people. Intersectionality became my way of visualizing what the courts didn't see, the combined and simultaneous effects of race and gender discrimination. In the metaphor, then, we have what amounts to a racist structure, and a sexist structure, and an institutional setup that channeled race in one way and gender in another.
Intersectionality was not, and to my mind, a shallow claim of identitarianism. It is instead a framework to name and challenge the ways that power is produced and sustained. It has clearly demonstrated, not just how Black women, but anyone, can be subject to multiple and overlapping discriminatory factors.
In the years since, I've spent much of my time learning and writing about intersectionality, how it's not just a problem faced by Black women, but by women of color, working class women, immigrant women, queer and trans women, differently-abled women, more broadly people who face multiply structured disadvantages. And intersectionality isn't just a problem in employment. It stretches to education, intimate partner violence, housing insecurity, punitive family policies, and, quite frankly, every economic and social issue I've studied since.
It wasn't just a problem in the US. Women in conflict zones, for example, experienced astronomical levels of sexual violence. Women in refugee camps are particularly vulnerable to assault, often because they have to travel long distances to collect water and the basics of life. This isn't just a refugee problem. It's not just a women's problem. It's a problem of women refugees. The problem isn't just the vulnerabilities that are intersectional but the inadequacies of solutions that are not.
So when, last year, the College Board attempted to excise intersectionality from its AP African-American studies curriculum because, in their words, it had been, quote, "compromised by disingenuous voices" and was, thus, no longer effective, having been, quote, "drained of its meaning and filled up with political rhetoric," I wanted to ask, drained of meaning for whom?
If all terms can be censored from a college-level curriculum simply because they have been politically contested, then the College Board ought to not include liberalism, populism, freedom culture, or even democracy in their curricula. When we acquiesce to eliminating words because opponents have tried to redefine or misconstrue their meaning, we allow power politics rather than the pursuit of knowledge to dictate the content of our courses.
This is why the anti-woke cabal wants to silence these ideas. Because ideas make a difference. They make a difference in the lives of the members of the #SayHerName Mothers Network, a group of women close to my heart and at the center of the #SayHerName Movement. These are women who have lost daughters, sisters, mothers to anti-Black police violence and then had to suffer what we call the loss of the loss. These concepts make a difference more broadly and widely, which is why there's an organized effort to take them away.
So in the face of this onslaught, I recognize that it is tempting to be pessimistic. It feels overwhelming, but our problem isn't just a problem of numbers. It's a problem of disillusionment. But remember, no one had more of a reason to give up than Dr. King. Yet, he kept talking back.
It is with this obligation, at the African-American Policy Forum, we are engaged in the urgent work of speaking back to power. We are organizing towards our second annual National Day of Action that brings stakeholders together across education to demonstrate against the silencing of our stories, thoughts and frameworks. Join us on May 3.
We are calling out all institutions committed to supposed liberal values to stand up in the defense of academic freedom, the gutting of racial, ethnic, and gender studies, and the crucial work of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. And at a time when the university is becoming an increasingly hostile site for students who have been historically marginalized, we are encouraging you to follow our work. Join us for a critical race theory summer school.
But let me be clear about one thing, backtalking is not a prescription for popularity--
[LAUGHTER]
--acceptance or respect. And sometimes one can be utterly shocked at how one's presumed allies fail to show up. And it can be tempting to give up. So here I want to end where I began, which is to acknowledge the magnificence of this gathering. Such moments inspire us, move us, challenge us to reach for a greater version of ourselves.
I take these moments as opportunities to digest and to challenge ourselves. And in doing so, I'll leave you with one last story about why we cannot afford to allow ourselves to be silenced. This one comes from the annals of being a Harvard Law student. And it's not a story I'm proud of, which is why I'm compelled to share it.
I was invited by one of the members of my all Black study group to be his guest at an all-white, formerly male drinking society. We'll call it the Fox Club.
[LAUGHTER]
As told to me and my friend, the club was a long time host to elite Harvard men, including former presidents, captains of industry, wealthy families where artifacts of wealth and privilege adorn the walls. While we welcomed the invitation, myself and my other friend were cautious and not entirely sure that a visit into this place, where even our host was an exception, was the ideal way to celebrate the end of exams.
But he and I eventually came to an agreement that we would go only under conditions that would not compromise our dignity. We told ourselves we weren't going to take any-- and I can't say the words since I'm standing here--
[LAUGHTER]
--but we were not going to take any of it from anyone at the Fox Club. And at the first sign of trouble, we were going to stand our ground. Duly bonded, my fellow invitee and I arrived at the venue and knocked at the front door to announce our arrival.
