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Speaker 1: up on the Getting Even show page in Apple Podcasts
Speaker 1: or at Pushkin dot Fm. Just like you cross intersections
Speaker 1: and there's traffic moving north and south and east and west,
Speaker 1: black women have been impacted by the combination of race
Speaker 1: traffic gender traffic. So that's where intersectionality came from. That's
Speaker 1: legal scholar and professor Kimberly Crenshaw. When she introduced the
Speaker 1: concept of intersectionality in the late nineteen eighties, Crenshaw was
Speaker 1: underlining the ways that race and gender discrimination converge. As
Speaker 1: a student, she saw how laws that address race and
Speaker 1: gender separately failed to deliver justice to those at the intersections.
Speaker 1: Just an attempt to help lawyers see things that they
Speaker 1: apparently were having a hard time sin. Intersectionality found its
Speaker 1: way into the Oxford English Dictionary in twenty fifteen and
Speaker 1: became widely used in discussions about the Women's March and
Speaker 1: the Me Too movement. But intersectionality isn't the only phrase
Speaker 1: that Timberly Crenshaw has coined. Crenshaw is one of the
Speaker 1: handful of legal scholars who originated and developed critical race theory.
Speaker 1: In Layman's terms, I would describe it as the study
Speaker 1: of how law consistently supports institutionalized forms of racial inequality.
Speaker 1: Like intersectionality, critical race theory was originally developed to unpack
Speaker 1: issues of identity and status in our justice system, and
Speaker 1: like intersectionality, critical race theory has become a household phrase.
Speaker 1: It's also become a cornerstone for a national attack on education.
Speaker 1: It's used to shut down any additions to the curriculum
Speaker 1: taught in American public schools which would more accurately reflect
Speaker 1: our nation's history. I'm Anita Hill. This is getting even
Speaker 1: my podcast about equality and what it takes to get there.
Speaker 1: I'll be speaking with people who are improving our imperfect world,
Speaker 1: people who took risks and broke the rules. In this episode,
Speaker 1: I'm talking with Kimberly Crenshaw about critical race theory. Crenshaw
Speaker 1: and I have known each other since the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: I think people need to know that. At the time
Speaker 1: and need to there was just a handful of black
Speaker 1: women law professors. We all either knew each other or
Speaker 1: new of each other. We could all get in a
Speaker 1: minivan if we had a lunch meeting. You know, we
Speaker 1: just need one table, right, Yes, Crenshaw and I both
Speaker 1: found that our formal education lack teaching about race, racism,
Speaker 1: and the law. For Crenshaw, that meant creating the theories
Speaker 1: that we're missing writing them herself. You know, funny, you
Speaker 1: should say that my mic is sitting here on the
Speaker 1: Critical Race Theory Book as we speak. It's the foundation
Speaker 1: of everything, right, the critic It's called the Red Book now,
Speaker 1: the Critical Race Theory the key writings that formed the
Speaker 1: movement effectively. If we want to understand, for example, why
Speaker 1: we still have housing segregation that in some ways is
Speaker 1: as significant ablight upon our society as it was fifty
Speaker 1: years ago, we have to look at how legally segregated
Speaker 1: neighborhoods were created and sustained. If we want to understand
Speaker 1: why schools remain racially separated, we have to understand the
Speaker 1: legacy of decisions that are perfectly legal that sustain racial separation.
Speaker 1: So the overall point is to understand that race and
Speaker 1: racism are legally constituted concepts and processes. We like to
Speaker 1: think of Critical race theory not so much of a thing,
Speaker 1: but of a way of viewing a thing, a way
Speaker 1: of viewing what we think. Race is a way of
Speaker 1: understanding why it is utterly predictable who's most likely to
Speaker 1: be the CEO and who's most likely to be the
Speaker 1: person cleaning the CEO's office. Race is still a primary
Speaker 1: factor in determining access to the good things in life.
Speaker 1: As long as race is a predictive factor, we would
Speaker 1: want to understand, well, how does it happen fifty years
Speaker 1: after Brown versus Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act
Speaker 1: of sixty four and sixty five? Why do we still
Speaker 1: have these problems? Critical race theory attempts to ask those
Speaker 1: questions and provide some answers from the vantage point of
Speaker 1: the law. We didn't know it was called critical race theory,
Speaker 1: but we started the thinking as a way of understanding why.
Speaker 1: When we arrived at Harvard Law School, we saw ourselves
Speaker 1: as advancing the cause of racial justice through learning how
Speaker 1: to be good lawyers. And we got there and found
Speaker 1: that there really weren't many courses, many any courses that
Speaker 1: were dedicated to sharing the knowledge about how to do that.
