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Kimberle Crenshaw on “The Charleston Imperative: Why Feminism and Antiracism Must Be Linked”

Kimberle Crenshaw’s The Charleston Imperative calls on feminism and anti-racism to be linked:

If the reaction to the Charleston massacre is to be realized as something beyond a singular moment of redemptive mourning, then neither the intersectional dynamics of racism and patriarchy which produced this hateful crime, nor the inept rhetorical politics that sustain the separation of feminism from antiracism, can be allowed to continue.

Decisions about where to live, how to identify a “safe neighborhood” or a “good school,” whom to police, and to whom police are to be accountable, also rest on a longstanding demonization of Black bodies. These choices, grounded in ideologies of Black threat, frame separation from Blackness as a rational choice.

Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity — whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics or white wealth — to justify the brutal assaults against Black people of all genders.

Why Stand Your Ground laws, white masculinity, private property, logics of threat and security, human capital social mobility, and so much more are gendered and raced. I’m not sure what it means to sign the petition other than adding to a long list, but I thought it might both spread the message and make me available to them for further organizing efforts so I signed.

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