Our friend opened the door. But instead of clearing the path for our entry, sheepishly stepped outside, cutting off our entry into the club. Assuming we were now to be schooled in precisely what kind of stuff we weren't going to take, we assumed the trigger position. With arms crossed and brows furrowed, we got ready to rumble.
Our friend, sensing the escalation, entreated us to relax. "It's not what you think," he insured us. In evident haste to update the evening's plan, he told us a minor detail that he'd forgotten. "I forgot to tell you that Kim is going to have to come through the back door," he explained. "Women cannot enter from the front door."
And sure enough, my friend beside me promptly disarmed. This was not, apparently for him, what counted as stuff. It mattered not a whit to me what specific reason was that I couldn't walk through the front door. In my mind, whether it was because I was a woman or a Black person made no difference under the terms of our pact.
Yet, my erstwhile ally seemed all too agreeable to affix a sexist rider to our agreement. For him, stuff clearly applied to things that were going to affect us both in the same way. A racial exclusion of both of us, OK, that fit the bill. But a gender exclusion of me, not so much.
It was bad enough that this patriarchal interpretation of our pact extinguished any commitment that my friends had to me. What was plainly worse was they expected me to continue hewing to the reading of the agreement and fall in line as a second-class citizen of the Harvard patriarchy.
In honor of our Black friend's first opportunity to bring invited guests to the Fox Club, and apparently to the collective reputation of Black people everywhere, they bestowed upon me the responsibility not to make a scene. The indignity that I would experience as a woman was apparently nothing compared to our mandate to comport ourselves as proper guests.
I can't say that partying at the Fox Club that night was something that I could have missed. I stood down. I went around to the back door. I climbed the stairs to the Fox Club. In fact, for days, I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd turned on my heels and walked away.
As if to underscore the disgust of my foremothers for succumbing to such conditions, whatever I consumed that night in the Fox Club made me violently ill. My head was spinning. My churning stomach seemed to be urging me to leave a token of my indignity on the unstated interiors of the Fox Club game room. The war inside my body was barely containable, but I was determined to hold myself together to perform one last act of defiance that required every ounce of my physical ability to execute.
When it was finally time to leave, I spent my final moments in the Fox Club stomping loudly down the stairs and out the front door, slamming it so violently that I hoped it would break. Back in my dorm, my head held me hostage to the kind of perceptual tricks that make you cling to the bed for fear that without gravity you'll fall off. I prayed for relief, making a deal that I would never come close to imbibing what I consumed that night-- physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually.
On the mend, I swore never to go around to anyone's back door, whether urged by an ally, a mentor, a friend, a lover or even a president. From that moment on, I determined never to consciously accede to the distorted notion of what respectable racial solidarity requires, nor would I bend to any other form of unrequited allegiance, whether feminism, American nationalism, or any political expectation that demands fidelity in exchange for nothing.
Perhaps because my humiliation that night was amplified by physical illness, this resistance to asymmetrical solidarities is now fully reflexive. It is inalterable. I cannot bring myself to believe in or agitate for trickle down justice with its promise that some of us can wait for equal treatment while others experience inclusion. Rejecting this marginalization of Black women's expectations for communal support, I fully part ways with allies and travelers over the expulsion of women and other issues from our body politics.
It's why I believe Desiree Washington and did not join Harlem's homecoming for Mike Tyson. It's why I believe Anita Hill and did not join the chorus of African-Americans seeking God's intervention to silence her testimony about sexual harassment. It's why I critiqued the Million Man March and its masculinist project, declining to pack sandwiches for men when they marched to Washington DC. It is why I give voice to Black women who have been killed by police.
At least I do see it, trickle down politics and wait your turn rhetoric can't exist with a robust commitment to intersectionality. So the Fox Club, my last story, it has been my lodestar, the source of my determination to resist the appeal of going along to get along. It is the encounter that steers my thinking that disciplines my desire to be desired, to be part of the slumber party, the club, to be the belle of the ball. It reminds me not to ride or die for a politics that won't ride or die for me.
I write this with a determination that belies the fact that it's not always easy to stand outside and that to refuse to go around to the back door has had real consequences. And in fact, there have been times where it's hard to stand this ground.