Speaker 1: Derek Bell's courses were no longer being taught. He left
Speaker 1: before we got there, So we engaged in a strategy
Speaker 1: of trying to ask politely the institution to teach us
Speaker 1: these courses, and the institution didn't think that they were
Speaker 1: as significant as we did. It was, in fact, Derek Bell,
Speaker 1: who was this towering figure in legal education, who had
Speaker 1: this famous class of Race in the Law that he
Speaker 1: taught at Harvard. But it was his absence that really
Speaker 1: drove you and the other students to organize. That's a
Speaker 1: real irony. You would think that, Okay would be inspired
Speaker 1: by Derek Bell, and that's how things happen. But when
Speaker 1: you get to a place and you know something is missing,
Speaker 1: you know it's needed, and that it has been there before,
Speaker 1: you all were inspired to do something about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we invited law professors of color from across the country
Speaker 1: to come and teach a chapter out of Derek Bell's book, Race, Racism,
Speaker 1: and American Law, and it came out of a concrete
Speaker 1: engagement with institutions that weren't prepared to deal with us.
Speaker 1: That cohort of students included Maria Matsuda. Some of the
Speaker 1: people that we invited included Chuck Lawrence, Richard Delgado the
Speaker 1: core group that eventually came together with about twenty other people,
Speaker 1: and we called ourselves critical race theorists. Basically, we were
Speaker 1: the kids who were watching the civil rights movement happened
Speaker 1: on television. We were the ones who were aware but
Speaker 1: not old enough to really become involved in the demands
Speaker 1: for voting and the demands for even what we were called.
Speaker 1: I mean, you and I grew up at a time
Speaker 1: where it wasn't even a good thing to be called
Speaker 1: a black person, right. So, becoming a law student going
Speaker 1: into these institutions, after having watched the doors open and
Speaker 1: understanding the role that students had played not only in
Speaker 1: voting rights, not only snick, but the role that students
Speaker 1: had played in universities, to say, look, universities, you are
Speaker 1: not immune. You are not disconnected from what's happening in
Speaker 1: the rest of the society. If we don't have the
Speaker 1: ability to learn what the true history was, what reconstruction
Speaker 1: was all about, how all of the advances from reconstruction
Speaker 1: were rolled back. If we're not learning that stuff, we're
Speaker 1: not learning the truth about America. So we went into
Speaker 1: Harvard Law School with the sense that we were entitled
Speaker 1: to learn this history. That's what desegregation was supposed to
Speaker 1: be about, not just about bodies, but about knowledge. So
Speaker 1: in going there and thinking, okay, well, the person we
Speaker 1: were coming here to learn from, the courses we were
Speaker 1: hoping to take are not being offered. Surely you're going
Speaker 1: to do something about this, right, And the answer was
Speaker 1: as instructive as the absence. The absence presented the moment
Speaker 1: to raise the question, and the answer to the question
Speaker 1: told us reams right, like, basically, there are no qualified
Speaker 1: people of color, at least people we think who are
Speaker 1: qualified to come here and teach. Well, that caused us
Speaker 1: to say, well, what counts this qualification, particularly in an
Speaker 1: institution and an entire field that into like yesterday largely
Speaker 1: was a place that was not welcoming to people of color.
Speaker 1: So how do you become qualified when your people weren't
Speaker 1: really part of that institution? And we were coming so
Speaker 1: inspired by what had happened during the first fifteen years
Speaker 1: of the civil rights movement, we thought, of course it's
Speaker 1: going to continue, right, these are the new lunch counters.
Speaker 1: And we got there, Nita, just as the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: was beginning to push back and beginning to say, we're
Speaker 1: at the end of the road. We've done all the
Speaker 1: reform that's necessary, So telling us why there wasn't more
Speaker 1: coming became the text that we were reading and critiquing,
Speaker 1: and that critique became critical race theory. This was a
Speaker 1: conversation happening mostly inside law schools, and not even in
Speaker 1: all law schools at that Nope, but law school conversations
Speaker 1: were going on in the eighties and then ultimately though,
Speaker 1: this idea started to spread outside of the law school,
Speaker 1: and one of the factors was a book that you
Speaker 1: co author, that book, Critical Race Theory, the key writings.
