Blackness at the intersection (2024)
Di Kimberle Crenshaw
“…Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an integral part of the intellectual framework that developed intersectionality. The main tenet of CRT is that racism is a permanent feature of society, an unmovable part of the social systems of oppression. This is not to downplay other forms of oppression but to centralize a race analysis. Racism is the external force that produces discrimination. Blackness should never be conflated with Western constructs of race but it does emerge in response to racism. We claim and organize around our Blackness in large part to challenge the oppression of race. Acknowledging Blackness as the intersectiontherefore places racism at the centre of the analysis. One of the problems with the way that intersectionality has been used is to remove racism from the analysis. This is possible because race is seen as a variable that can be taken away if there are no people of colour involved. But the lesson of CRT is that racism is always at work, even if there are only White people present.
To centre Blackness as the roundabout is to remind everyone that you can never remove racism from the equation. Colour-blindness and intersectionality simply do not go together. Throughout this volume we have also heavily embraced a Black feminist standpoint. Although not all of the papers were written by, or from the perspective of, Black women, the majority were and all engage with Black feminist scholarship. As we explained in the beginning, intersectionality is contingent on the context in which it emerged. In this case that context is Blackness. It is the glue that holds all of the pieces together, and so is more than an axis to be considered alongside others, but the roundabout through which everything must pass. Of course, intersectionality can and should be applied to wider contexts than those from which it originally emerged. Blackness is the intersection for this collection of work and a wider intellectual movement but that does not hold that it always must be. The specific context matters and we are certainly not arguing that intersectionality can only be applied with Blackness at the core. For instance, it would be the definition of appropriation for a group of White scholars to organize a volume centring the work on their relationship to Blackness.
Whiteness as the intersection would be the appropriate starting point for the hypothetical group of White scholars. We are arguing that Blackness is at the heart of the ways that we have mobilized intersectionality because our relationship to White supremacy is at the core of how we exist and resist. Furthermore, we hope that these kinds of uses of intersectionality will be picked up, unapologetically framing intersectionality through Blackness. We also hope that the insights gained from centring Blackness will be useful in other contexts. After all this is where the concept emerged and it has gone on to be one of the most influential ideas in shaping how we engage with the social world. To dismiss the wider applications of intersectionality through Blackness would actually be to do away with the concept itself. Black intellectual thought has always had ramifications that go beyond the initial contexts in which it arises. Attempts to apply concepts whilst removing the lessons of Blackness are the continued racist project of Whitewashing intellectual ideas and histories …”
Dal testo Blackness at the intersection, Bloomsbury Publishing
Creenshaw è nota per l’elaborazione del concetto di intersezionalità, da ricordare anche uno degli ultimi lavori scritto a quattro mani con MacKinnon alla fine del 2019:
https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/MacKinnonCrenshaw_ReconstitutingtheFuture_nwp4msav.pdf