Snyopsis: Kimberlé Crenshaw and Laura Flanders examine the recent efforts by the Trump administration to remove so-called "improper ideology" from institutions like the Smithsonian, and how this move is part of a larger attempt to erase the history of enslavement and genocide in America. Description: The problems with our legal system are more conspicuous than ever, but thought leaders like Kimberlé Crenshaw have been sounding the alarm for decades. Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, Crenshaw is celebrating the organization's 30th anniversary and joining Laura Flanders in this episode to discuss the challenges ahead. Guest: Kimberlé Crenshaw: Professor of Law, Columbia & UCLA Law Schools; Executive Director, African American Policy Forum Full Conversation Release: While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation. These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters. Become a member today, go to https://Patreon.com/LauraFlandersandFriends Watch the special report on YouTube; PBS World Channel September 21st, and on over 300 public stations across the country (check your listings, or search here via zipcode). Listen: Episode airing on community radio September 24th (check here to see if your station is airing the show) & available as a podcast.
Synopsis: With attacks on Critical Race Theory gaining momentum, Columbia Law Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw joins Laura Flanders to dissect the fight for antiracism in America today.
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Description: Calling all white people: How many times in the last eight months have you heard the phrase “isn’t that illegal?” The problems with our legal system are more conspicuous than ever in 2025, but thought leaders like Kimberlé Crenshaw have been sounding the alarm for decades. Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, Crenshaw is celebrating the organization's 30th anniversary and joining Laura Flanders in this episode to discuss the challenges ahead. For starters, the Supreme Court has recently legalized racial profiling for ICE deportations, the Trump administration is looking to remove so-called “improper ideology” from US institutions like the Smithsonian, and the president recently suggested domestic violence is not a real crime. Crenshaw is a leading scholar on Critical Race Theory, a Professor of Law at Columbia and UCLA Law Schools, and host of the podcast "Intersectionality Matters!" which is currently releasing a new episode of their series United States of Amnesia: The Real Histories of Critical Race Theory. Join Crenshaw and Flanders as they look at the AAPF’s role in advancing intersectional policies to address antiracism, and how they plan to continue that work in this critical moment. Plus, a commentary from Laura on rights and the Right.
“To really stand behind this idea of making America great again, you've got to erase the memory of what America was . . . He's going after the history of enslavement. He's going after the history of genocide. He's saying that this kind of history is no longer appropriate for the federal government to officially recognize and historicize.” - Kimberlé Crenshaw
“[Conservatives] believe race should not play a role in creating greater access to equality. They do believe race should play a role in deciding who should be surveilled. They do believe in race when it comes to who should be collected up, potentially put on buses and planes and sent out of this country.” - Kimberlé Crenshaw
Guest: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law, Columbia & UCLA Law Schools; Executive Director, African American Policy Forum
Full Conversation Release: While our weekly shows are edited to time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offer to our members and podcast subscribers the full uncut conversation. These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters.
Watch the special report on YouTube; PBS World Channel September 21st, and on over 300 public stations across the country (check your listings, or search here via zipcode). Listen: Episode airing on community radio September 24th (check here to see if your station is airing the show) & available as a podcast.
Full Episode Notes are located HERE.
Support Laura Flanders and Friends by becoming a member at https://www.patreon.com/c/lauraflandersandfriends
Music Credit: 'Dawn Smolders' by Bluedot Sessions, and original sound design by Jeannie Hopper
RESOURCES:
*Recommended book:
• On Intersectionality - Selected Writings by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Get the book
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Related Laura Flanders Show Episodes:
• Kimberlé Crenshaw & Soledad O’Brien Call Out the Media on Critical Race Theory: Watch / Listen: Episode, Uncut Conversation
• Decades After Bloody Sunday, Is Trump Taking Civil Rights Back to Before Selma in ‘65?: Watch / Listen: Episode, Uncut Conversation
• Juneteenth Special: To Confront Fascism, We Must Learn About Slavery and Colonialism: Watch
Related Articles and Resources:
• Under the Blacklight Live 2025 AAPF Event: Preemptive Alliances: Black Attorneys General On The Frontlines For Civil Rights. Watch
• Intersectionality Matters! Podcast
• US Supreme Court ‘effectively legalized racial profiling’, immigration experts warn, by Lauren Gambino, September 9, 2025, The Guardian
• Supreme Court guts affirmative action, effectively ending race-conscious admissions, by Nina Totenberg, June 29, 2023, NPR
• Trump Says Having ‘a Little Fight With the Wife’ Should Not Be a Crime, by Luke Broadwater, September 8, 2025, New York Times
• ‘Critical thinking is the kryptonite to fascism’: Kimerlé Crenshaw on the Trumps’ erasure policies, by Ali Velshi, May 3, 2025, MSNBC
• Why Trump’s ‘anti-woke’ attack on the Smithsonian matters, by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley, August 27, 2025, Opinion- The Guardian
Chapters - Kimberlé Crenshaw - [Uncut Conversation]
Understanding Critical Race Theory and Current Attacks
00:00:00
Founding the AAPF and Intersectionality's Core Principles
00:03:04
Applying Intersectionality to Police and Domestic Violence
00:08:50
Attacks on History and the Fragility of Institutions
00:13:22
Lessons from US History to Resist Fascism
00:20:51
US Stance on Human Rights and Group Rights
00:25:45
Racial Profiling, Affirmative Action, and State Power
00:33:59
Political Violence, Media, and Hope for Democracy
00:38:51
LAURA FLANDERS AND FRIENDS
UNCUT INTERVIEW FROM THE EPISODE:
Kimberlé Crenshaw on the Legal System Cracking Up: Critical Race Theory & the Rollback of Civil Rights
Watch | Download Podcast – Uncut Interview | Download Podcast – Episode
0:00
While our weekly shows are edited at a time for broadcast on Public TV and community radio, we offered to our members and podcast subscribers the full, uncut conversation.