Speaker 1: But even in the nineties, Kimberley wasn't It's pretty fair
Speaker 1: to say that critical race theory was something that was
Speaker 1: really still thought about in the academy in law and
Speaker 1: even though it started to spread in other areas, it
Speaker 1: was still by the end of the nineties, it was
Speaker 1: still in academic. Yeah, people started reading it in political science,
Speaker 1: in sociology and American studies and cultural studies, and so
Speaker 1: that's where it existed until like last year, and then
Speaker 1: it was discovered as the Unamerican anti American idea. I
Speaker 1: don't know if this is one of the reasons. But
Speaker 1: evidence of that is the extent to which it was
Speaker 1: challenging for people to think about race and racial power
Speaker 1: outside of the framework of an individually biased person. And
Speaker 1: the solution to that narrow conception of what racism is
Speaker 1: or could be was, well, let's not look at race,
Speaker 1: let's all be colorblind. So there was sort of a
Speaker 1: bipartisan discomfort with some of the core ideas in critical
Speaker 1: race theory, which where race does not go away because
Speaker 1: you don't name it. Racism is not something that you
Speaker 1: can solve by being colorblind. My analogy has always been,
Speaker 1: we realize that we built our institutions with toxic material
Speaker 1: like asbestos. We don't think the solution to brown lung
Speaker 1: disease is to not notice that this asbestos is there,
Speaker 1: not use the word or terminology asbestos, and to criticize
Speaker 1: those experts who can tell you where the asbestos is
Speaker 1: tucked away in our institutions. We would never do that
Speaker 1: with something that we really cared about. Yet we've done
Speaker 1: that with race and racism. So it's only been, i
Speaker 1: would say, in the reckoning around Black Lives Matter, and
Speaker 1: in particular in twenty twenty during the uprisings around Brianna
Speaker 1: Taylor and George Floyd that people started uttering the phrases
Speaker 1: structural racism, and so I think that created both more
Speaker 1: of a demand for critical thinking about race and then
Speaker 1: quickly after that the backlash against critical thinking about race.
Speaker 1: After the break, we discussed the recent backlash against critical
Speaker 1: race theory, the power struggle over school curriculum and the
Speaker 1: role of education, and moving us toward a more equal society.
Speaker 1: You're listening to getting even I'm Anita Hill. I'm speaking
Speaker 1: with Kimberly Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the terms
Speaker 1: intersectionality and critical race theory. And we can't talk about
Speaker 1: CRT without talking about education. Can you talk about how
Speaker 1: your early education got you to thinking about race, gender
Speaker 1: and the law. Well, you know, Anita, it's not even
Speaker 1: my early education. It's sitting at the dinner table. My
Speaker 1: mother was what we might call a race woman of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. She was born and raised in Kent, Ohio,
Speaker 1: and partly because her father was the town's physician, they
Speaker 1: weren't constrained by concerns that many other folks had to
Speaker 1: worry about that if they demanded their equal rights, they
Speaker 1: would lose jobs. The way that segregation was reinforced in
Speaker 1: the North was through economic punishment, and because they relied
Speaker 1: on the black community for their livelihood, they were freer
Speaker 1: to demand certain rights. So my mom her first civil
Speaker 1: rights action was as a three year old, integrating the
Speaker 1: Waiting pool, and she talks about remembering what happened when
Speaker 1: they decided to drain the pool with her in it.
Speaker 1: Right said, she was splashing around and the water kept
Speaker 1: getting lower and lower until it was sucked down the drain,
Speaker 1: and her mom gathered her up, went to the neighborhood,
Speaker 1: got a whole bunch of other black kids, went and
Speaker 1: got swimming suits, and went right back and jumped back
Speaker 1: into the pool that had been refilled. That was sort
Speaker 1: of where she came from. And at our dinner table
Speaker 1: we heard these stories. I was raised in the town
Speaker 1: that she grew up in. The history was built in
Speaker 1: the geography everywhere we went. That was the place that
Speaker 1: didn't want to serve us at the counter, That was
Speaker 1: the movie theater that didn't want to let us sit
Speaker 1: where we wanted to sit. So that was the conversation
Speaker 1: at the dinner table. So a lot of my childhood
Speaker 1: was trying to navigate how to think about this thing
Speaker 1: that happens, this thing called racism. So going to school
Speaker 1: was a process of trying to figure out, well, why
Speaker 1: aren't we talking about this. You are one of the
Speaker 1: legal scholars who developed critical race theory beginning when you
Speaker 1: were in law school. I wanted to go to law
Speaker 1: school because I wanted to understand how to dismantle the
Speaker 1: things that are just kind of built in. And my
Speaker 1: eyes were continuously open to the fact that this thing
Speaker 1: called racism is not just about people with a bad heart.
