Have We Missed The Message? with Ta-Nehisi Coates | What Now? with Trevor Noah Podcast
Bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates joins myself and Christiana to discuss his new book about how the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t, shape our realities. We also unpack the jaw-dropping CBS interview that followed the book’s release, and our elusive search as a people to see the humanity in others. If you haven't already....
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPbD9PZ5FP4
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel’s apartheid:
“We need more Palestinians telling the story”
“When you see segregation. I don't need more time to understand what it is.” Award-winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates joins ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ to discuss his latest book’s focus on Palestine, and the reception it has received from the mainstream media – including a shocking interview on CBS. In this exclusive interview, Coates discusses topics for the first time since the start of his book tour – including his view of President Biden’s Zionism, and his advice to Vice President Kamala Harris on arms sales to Israel. His new book, The Message, explores how mainstream narratives shape and sometimes distort our experience. To write the book, Coates traveled to Senegal, South Carolina, and the occupied West Bank.
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Kimberlé Crenshaw Awarded W.E.B Du Bois Medal from the Hutchins Center at Harvard
On October 1, 2024 Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the Promise Institute Professor at UCLA Law School received the prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. The award recognizes individuals for their groundbreaking contributions to African American history, studies and culture.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEX1vhW22qE
LL.M., University of Wisconsin, 1985
J.D., Harvard Law School, 1984
B.A., Cornell University, 1981
Constitutional Law
Civil Rights
Critical Race Theory
Intersectionality
Feminism and Law
Dear Friends,
AAPF congratulates Co-Founder and Executive Director Kimberlé Crenshaw for receiving the W.E.B Du Bois Medal presented by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Crenshaw was one of eight recipients this year alongside filmmaker Spike Lee, rapper Ice T, Emmy-award winning actor LeVar Burton, former Harvard women’s basketball coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, Studio Museum Director Thelma Golden, entrepreneur and philanthropist Strive Masiyiwa, and Colombia Vice President Francia Márquez Mina!
The W.E.B Du Bois Medal is awarded to people who have made significant contributions to African and African American culture. This year’s cohort joins past honorees such as Muhammed Ali, Harry Belafonte, and Laverne Cox. You can watch the ceremony here!
Photo credit: Photograph by Melissa Blackall
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Kimberlé Crenshaw J.D. Harvard; L.L.M. University of Wisconsin; B.A. Cornell University) is founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. She is also Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, and a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. Her 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” has traveled globally and 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, 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. In partnership with the Aspen Roundtable for Community Change, Crenshaw facilitated workshops on racial equity for hundreds of community leaders and organizations throughout the country. 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. 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.
Twice awarded Professor of the Year at UCLA Law School, Crenshaw received the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award presented by the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, and the ACLU Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellowship from 2005-07. Crenshaw has received the Fulbright Distinguished Chair for Latin America, the Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship, and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2009 and a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2010. Currently, Crenshaw is the Faculty Director of the Critical Race Studies program at UCLA Law School.
https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/kimberle-w-crenshaw
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. In addition to her position at Columbia Law School, she is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in critical race theory and in “intersectionality,” a term she coined to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice. Her studies, writing, and activism have identified key issues in the perpetuation of inequality, including the “school to prison pipeline” for African American children and the criminalization of behavior among Black teenage girls. Through the Columbia Law School African American Policy Forum (AAPF), which she co-founded, Crenshaw co-authored (with Andrea Ritchie) Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, which documented and drew attention to the killing of Black women and girls by police. Crenshaw and AAPF subsequently launched the #SayHerName campaign to call attention to police violence against Black women and girls.
Crenshaw is a sought-after speaker and conducts workshops and trainings. She is also the co-author of Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. Her writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review. She is a founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory workshop and co-editor of Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. In 1981, she assisted on the legal team of Anita Hill during her testimony at the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Crenshaw writes regularly for The New Republic, The Nation, and Ms. and provides commentary for media outlets, including MSNBC and NPR, and hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters! In addition to frequent speaking engagements, training sessions, and town halls, Crenshaw has facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. She serves on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science.