These audio exclusives are made possible thanks to our member supporters.
0:22
Calling on all white people, how many times in the last eight months have you heard somebody say, isn't that illegal?
Many of us, it seems, are just now waking up to the reality that our legal system is not what it's cracked up to be.
Our guest Kimberly Crenshaw, however, has been sounding the alarm about this for years.
0:43
The school of thought with which she is often associated, critical race theory, is all about thinking critically about our laws and naming the ways that they protect power and a particular racial status quo.
The progress of the 20th century came about largely through establishing new precedents asserting the collective rights of women, people of color, and others as a group or a class.
1:08
Project 2025 set out explicitly to reverse all of that, and that is what is happening as we speak.
How does this administration think and want Americans to think about race and gender and history?
1:24
And why are the President's executive orders targeting so-called improper ideology from institutions like the Smithsonian important to pay attention to?
Kimberly Crenshaw recently co-authored an article with Jason Stanley on exactly that.
1:40
Crenshaw is a professor of law at Columbia and UCLA law schools.
She's executive director of the African American Policy Forum, and she hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters, which is currently releasing a new episode of their series called United States of Amnesia, the Real histories of Critical Race Theory.
2:01
The new episode is about the weaponization of parents rights going all the way back to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
You can find it on all the podcast platforms.
And I can find my friend Kimberly Crenshaw right here.
Kim, welcome back to the program.
So good as always to have you.
2:18
Last time we were together it was in Selma.
It was in Selma, yeah.
So much seems to have happened since just this spring.
Are you excited about the new podcast?
I know I am.
I haven't had a chance to hear it yet, but it sounds.
And again, another kind of rallying cry.
2:35
And I am so excited about it, Laura, because as you know, for the last four years, we've been sitting here resisting the disinformation about critical thinking, resisting the disinformation about critical race theory.
And now we get to actually tell the story.
2:50
And we're telling a story at a time when people realize that the disinformation has been damaging.
So now we're providing what the reality is that people need to.
Know well.
I encourage people to check out the podcast for much, much more.
Before we talk about right now, I want to take you back.
3:06
Next year, if I have my maths correct, is the 30th anniversary of the African Americans Policy Forum.
Why we why did you find found it?
Why?
Why did you start it?
You and your colleague Luke Harris and the others.
Why did you think it was important then and what were you hoping to achieve?
3:23
Oh, Laura, it, it came out of a similar time, a similar crises to the one we're facing now.
I met Luke Harris, who is the cofounder of the African American Policy Forum, during the Anita Hill Clarence Thomas hearings.
3:39
I'm sure a lot of your listeners, those who are old enough, may remember that during the first moment of the hearing, when we heard from Clarence Thomas, he denounced the hearings designed to explore whether he had sexually harassed Anita Hill as a high tech lynching.
3:58
So we immediately got on the phone and called as many black men as we could and said, please come down to Washington, DC and speak out against this effort to weaponize the tragedy of lynching, because this has nothing to do with that history.
4:14
This has to do with whether this person who is going to be sworn in to be a Supreme Court Justice actually is fit for the job.
About 2:00 in the morning, I heard a knock on my door, and it was Luke and a colleague, Carlton Long, saying, we're here to join the men's brigade.