I admit that sometimes when I walk by the many Fox Clubs in my mind's eye, I sometimes catch a glimpse of my wannabe self, disinterred, laughing, tossing her hair, batting light eyes and being toasted by people of all genders who, like her, accepted the invitation to come through the back door. I gaze into the window, and I feel a twinge, a momentary flight of indecision. And then I remember the drinks in there suck anyway.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SHURA GAT: What a gift. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Crenshaw. My name is Shura Gat, and I'm the Associate Dean of Students and Director of the Gender Equity Resource Center.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks, team. Before we move on to the next element of this gathering, I want to take the time to express gratitude to the wonderful Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture Committee and our many essential co-sponsors, all of whom are in the house tonight. The Centers for Student Equity, Empowerment and Belonging; The Office of Spirituality and Meaning-Making; The Gender Equity Resource Center; The Gender Justice Advocacy Coalition; The LGBT Resource Center; The Office of Academic Diversity Initiatives; The Greater Ithaca Activities Center--
[CHEERS]
--hey, yeah--
[APPLAUSE]
--The Asian and Asian-American Center; Black Student Empowerment--
[APPLAUSE]
--The Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures; The Cornell Law School; The College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; The John Henrik Clark Africana Library--
[APPLAUSE]
--and The Interfaith Council at Cornell. In addition, I would like to thank our ushers and the organizations they represent. Mu Gamma chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated--
[APPLAUSE]
--The Lambda Omicron chapter; Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority Incorporated; The Xi Phi chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Incorporated.
[APPLAUSE]
And the fraternities-- The Alpha chapter, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated; The Iota Phi chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Incorporated; and last, but certainly not least, the Kappa Xi chapter of the Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Incorporated.
[APPLAUSE]
That is a lot of people who wanted you here.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, so we are now transitioning to a conversational Q&A, which will be moderated by Dr. Riché Richardson, a professor of African-American literature in the Africana Studies and Research Center here at Cornell. Professor Richardson graduated from Spelman College with a major in English and minors in philosophy and women's studies and received her doctorate in American literature from the English Department at Duke University, along with a certificate in African and African-American studies.
Professor Richardson's other areas of interest include American literature, American studies, Black feminism, gender studies, Southern studies, cultural studies, and critical theory. In other words, Professor Richardson is the perfect person to moderate tonight's Q&A. Please join me in welcoming Professor Richardson to the conversation.
[APPLAUSE]
RICHÉ RICHARDSON: I'm so delighted and humbled to be here and to be a part of this conversation, and right now just so deeply inspired, enriched, and excited that we have Professor Crenshaw in the Cornell community once again. And it's been so wonderful to help welcome her home today.
I want to just begin by sharing a couple of reflections and then put just a couple of questions on the table and then open up more generally. My deepest thanks to the Gender Resource Center. It was just such an incredible honor and so humbling to participate in the teaching a few days ago. And it was really a nice warm-up. But I don't think anything could have prepared me for what we were experiencing right now. And to the planning committee and so many others who have helped to make this event possible.
In terms of just some of my general thoughts, most immediately, yesterday we had the privilege of commemorating what would have been the 93rd birthday of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison in, significantly, Toni Morrison Hall on this campus.
[APPLAUSE]
She, in an interview with Charlie Rose, famously described racism as a neurosis that so many people insistently fail to recognize, that no one recognizes for what it is. And I think that that is such a revealing insight. She, in her rich and extensive body of work, has given us so much valuable material to think with, and through, on topics such as race and racism.
And yet-- and still, and ironically enough, her work has been targeted for purposes of censorship in the same ways as critical race theory. And this is so frustrating because it hurts our democracy that this is happening. It doesn't help us at all. And the propaganda is by no means useful for anyone. And so it's really frustrating to see a climate like that.
And as we think about questions of intersectionality, another thing I think of as closer to home-- and I go back to the Tompkins County historian Carol Kamen's important book entitled Part and Apart, The Black Experience at Cornell, 1865 to 1945. I think that everyone at Cornell should read this book. And Oprah style, I would just, if I could, just pass them out--
[LAUGHTER]
--on campus because I think it's such a valuable resource. And in one section of it, she talks about how top administrators during the 1920s made the decision, made the choice to exclude Black women students from living in Sage Hall-- the dormitory Sage Hall on campus. So they didn't have the asset, say, of being athletes as, say, some of their Black male counterparts.
So we're placed at a distinct advantage. And we can think about what that would have meant in a climate like the one experienced in this region, especially during the winter. It meant that they couldn't access the library in the evening in order to do their work. And so their education was inevitably impacted.
