-
I'd like to try something new.
-
Those of you who are able,
-
please stand up.
-
OK, so I'm going to name some names.
-
When you hear a name
that you don't recognize,
-
you can't tell me anything about them,
-
I'd like you to take a seat,
-
and stay seated.
-
The last person standing,
we're going to see what they know. OK?
-
(Laughter)
-
All right.
-
Eric Garner.
-
Mike Brown.
-
Tamir Rice.
-
Freddie Gray.
-
So those of you who are still standing,
-
I'd like you to turn around
and take a look.
-
I'd say half to most of the people
are still standing.
-
So let's continue.
-
Michelle Cusseaux.
-
Tanisha Anderson.
-
Aura Rosser.
-
Meagan Hockaday.
-
So if we look around again,
-
there are about four people
still standing,
-
and actually I'm not going
to put you on the spot.
-
I just say that to encourage transparency,
so you can be seated.
-
(Laughter)
-
So those of you who recognized
the first group of names know
-
that these were African-Americans
who have been killed by the police
-
over the last two and a half years.
-
What you may not know
-
is that the other list
is also African-Americans
-
who have been killed
within the last two years.
-
Only one thing distinguishes
the names that you know
-
from the names that you don't know:
-
gender.
-
So let me first let you know
that there's nothing at all distinct
-
about this audience
-
that explains the pattern of recognition
that we've just seen.
-
I've done this exercise
dozens of times around the country.
-
I've done it to women's
rights organizations.
-
I've done it with civil rights groups.
-
I've done it with professors.
I've done it with students.
-
I've done it with psychologists.
I've done it with sociologists.
-
I've done it even with
progressive members of Congress.
-
And everywhere, the awareness
of the level of police violence
-
that black women experience
-
is exceedingly low.
-
Now, it is surprising, isn't it,
that this would be the case.
-
I mean, there are two issues
involved here.
-
There's police violence
against African-Americans,
-
and there's violence against women,
-
two issues that have been
talked about a lot lately.
-
But when we think about
who is implicated by these problems,
-
when we think about
who is victimized by these problems,
-
the names of these black women
never come to mind.
-
Now, communications experts tell us
-
that when facts do not fit
with the available frames,
-
people have a difficult time
incorporating new facts
-
into their way of thinking
about a problem.
-
These women's names
have slipped through our consciousness
-
because there are no frames
for us to see them,
-
no frames for us to remember them,
-
no frames for us to hold them.
-
As a consequence,
-
reporters don't lead with them,
-
policymakers don't think about them,
-
and politicians aren't encouraged
or demanded that they speak to them.
-
Now, you might ask,
-
why does a frame matter?
-
I mean, after all,
-
an issue that affects black people
and an issue that affects women,
-
wouldn't that necessarily include
black people who are women
-
and women who are black people?
-
Well, the simple answer is that this is
a trickle-down approach to social justice,
-
and many times it just doesn't work.
-
Without frames that allow us to see
-
how social problems impact
all the members of a targeted group,
-
many will fall through the cracks
of our movements,
-
left to suffer in virtual isolation.
-
But it doesn't have to be this way.
-
Many years ago, I began to use
the term "intersectionality"
-
to deal with the fact
that many of our social justice problems
-
like racism and sexism
-
are often overlapping,
-
creating multiple levels
of social injustice.
-
Now, the experience
that gave rise to intersectionality
-
was my chance encounter
with a woman named Emma DeGraffenreid.
-
Emma DeGraffenreid
was an African-American woman,
-
a working wife, and a mother.
-
I actually read about Emma's story
from the pages of a legal opinion
-
written by a judge
who had dismissed Emma's claim
-
of race and gender discrimination
-
against a local car manufacturing plant.
-
Emma, like so many African-American women,
-
sought better employment
for her family and for others.
-
She wanted to create a better life
for her children and for her family.
-
But she applied for a job,
-
and she was not hired,
-
and she believed that she was not hired
because she was a black woman.
-
Now, the judge in question
dismissed Emma's suit,
-
and the argument
for dismissing the suit was
-
that the employer
did hire African-Americans
-
and the employer hired women.
-
The real problem, though, that the judge
was not willing to acknowledge
-
was what Emma was actually trying to say,
-
that the African-Americans
that were hired,
-
usually for industrial jobs,
maintenance jobs, were all men,
-
and the women that were hired,
-
usually for secretarial
or front-office work,
-
were all white.
-
Only if the court was able to see
how these policies came together
-
would he be able to see
the double discrimination
-
that Emma DeGraffenreid was facing.
-
But the court refused to allow Emma
to put two causes of action together
-
to tell her story
-
because he believed that,
by allowing her to do that,
-
she would be able
to have preferential treatment.
-
She would have an advantage
by having two swings at the bat,
-
when African-American men and white women
only had one swing at the bat.
-
But of course, neither
African-American men or white women
-
needed to combine a race
and gender discrimination claim
-
to tell the story of the discrimination
they were experiencing.
-
Why wasn't the real unfairness
-
law's refusal to protect
African-American women
-
simply because their experiences
weren't exactly the same
-
as white women and African-American men?
-
Rather than broadening the frame
to include African-American women,
-
the court simply tossed their case
completely out of court.
-
Now, as a student
of antidiscrimination law,
-
as a feminist,
-
as an antiracist,
-
I was struck by this case.
-
It felt to me like injustice squared.
-
So first of all,
-
black women weren't allowed
to work at the plant.
-
Second of all, the court
doubled down on this exclusion
-
by making it legally inconsequential.
-
And to boot, there was
no name for this problem.