Speaker 1: It's not about people who don't like us because of
Speaker 1: our skin color. It's about deeply structured ways in which
Speaker 1: disadvantage functions. It's about the historical ways that those platforms
Speaker 1: of advantage and disadvantage can reproduce themselves without anybody intending
Speaker 1: to do it. So law school was the place where
Speaker 1: I'd be able to develop the tools to do something
Speaker 1: about it. One could have figured that something like a
Speaker 1: concept like critical race theory, like a way of thinking
Speaker 1: about race, that there would be attacks. So why I'm
Speaker 1: asking this rhetorically, but I'm also asking it literally, Why
Speaker 1: didn't you see it coming? Well, you know I did
Speaker 1: see it coming. I actually see worse coming. And that's
Speaker 1: really what worries me so much. I mean, race reform
Speaker 1: has in this country always been met with a backlash,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the backlash was more powerful and lasted longer
Speaker 1: than the reform did. So if you think about reconstruction,
Speaker 1: you know, how do we take people who had been
Speaker 1: enslaved and make them full fledged citizens? That lasted about
Speaker 1: a decade. The reaction to that, the retrenchment to that,
Speaker 1: lasted over a half century. In the mid eighties to
Speaker 1: the nineties, the response to civil rights claim was you're
Speaker 1: asking for handouts. Remedies are reverse discrimination, preferential treatment. That
Speaker 1: was a backlash to the sixties, and it was a
Speaker 1: backlash that articulated itself in the same way that the
Speaker 1: backlash against reconstruction was articulated. So reform and retrenchment have
Speaker 1: been a dynamic deeply structured into American society. So that's
Speaker 1: a pattern that we've seen and I'm more or less
Speaker 1: expected at. What worried me the most was when then
Speaker 1: President Trump issued an executive order against all training in
Speaker 1: the federal government to advance equal opportunity, framing that as discriminatory.
Speaker 1: Most people, I think we're thinking ay, it would go
Speaker 1: away if Biden got elected and he would rescind the order,
Speaker 1: which happened. What they didn't anticipate would be that this
Speaker 1: would become a multi state strategy. It would quickly go
Speaker 1: through state legislatures where there wasn't much pushback, and it
Speaker 1: would quickly turn into brush fires in school boards. I
Speaker 1: think people didn't see that coming, and as a consequence,
Speaker 1: there wasn't a sense of what the response should be
Speaker 1: to the problem. Because what they're getting at is the
Speaker 1: fundamental idea that in order to to become a more
Speaker 1: perfect union, we have to address the ways in which
Speaker 1: we are and always have been imperfect well, and what
Speaker 1: it says is that it's ultimately going back to the
Speaker 1: day when you were in school trying to figure it
Speaker 1: out yourself. Yeah. Yeah, that is what we're doing to children.
Speaker 1: And as you pointed out, when we were going into
Speaker 1: law school with a sense that we had a right
Speaker 1: to this more inclusive education, it was because it had
Speaker 1: been there. It was because there were elements of it
Speaker 1: in various places. And I think our opponents recognize that
Speaker 1: if you give them a taste of it, if you
Speaker 1: open up the door to any of this, it will
Speaker 1: become the fuel that will energize future generations to ask
Speaker 1: for more of it, so shut it down completely. Their
Speaker 1: reaction shows how significant it is to be able to
Speaker 1: really grapple with uncover the ground upon which we stand,
Speaker 1: because if it was insignificant, they wouldn't be spending millions
Speaker 1: of dollars trying to shut it down. Now, one of
Speaker 1: the responses I've heard is for students of color, and
Speaker 1: really any students or faculty teachers who are subjected to
Speaker 1: having their curriculum stifled or whitewashed, there is a recourse,
Speaker 1: and that is you go to predominantly black university or
Speaker 1: college where perhaps if it's not a state's fund at college,
Speaker 1: then you are able to teach whatever you want to learn,
Speaker 1: what you want to understand race and someone in a
Speaker 1: different way then you will if you're going to a
Speaker 1: school where the material has been banned. You know, I
Speaker 1: thought about that, and it really does get to this
Speaker 1: larger question shit about choice as well as about the
Speaker 1: value of degrees, and that's part of the racism and
Speaker 1: structural racism that we exist with. When you get a
Speaker 1: degree from Harvard or Yale or their University of Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: it comes with a whole network of people and resources
Speaker 1: that you're not likely to get in a smaller institution,
Speaker 1: and especially not likely to get in an institution with
Speaker 1: less funding, which is often the case for our historically
Speaker 1: BIA colleges and universities. Do we ask students to give
Speaker 1: up those benefits in order to learn about how to
Speaker 1: end racism? Is it fair to those students? I mean,
Speaker 1: is there an equal protection argument to be made that
Speaker 1: something is lost when you are not provided with the
Speaker 1: information that is critical to understanding bias and oppression in
Speaker 1: this country. Well, one of the strategies that has been
Speaker 1: much discussed is to raise precisely that argument that Brown
Speaker 1: versus Board, and the entire legacy of that monumental case
Speaker 1: was that democracy requires equitable educational opportunity. That's why the
Speaker 1: real injury that Linda Brown experience wasn't simply that race
Speaker 1: was taken into account in making the school assignment. That
Speaker 1: would mean that the white students were harmed in the
Speaker 1: same way that Linda Brown was harmed. And so the
Speaker 1: main argument there was that the message of racial subordination
Speaker 1: that is generated from segregation undermines our guarantee of democracy.