And so even at an institution with a founding mission as visionary as Cornell's, these forms of excluding Black women were literally baked in and are a part of this institution's history. And so that's a very sobering thing.
And to go-- I guess it's just really inspiring to hear the memoir aspects of your presentation. And I think about aspects of my own life story as well, inevitably, as I read some of your work. And of course, from birth, very much one is interpolated as a race and gendered subject, but I began to feel that status very viscerally once I entered University of California as an assistant professor in 1998.
Professor Crenshaw is very much one of those ultimate University of California professors, in my mind. People like Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, June Jordan and so many others I think have set the bar very high for what counts as intellectualism. And so I've ever been inspired by all of their legacies and more.
But I was hired in 1998, and on the campus of the University of California at Davis. And so this is the home base for the famous University of California Regents versus Bakke, that case in 1978. So exactly 20 years later I was hired on the campus of the University of California Davis as an assistant professor.
And that year-- and there's a statistic on the book that attests to this that I think I've seen once, and I was told about again on my exit interview-- oh, you're the person-- the only person hired that year during that cycle who was Black and female. And yet, and still in a way, given some of the concerns about the shrinking numbers of Black faculty on campus and issues of representation, precisely because I was Black and a woman, it wasn't necessarily felt as being a racial hire or a hire that addressed issues of race among anti-racist activists. And so, again, intersectionality as a framework is very relevant to that.
Flash forward to coming here to Cornell and becoming a full professor in 2021 and being featured in a wonderful article--
[APPLAUSE]
--thank you. Thank you. It was a wonderful article in the Cornell Daily Sun entitled, significantly enough, "I don't want to be the only one." And it was in that moment that I learned that there were, at that point, eight Black women full professors on this campus, and I was one of them.
What's significant about these statistics, I think, too, is that women, according to the data-- the latest data I checked-- make up approximately 32% of full professors in this nation. And yet, even that data is deceptive when recognizing that of that proportion Black women only make up 2% of full professors. So our numbers are exponentially smaller than that. And this is also another reason why intersectionality is so important and so indispensable.
One of the questions I have then relates to the elimination of affirmative action at the national level by the Supreme Court. Because even statistics like that suggest that affirmative action even hasn't been adequate to give Black women access to institutions in some cases.
But given this climate that we're in, what does it portend for issues of intersectionality, for the work of intersectionality? I'm wondering how will or how should maybe practices shift? What are the best practices continuing forward for continuing to achieve goals that ensure that institutions are accountable, that there is adequate representation for a range of citizens?
And then I have this question about what we lose when Black women are excluded, when they're not embraced, especially considering that so many have been positioned at the forefront of activist movements, including the movements for voting rights in recent years. And so what do we lose when Black women are left out?
And when thinking of issues of Black women's precarity, such as the ones examined by the African-American Policy Forum and amplified through the mass movement #SayHerName, how does it help when the broader society gains literacy about Black women's precarity, whether we're talking about the violence of policing or domestic violence and other issues?
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: OK.
[LAUGHTER]
Let me start where you started, with Toni Morrison, partly because some part of the way in which her work sought to make Black women's stories more legible is one of the reasons why her frameworks, her stories and so many others is under so much pressure and is being censored.
One of the things that the African-American Policy Forum has been doing has been to pursue a unbanned book campaign. We've been going around the country, and we've been giving away the books that the censors are trying to--
[APPLAUSE]
--take away from people. And so we've gone on two tours-- the first one was 17 states, 23 cities-- with the objective of saying, look, this isn't just a headline or it's not just an abstraction. Concretely, this is what they are trying to take away from you. Concretely, this is the wisdom. Concretely, these are the legacies that people are trying to take away.
And Toni Morrison is such a powerful illustration that this is not about merit. This is not about any claim that the work isn't amazing work. This is one of the most decorated authors of the 20th century. Her work is being censored because what it is resonant with, what it seeks to do, the kinds of reflections that her stories project upon us as a nation.
One of the books that has been censored is The Bluest Eye. And The Bluest Eye, one of my favorite, favorite books, is a tragic story. And it is one that she explains why she went about telling this story. She wanted-- in the foreword, she said she wanted to elevate the notion of how racism and basically an intersectional set of injuries could destroy the soul of someone who was least likely, least able to be able to withstand it.
She wanted to mount a series of assaults on her so we could understand and see the toll of these isms. She said it wasn't a typical story. It wasn't a representative story. But it was a story that she was seeking to articulate so that we could understand how she saw these isms and what its impact is.