-
And we all know that,
where there's no name for a problem,
-
you can't see a problem,
-
and when you can't see a problem,
you pretty much can't solve it.
-
Many years later, I had come to recognize
-
that the problem that Emma was facing
was a framing problem.
-
The frame that the court was using
-
to see gender discrimination
or to see race discrimination
-
was partial and it was distorting.
-
For me, the challenge that I faced was
-
trying to figure out whether
there was an alternative narrative,
-
a prism that would allow us
to see Emma's dilemma,
-
a prism that would allow us
to rescue her from the cracks in the law,
-
that would allow judges to see her story.
-
So it occurred to me,
-
maybe a simple analogy to an intersection
-
might allow judges
to better see Emma's dilemma.
-
So if we think about this intersection,
the roads to the intersection would be
-
the way that the workforce
was structured by race and by gender,
-
and then the traffic in those roads
would be the hiring policies
-
and the other practices
that ran through those roads.
-
Now, because Emma
was both black and female,
-
she was positioned precisely
where those roads overlapped,
-
experiencing the simultaneous impact
-
of the company's gender and race traffic.
-
The law -- the law is
like that ambulance that shows up
-
and is ready to treat Emma
only if it can be shown
-
that she was harmed
on the race road or on the gender road
-
but not where those roads intersected.
-
So what do you call
being impacted by multiple forces
-
and then abandoned to fend for yourself?
-
Intersectionality seemed to do it for me.
-
I would go on to learn
that African-American women,
-
like other women of color,
-
like other socially marginalized people
all over the world,
-
were facing all kinds
of dilemmas and challenges
-
as a consequence of intersectionality,
-
intersections of race and gender,
-
of heterosexism, transphobia,
xenophobia, ablism,
-
all of these social dynamics come together
-
and create challenges
that are sometimes quite unique.
-
But in the same way
-
that intersectionality
-
raised our awareness to the way
that black women live their lives,
-
it also exposes the tragic circumstances
-
under which African-American women die.
-
Police violence against black women
-
is very real.
-
The level of violence
that black women face
-
is such that it's not surprising
-
that some of them do not survive
their encounters with police.
-
Black girls as young as seven,
-
great grandmothers as old as 95
-
have been killed by the police.
-
They've been killed in their living rooms,
-
in their bedrooms.
-
They've been killed in their cars.
-
They've been killed on the street.
-
They've been killed
in front of their parents
-
and they've been killed
in front of their children.
-
They have been shot to death.
-
They have been stomped to death.
-
They have been suffocated to death.
-
They have been manhandled to death.
-
They have been tasered to death.
-
They've been killed
when they've called for help.
-
They've been killed when they were alone,
-
and they've been killed
when they were with others.
-
They've been killed shopping while black,
-
driving while black,
-
having a mental disability while black,
-
having a domestic disturbance while black.
-
They've even been killed
being homeless while black.
-
They've been killed
talking on the cell phone,
-
laughing with friends,
-
sitting in a car reported as stolen,
-
and making a U-turn
in front of the White House
-
with an infant strapped
in the backseat of the car.
-
Why don't we know these stories?
-
Why is it that their lost lives
-
don't generate the same amount
of media attention and communal outcry
-
as the lost lives
of their fallen brothers?
-
It's time for a change.
-
So what can we do?
-
In 2014, the African-American
Policy Forum began to demand
-
that we "say her name"
-
at rallies, at protests,
-
at conferences, at meetings,
-
anywhere and everywhere
-
that state violence against black bodies
is being discussed.
-
But saying her name is not enough.
-
We have to be willing to do more.
-
We have to be willing to bear witness,
-
to bear witness
to the often painful realities
-
that we would just rather not confront,
-
the everyday violence and humiliation
that many black women have had to face,
-
black women across color,
-
age, gender expression,
-
sexuality, and ability.
-
So we have the opportunity right now --
-
bearing in mind that some of the images
that I'm about to share with you
-
may be triggering for some --
-
to collectively bear witness
to some of this violence.
-
We're going to hear the voice
of the phenomenal Abby Dobson,
-
and as we sit with these women,
-
some who have experienced violence
and some who have not survived them,
-
we have an opportunity
-
to reverse what happened
at the beginning of this talk,
-
when we could not stand for these women
-
because we did not know their names.
-
So at the end of this clip,
there's going to be a roll call.
-
Several black women's names will come up.
-
I'd like those of you who are able
to join us in saying these names
-
as loud as you can,
-
randomly, disorderly.
-
Let's create a cacophony of sound
-
to represent our intention
-
to hold these women up,
-
to sit with them,
-
to bear witness to them,
-
to bring them into the light.
-
(Song) Abby Dobson: Say,
-
say her name.
-
Say,
-
say her name.
-
(Audience) Shelly!
-
(Audience) Kayla!
-
(Song) Oh,
-
say her name.
-
(Audience shouting out the names)
-
Say, say,
-
say her name.
-
Say her name.
-
For all the names
-
I'll never know,
-
say her name.
-
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Aiyanna Stanley Jones, Janisha Fonville,
-
Kathryn Johnston, Kayla Moore,
-
Michelle Cusseaux, Rekia Boyd,
-
Shelly Frey, Tarika, Yvette Smith.
-
(Song) Say her name.
-
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
So I said at the beginning,
-
if we can't see a problem,
-
we can't fix a problem.
-
Together, we've come together
to bear witness
-
to these women's lost lives,
-
but the time now is to move
-
from mourning and grief
-
to action and transformation.
-
This is something that we can do.
-
It's up to us.
-
Thank you for joining us.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)