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work on intersectionality was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. She authored the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism in 2001, 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.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born May 5, 1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.[1]
Crenshaw is known for introducing and developing intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.[2][3] Her work further expands to include intersectional feminism, which is a sub-category related to intersectional theory. Intersectional feminism examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face due to their ethnicity, sexuality, and economic background.[4]
Crenshaw was born in Canton, Ohio, on May 5, 1959,[5] to parents Marian and Walter Clarence Crenshaw Jr.[6] From a young age, Crenshaw's parents encouraged her to discuss "interesting things" that she "observed in the world that day". This early training would later become the basis of her career choices later in life.[7]
Crenshaw attended Canton McKinley High School. In 1981, she received a bachelor's degree in government and Africana studies from Cornell University,[8] where she was a member of the Quill and Dagger senior Honors' Society.[9][10] She received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984.[11] In 1985, she received an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she was a William H. Hastie Fellow[12] and law clerk to Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Shirley Abrahamson.[10][13][14]
After completing her LL.M., Crenshaw joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law in 1986. She is a founder of the field of critical race theory and a lecturer on civil rights, critical race studies, and constitutional law.[8] At UCLA School of Law, as of 2017, she teaches four classes, Advanced Critical Race Theory, Civil Rights, Intersectional Perspectives on Race, Gender and the Criminalization of Women & Girls, and Race, Law and Representation.[15]
In 1991, Crenshaw assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill at the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.[16] In both 1991 and 1994, she was elected professor of the year by matriculating students.[17] In 1995, Crenshaw was appointed full professor at Columbia Law School, where she is the founder and director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, established in 2011.[17][18] At Columbia Law School, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw's courses include an intersectionalities workshop and an intersectionalities workshop centered on civil rights.[19]
In 1996, Crenshaw became the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), a think tank focused on "dismantling structural inequality" and "advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of all human rights, both in the U.S. and internationally."[20][21] Its mission is to build bridges between scholarly research and public discourse in addressing inequality and discrimination. Crenshaw has been awarded the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil, and in 2008, she was awarded an in-residence fellowship at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford.[19]
In 2001, Crenshaw wrote the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nations World Conference on Racism, helped to facilitate the addition of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration, served as a member of the National Science Foundation's Committee to Research Violence Against Women and the National Research Council panel on Research on Violence Against Women. Crenshaw was a member of the Domestic Strategy Group at the Aspen Institute from 1992 to 1995,[22] the Women's Media Initiative,[23] and was a regular commentator on NPR's The Tavis Smiley Show.[24]
In 2020, Crenshaw received an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven.[25] She has authored several books and articles and continues to publish.[26][27] Crenshaw's book with Luke Charles Harris & George Lipsitz, The Race Track: How the Myth of Equal Opportunity Defeats Racial Justice, is scheduled for publication December 2025.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Kimberlé Crenshaw - On Intersectionality - keynote - WOW 2016: Southbank Centre[28] |
In 1989, Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in her essay "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" as a way to help explain the oppression of African-American women.[29][30] The idea of intersectionality existed long before Crenshaw coined the term but was not widely recognized until Crenshaw's work. Black feminist trailblazers like Sojourner Truth in her 1851 speech "Ain't I a Woman?" and Anna Julia Cooper in her 1892 essay "The Colored Woman's Office" exemplified the ideas of intersectionality before intersectionality came to be.[31][32][33] Crenshaw's inspiration for the theory started while she was still in college at Cornell University when she realized that the gender aspect of race was extremely underdeveloped.[2]