4:31
We said, you are the men's brigade.
And they became the two African American men who went all over the media denouncing this effort to weaponize our history.
The unfortunate reality, though, is that what Clarence Thomas did in that moment actually worked.
4:48
It split the African American and the broader liberal civil rights community from the feminist community, from women.
And because of that sort of reaction to the idea that sexual harassment was not a black women's issue, that reaction to the idea that Anita Hill was being a traitor, the reaction to the idea that this is just a typical way that black men get taken down.
5:12
The support for Clarence Thomas went up from like 50% to more than 80%.
So as we were sitting on the stairs of the Supreme Court when he was being sworn in, we said two things.
Number one, we knew that this was going to change the future, was going to change our lives in every way we could think of.
5:29
And that turns out to be true.
We also knew that we needed to have an organization that would stand in the breach between anti racism and feminism, that would make sure that feminism had an anti racist frame and the anti racism had a gender sensitive frame.
5:48
And so the African American Policy Forum has been that organization for the last 30 years that's tried to do that work.
So here we are 30 years later, A we still exist, but B everything that we were worried about has come to pass.
6:06
Well, we've known each other more or less for as long as the African American Policy Forum has been around.
And it is extraordinary to think of all the struggles that the organization's been involved in and been a leader.
In.
Looking back, what stands out and what do you think has changed most significantly since those early days when the issues, as you've mentioned, you know, also included affirmative action and so much more?
6:33
Yeah, So that's the work that we've been doing.
We've been doing affirmative action work.
We've been doing work around black women who've been killed by the police.
We do work to ensure that anti racist agendas, particularly those that focus on some of the consequences of racism, are inclusive of the ways that women of color, black women in particular, have experienced racism.
6:58
One of the things that we probably are notorious for is having encouraged President Obama when he created My Brothers Keeper, to address some of the crises facing African American men and boys, to include the crises facing African American women and girls.
7:16
Our point is that we all have to deal with some of the consequences of racism.
Sometimes those consequences are gendered in different ways, but the the reality is African American girls, African American women face some of the same obstacles and consequences of racism as men do, and some of them are different.
7:38
And that's what we're seeing right now when we see, you know, 300,000 African American women having lost their jobs since President Trump took over, when we see some of the consequences of the rollback of reproductive rights and we see how black women are disproportionately impacted by that.
7:57
That is the reality of intersectionality.
That is the the material consequences of being subject to racism and sexism.
So we've been doing that work for for the last 30 years.
And at this particular moment, it's important that we have the capacity to see now how those vulnerabilities have contributed to what we are frankly seeing.
8:21
We're seeing the destruction of our democracy.
We're seeing the descent into fascism, and intersectionality is a language that we're going to need in order to describe it and to resist it more effectively.
Now, I feel reluctant to ask you to kind of specify or clarify because this has been your life's work and I'm excited to say that you have a book coming out on exactly this topic.
8:45
But for people that still need the penny to drop, what difference?
Pick any example?
What difference does applying the gender lens to our understanding of racism make?
Well, let's take violence for example.
9:01
Let's take police violence, which is frankly what say her name is all about.
We all know, especially since 2020, that anti black police violence is still very much a reality in our country.
We know that African American men are disproportionately likely to be those who experience excessive force and even death at the hands of the police.
9:28
That's what the names George Floyd and Michael Brown and Eric Garner tell us.
And people generally know that.
But they don't know the names of Michelle Couseau for example.
They don't know the name of Pamela Anderson, for example.
And the reality that not knowing those names, James hides is the fact that African American women also face disproportionate risk of violence at the hands of police.
9:53
In fact, a recent study that we're about to drop very soon shows that African American women experience violence at the hands of the police at rates that are equal to and sometimes even surpass that of white and brown men.
10:08
So black women are often treated as men when they have encounters with police that is as much a part of anti blackness as it is a part of being vulnerable as women.
Police are called many times when women need help, when they're having a mental health crises, when they're calling the police because of domestic violence.
10:31
The reality is that their gender and their race makes them vulnerable to anti black violence.
The problem that we're trying to elevate is both that that vulnerability and what we call the loss of the loss.
10:48
When feminism doesn't have a critique of state violence and when anti racism doesn't have a critique of the gender dimensions of violence that impact women, the things that happened to black women and the families that survived them fall through the cracks.
11:05
We call it the loss of the loss.
So we use intersectionality as a frame to elevate these losses, to make visible the aspects of problems that sometimes escape consciousness or escape analysis, because it falls between the traditional ways that we think about social problems.
11:39
It's all about making us smarter and it's about making change.