Speaker 1: It doesn't end with just segregation. It includes the content
Speaker 1: of education. It includes saying that there's only one story
Speaker 1: that is the permissible official story of America, and it's
Speaker 1: a story that does not explore the consequences of enslavement
Speaker 1: and of all of the other racial dynamics that built
Speaker 1: this country. So when you have an educational system that
Speaker 1: denies and deprives constituencies of the actual factual information that
Speaker 1: explains our history and explains how and why our society
Speaker 1: looks the way it does now, I would say that
Speaker 1: that compromises the very values that Brown versus Board of
Speaker 1: Education embodied. So I think there is an argument to
Speaker 1: be made. I think it has a deeper grounding in
Speaker 1: what the fourteenth Amendment was all about. We cannot have
Speaker 1: an equal citizen and when we're not willing to tell
Speaker 1: the full story of when our society embraced inequality and
Speaker 1: what the echoes of that embrace continue to be. So
Speaker 1: my hope is that there will be more affirmative efforts
Speaker 1: to fight back against this repression. The fourteenth Amendment does
Speaker 1: embody a value, and these laws undermine that value. That's
Speaker 1: what we need to be able to teach our young people.
Speaker 1: That's what we need to be able to say to
Speaker 1: ourselves and to our elected officials, and that's what we
Speaker 1: should hold them accountable to. That value that was fought
Speaker 1: and died for, that value that was resuscitated in mid
Speaker 1: twentieth century, and that value that has to rise again
Speaker 1: if we're to save this country. And this is where
Speaker 1: a need of I feel that our generation has got
Speaker 1: to make up for the losses. So for me, for
Speaker 1: at least the rest of my life, it's like, well,
Speaker 1: we've got to fight back because we have got to
Speaker 1: pass on something to the next generation. It's got to
Speaker 1: be better than what they're getting if these laws are effective. So,
Speaker 1: you know, the performance that we are seeing by all
Speaker 1: of these critics, the hyperbole, the hysteria around telling the
Speaker 1: truth about the constitution, telling the truth about slavery, telling
Speaker 1: the truth about the Civil War and the laws cause
Speaker 1: and segregation. The response that we ought to collectively have
Speaker 1: is to read all this stuff right, all this stuff,
Speaker 1: learn all this stuff, and act accordingly. Kimberly Crenshaw's work
Speaker 1: has helped move us to a more equitable world. Her
Speaker 1: ideas have enriched the learning experiences of countless students. Education
Speaker 1: is currency and stifling education has real costs. We all lose.
Speaker 1: If we limit critical thinking about inequalities, we will pass
Speaker 1: problems of racism on to our children. Quinshaw's words are
Speaker 1: an urgent call to action, because learning the truth is
Speaker 1: how we can equip the next generation with the tools
Speaker 1: they need to reach equality. In the next episode, I'm
Speaker 1: talking with Cherylyn Eiffel. We spoke on her last day
Speaker 1: as president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,
Speaker 1: the country's leading civil rights law organization. Oh, if you're
Speaker 1: not daunted, you know something is very wrong with you
Speaker 1: and you're probably not right for this job. So yes,
Speaker 1: it is daunting, and I think it should be. Getting
Speaker 1: Even is a production of Pushkin Industries, and it's written
Speaker 1: and hosted by me Anita Hill. Is produced by Mola
Speaker 1: Board and Brittany Brown. Our editor is Sarah Kramer, our
Speaker 1: engineer is Amanda kay Wang, and our showrunner is Sasha Matthias.
Speaker 1: Luis Gara composed original music for the show. Our executive
Speaker 1: producers are Mia Lobel and Letal Malad. Our Director of
Speaker 1: Development is Justine Lane. At Pushkin, Thanks to Heather Fane,
Speaker 1: Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrel, Julia Barton, John Schnarz, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at Anita Hill and
Speaker 1: on Facebook at Anita Hill. You can find Pushkin on
Speaker 1: all social platforms at pushkin Pods, and you can sign
Speaker 1: up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. If you
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