Crenshaw's focus on intersectionality is how the law responds to issues that include gender and race discrimination. The particular challenge in law is that anti-discrimination laws look at gender and race separately. Consequently, African-American women and other women of color who experience overlapping forms of discrimination are left with no justice.[2] Anti-discrimination laws and the justice system's attempt to remedy discrimination are limited and operate on a singular axis, only accounting for one identity at a time. A complete and understandable definition has not been written in the law; therefore, when the issues of intersectionality are presented in a court of law, if one form of discrimination cannot be proved without the other, then there is no law broken.[34] The law defines discrimination as unfair treatment based on a certain identity.[35][36] When enforcing the law, justice goes by the definition, and if discrimination cannot be proven based on a single identity, such as sex, then no crime has been committed.[37]
Crenshaw has referred to DeGraffenreid v. General Motors in writing, interviews, and lectures. In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors,[38] a group of African-American women argued they received compound discrimination, excluding them from employment opportunities. They contended that although women were eligible for office and secretarial jobs, such positions were only offered to white women, barring African-American women from seeking employment in the company. The courts weighed the allegations of race and gender discrimination separately, finding that the employment of African-American male factory workers disproved racial discrimination, and the employment of white female office workers disproved gender discrimination. Accordingly, the court declined to consider compound discrimination and dismissed the case.[2]
Crenshaw also discussed the theory of intersectionality in a TED Talk in October 2016.[40] Additionally, Crenshaw delivered a keynote speech at the Women of the World festival at the Southbank Centre in London, England, in 2016.[41] She spoke on women of color's unique challenges in the struggle for gender equality, racial justice and well-being.[10] In her 2016 TED Talk and keynote speech, she discussed a key challenge women of color face: police brutality. She highlighted the #SayHerName campaign aimed at uplifting the stories of black women killed by police.[42] The focus on the victimization of Black women in the say her name movement is dependent on the theory of intersectionality which, Crenshaw describes, "It's like a lazy Susan - you can subject race, sexuality, transgender identity or class to a feminist critique through intersectionality."[43]
Since the 2010s, Crenshaw has spoken out against misinterpretations of intersectionality, saying that some have wrongfully characterized it as a blanket term for "complicated" problems, "identity politics on steroids," or "a mechanism to turn white men into new pariahs."[44] Instead, Crenshaw characterizes intersectionality as,
"a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigration status. What's often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just a sum of its parts."[45]
Crenshaw is known for establishing the concept of intersectionality, which examines how race, class, gender, and other characteristics overlap and compound to explain systemic discrimination and inequality in society.[52] Crenshaw has served as a leader and activist on civil rights, race, intersectionality, and the law throughout United States and globally. Crenshaw's work on intersectionality was influential in drafting the equality clause in the Constitution of South Africa.[53] In 2001, Crenshaw wrote a paper on Race and Gender discrimination for the United Nation's World Conference on Racism which was leading in creating policy that benefiting minority groups globally. Additionally, Crenshaw advocated for the inclusion of gender in the WCAR conference.[26][53]
Since the 2010s, Crenshaw has advocated for the #SayHerName movement. She co-authored (with Andrea Ritchie) Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, documenting and drawing attention to Black women victims of police brutality and anti-Black violence in the United States.[54] Additionally, Crenshaw attended the Women of the World festival, which took place from 8–13 March 2016 at the Southbank Centre in London,[41] where she delivered a keynote speech on the unique challenges facing women of color, a key challenge being police brutality against Black women. She promoted the #SayHerName campaign, aimed at uplifting the stories of Black women killed by the police.[42][10]
In 2017, Crenshaw gave an hour-long lecture to a maximum-capacity crowd of attendees at Rapaporte Treasure Hall at Brandeis University.[55] She explained the role intersectionality plays in modern-day society.[56] After a three-day celebration of her work, University President Ron Liebowitz presented Crenshaw with the Toby Gittler award at a ceremony following the lecture.[57] That same year, Crenshaw was invited to moderate a Sexual Harassment Panel hosted by Women in Animation and The Animation Guild, Local 839. Crenshaw discussed the history of harassment in the workplace and transitioned the discussion to how it plays a role in today's work environments. The other panelists with Crenshaw agreed that there had been many protective measures placed to combat sexual harassment in the workplace. However, many issues remain to be resolved for a complete settlement of the problem at hand.[58]
In 2021, Crenshaw was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for her innovative work and accomplishments in pioneering intersectionality, civil rights, critical race theory, and the law.[59]