And some of your analysis and the evidence that you've compiled, particularly around violence against black women on the about the hands of the police, has led to some of the reforms that have benefited lots of people having to do with ensuring that there are medically informed and educated people at the end of those 911 calls or that there are other kinds of lines of emergency people can call in the 1st place.
12:06
Now, all of that, a lot of that is under attack these days as budgets are shrunk.
But to make the point, just to under score it, this is about making policy better and smarter.
It's not just about sort of bean counting.
Absolutely.
And and just to add to that, absolutely the, the, the issue is that we're not just trying to say me too for the heck of saying we don't see our names, we're not being called out.
12:28
We're actually saying, look, for the interventions to be effective, they have to be intersectional.
And it's not just with respect to racial justice.
We did a lot of work on domestic violence into personal violence.
And the reality is a lot of the shelters, a lot of the rate crisis centers, don't take into account what the consequences are for women of color.
12:51
So you have shelters that might not anticipate that all of the people coming there might not speak English.
So what happens when they have to deal with a woman of color who's fleeing domestic violence and they don't have language appropriate services?
13:06
That woman is not being well served.
So we it's not so much a you don't you're not calling out brown women.
It's a matter of the policy that you're fall following to actually address the problem is not inclusive, and we want the solutions to be inclusive.
13:22
All right.
So you just mentioned domestic violence, and we're speaking in a week in which the president has dismissed domestic violence as just a fight between a man and his wife at home and sought to remove those statistics from any statistics having to do with violent crime in DC so that he can claim that the deployment of the federalized troops there, the federalized National Guard, has brought down violent crime in that city.
13:47
That's just one example of a kind of baseline backlash that is characteristic of this moment on just about all the issues that you've worked with, worked on for 30 years where perhaps we were at the level of sophisticated subtle change, We are now, it seems way back in the basics.
14:07
And nothing's more basic than the president's attacks on the Smithsonian and so-called improper ideology that you wrote about recently with Jason Stanley in the Guardian.
With some much going on, including armed mobs in the streets.
14:23
Why is it important to pay attention to the president's message to the Smithsonian Institution?
Well, I think you put your finger on it when you talk about improper ideology.
I think that if we just take a look at what the president says is improper ideology, we know all we need to know about why they attack history, why they attack memory.
14:46
As Jason Stanley and I wrote, one of the key dimensions of a of a turn to fascism is the creation of a mythic past, is the celebration of this moment that never actually exists, which is better than the moment that we're in now.
15:03
That's what MAGA is all about.
To really stand behind this idea of making America great again, you've got to erase the memory of what America was.
You've got to deal away with all the receipts that help us understand the historical roots of what our country looks like right now, and importantly, the struggles that people of color, that women, the queer folk have all done in order to build a different future.
15:30
So when he says he's going after improper ideology, he's going after that memory, he's going after the history of enslavement, he's going after the history of genocide.
He's saying that this font, this kind of history is no longer appropriate for the federal government to officially recognize and historicize.
15:53
And if we have any doubt about what the proper ideology is, what he's trying to elevate, let's just look at what happened at the Naval Academy when they purged the library.
What did they take out of the library?
They took out Angela Maya, Maya Angelou.
16:11
I know why the cage bird sings.
They took out George Lipsitz.
How racism takes place.
What did they leave?
They left Hitler's Mein Kampf on the shelves.
They, they, they left the Bell Curve, which was a modern effort to restore scientific racism, to say that there are inherent differences between black people and white people that explain inequality.
16:40
So he's going after all of those things that try to tell the story about how inequality have come about and that create the imperative that we continue to focus our efforts to dismantle those inequalities.
16:56
That's what he's saying is improper.
And what he's saying is proper is scientific racism.
What's proper is the idea that certain races are superior to others.
And we can expand that to say certain genders are better, certain sexualities are better.
17:13
This is what he's attacking.
So we're not talking at this point about any overreach.
We're not talking about so-called preferential treatment.
We're talking about the entire latter part of the 20th century and the 21st century in which commitments to make a more inclusive multiracial democracy have been taken seriously.
17:35
This is what he's trying to dismantle, and this is the road to fascism that we're on right now.
You're making my glasses steam up here as I get harder and harder thinking about all this.
And I just have to ask you, Kim, you know, did you ever think that these were going to be the battle lines you would be fighting on in your lifetime, even where you came into this story, not just 30 years ago, but before that as you entered law school?
18:04
Well, so here's the here's the thing that I thought, and here's the thing I couldn't have anticipated when I talked about, you know, us sitting on the Supreme Court stairs thinking that the rest of our lives are going to be shaped by this.
