KIMBERLE CRENSHAW ON RACE AS A VERB AND THE UPSIDE OF IDENTITY POLITICS

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In her journal article Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color, Kimberle Crenshaw treats identity politics as a process that brings people together based on a shared aspect of their identity.

Crenshaw applauds identity politics for bringing African Americans (and other non-white people), gays and lesbians, and other oppressed groups together in community and progress.  

 However, Crenshaw also points out that frequently groups come together based on a shared political identity but then fail to examine differences among themselves within their own group:

"The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend differences, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences." Crenshaw argues that when society thinks "black", they think black male, and when society thinks feminism, they think white woman.

When considering black women, at least two aspects of their identity are the subject of oppression: their race and their sex. Crenshaw proposes instead that identity politics are useful but that we must be aware of intersectionality and the role it plays in identity politics.

Nira Yuval-Davis supports Crenshaw's critiques in Intersectionality and Feminist Politics and explains that "Identities are individual and collective narratives that answer the question 'who am/are I/we?" 

 In her journal article  Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color, Crenshaw provides the example of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy to expand on her point.

Anita Hill came forward and accused Supreme Court Justice Nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; Clarence Thomas would be the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court. Crenshaw argues that when Anita Hill came forward she was deemed anti-black in the movement against racism, and though she came forward on the feminist issue of sexual harassment, she was excluded because when considering feminism, it is the narrative of white middle-class women that prevails.^[ 

Crenshaw concludes that acknowledging intersecting categories when groups unite on the basis of identity politics is better than ignoring categories altogether.^[8]

Read More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics

KIMBERLE CRENSHAW on RACE & IDENTITY POLITICS 

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