I think that when those stories are censored, we are censoring brilliance. We are censoring her ability to marshal this art form to lay out deep reflections on our society. And we are censoring the capacity for us to recognize our own context. Toni always wrote for us first. And getting rid of her is part of the erasure of our history, the erasure of us as subjects, the erasure of us as leaders.
So what's happening in literature, what's happening in fiction and nonfiction is also being amplified in what's happening to us in the political arena. So one of the things we were doing was we were going with Black Voters Matter. We were going to the same places and the same states that were trying to erase our right to vote, also erase our right to see ourselves. These two things are one and the same.
So you ask about Black women, and Black women among voters are among the most mobilized in the country, and among Black folks the most mobilized. As they go, so often does the rest of the community in terms of their voting. So what better way to manage contemporary disenfranchisement but to take away our voice, take away our vote, erase us as subjects of our own destiny.
So when you ask about then affirmative action-- here's the last thing I'll say on this round-- it is odd to be fighting for something that was a partial remedy in the first place. So first of all, we have to understand that diversity was always a copy of a copy of a copy. The real rationale for race conscious remediation is to address race conscious exclusions.
Affirmative action, as was practiced by University of California Davis, was designed to reflect the fact that education was largely underfinanced and segregated, that the profession was a profession that was racially exclusive, and the consequences of that is that communities of color that are still disproportionately serviced by people of their own race was being underserved.
These three objectives were taken out of any consideration by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said those are not good justifications for affirmative action. So what's really going on is the stuff that cannot be said. And what's offered instead is you can take race into account for the university's interest in maintaining a diverse student body. Basically, we get in to help them do their job better. We don't get in to help us do our job better in the communities in which we live. So that was always the limited conception of diversity that we were fighting for.
There were some people-- Luke Harris being one-- who was always saying diversity is a weak rationale. We need to go back and find the other justifications that are possible, which include if the criteria that are used to distribute opportunities to attend higher education can be proved to be discriminatory criteria, not apt to predict the likelihood of success of people of color, then using race conscious means to circumvent those is not reverse discrimination at all.
It's corrective. It is equitable admissions. That's always been there, but it's never a rationale that was used. Most people said, if it ain't broke, we ain't going to fix it, right?
And so now we're in this moment where this slender reed of diversity is no longer available, and we have to figure out whether the option that was always there to say these criteria are not equitable, they do not predict the likelihood of success, can't be used.
And I'll end with this one thing because it has to do with Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King scored in the bottom quintile in his verbal SATs.
[LAUGHTER]
The most gifted orator of the 20th century did not test well. If we were to use a test to decide who's going to be commemorated every year from now until eternity, whose words are going to be echoed across our culture, whose words do we hear on a loop, if we were to use a test to decide that, we would never get Martin Luther King coming out at the top. So think about all of the other talents, all of the other performances that we are missing when we believe that standardized tests are the major measure to determine who should have the opportunities that we all have here and who shouldn't.
[APPLAUSE]
SHURA GAT: I'm very sorry to say that that is all the time that we have.
KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW: Thank you.
SHURA GAT: Thank you both very much.
RICHÉ RICHARDSON: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
The Urgency of Intersectional Justice Monday, February 19, 7:00 pm, Sage Chapel
This year’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration will feature Cornell ’81 alumna Kimberlé Crenshaw, speaking on The Urgency of Intersectional Justice . A leading legal scholar and civil rights advocate, Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in establishing critical race theory and intersectionality, both terms she coined and frameworks that have been increasingly attacked, misunderstood, and even legislated against.
Now more than ever, Crenshaw’s work is relevant and necessary to understanding and addressing systems of oppression, and at a time when some are seeking to limit teaching about oppression, to defund DEI programs, and to shut down gender, race, and ethnic studies departments within public education. Crenshaw’s work recognizes there can be no liberation without truth-telling around past and present oppression, and she challenges us to recognize that working towards Dr. King’s vision of beloved community requires advancing justice and civil rights at the intersection of race and gender.
The 2024 Commemoration is part of the year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Women's Resource Center at Cornell, now newly renamed the Gender Equity Resource Center (or GenEq), and celebrates Kimberlé Crenshaw's lifelong efforts as a leading advocate, educator, and pioneer for gender justice. This year's Commemoration also highlights the intersectional work of the newly renamed Centers for Student Equity, Empowerment, and Belonging within the Office of the Dean of Students.