It was clear to me that the battle of the Supreme Court was a battle of our future.
18:21
It was the institution that was going to say, we're loosening these rules that have been created to protect our democracy.
So it wasn't a surprise that Clarence Thomas contributed to the unraveling of the Voting Rights Act.
It wasn't a surprise that he contributed that fifth vote to undermining campaign finance reform.
18:42
These are all of the rules that disintegrated in our lifetime that make the possibility of this fascist rise happen.
So that I can't say was unpredictable.
But what is shocking to me is how weak the the, the, the, the barricades are.
19:03
How willing the institutions that we thought were going to hold the line have been to bending the knee.
So the universities, many have collapsed in face of his efforts to shake them down.
19:20
Law firms, and we're not talking about conservative law firms, we're talking about law firms that actually were the ones who promoted many of these protections, that took up pro bono work on behalf of marriage equality, on behalf of democracy, on behalf of greater forms of integration.
19:43
The fact that we're seeing them collapse in the face of this.
And lastly, mainstream media, those were the institutions that we thought would protect us.
And the fact that they're failing, that's the shocking piece of this moment.
You haven't mentioned our civil rights institutions and more broadly our progressive organizations.
20:03
And I'll just say it for you that there is also weakness there that we might not, we might have, let's say hoped wouldn't still be there at this point after all these years.
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20:20
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20:37
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Thank you.
One of the stumbling blocks, it seems to me, in pulling together the kind of response, the kind of united response that is needed at this moment, is the following sort of discourse.
21:04
And you tell me if you've heard this.
I know I've heard it a lot.
White people often are heard to say and organize in in organizing meetings as they're rallying the troops or rallying their forces.
The authoritarian moves by this administration are unprecedented or UN American.
21:20
And to that many African Americans say, well, not to us, you just haven't been paying attention.
So help us.
So that often then puts the white people on the back foot and they say, oh, well then do we just shrug off this moment?
21:36
I was trying to get active.
So how do you pull these two together where we can prioritize and understand?
We see the importance of understanding history and structural violence while not shrugging off the newness of this particular time.
21:55
Yeah, that is such an excellent question because the reality is that we're never outside of history.
We're never apart from the past.
I mean it, it's famously said that the past isn't even the past.
22:10
So the reality that we're facing right now is one that is resonant with the past.
It's resonant with the moment in history when the forces of the right, those who'd rather break this country then share this country, those who wanted an exclusive white only democracy as opposed to a multiracial 1 and took up arms against this country.
22:33
It was called the Civil War.
We were able to fight back from that and we were able to create a democracy based on some fundamental principles, that everyone born here is a citizen, that citizens have rights against discrimination, that democracy is the way that we go about making decisions.
22:53
That was what Reconstruction was all about.
Reconstruction was overthrown.
It was overthrown violently.
It was overthrown in the law.
It was overthrown with the participation of the Supreme Court, leading to what Langston Hughes says.
23:10
Look, you don't have to tell the Negro what fascism is.
That is what we have lived.
White supremacy is a fascist regime, particularly with respect to those who have been framed as the pariah class, who no one has to listen to and we can use as a permanent other to hold everybody else in place.
23:30
So this is a familiar history.
The challenge that we're facing is that when our scholars of democracy, when those who have been trained to help us understand the warning signs of fascism, think about that issue, all too often they look to Europe for the queues.
23:49
They measure where we are with respect to where were we in 1935, Where were we, you know, with respect to these benchmarks without recognizing we've got our own benchmarks here in this country.
And in fact, some of those benchmarks actually contributed to fascism in Europe.
24:07
So this history that we are coming out of, this history that's part of our legacy, is precisely the history that, number one, gives us a clearer sense of what threats we are looking at.
And it's also the history that the mega movement doesn't want us to have access to.
24:27
So what I consistently say is when people are trying to take something away from you and they are trying to take away our history, our ability to read the situation, our ability to be literate about how these contemporary realities are rehearsals from the past.
When they try to take that away from us, it's telling us that that history is fundamentally important for our ability to understand the situation in order to respond to it.
24:54
So we've got to fight even harder when they're trying to erase certain ideas, erase certain moments in history, erase certain people.
That is the wake up call that that's where we have to pitch our buckets and fight with everything we've got because that is the secret to our ability to build on the past in order to create a now a future that recovers the democracy that is our birthright.
25:19
And the the two sides of that history is not just it has happened here, it has happened here, it has happened here, it can happen here.
But also we have had movements that moved us out of that that chapter.
We have had movements that we can also look to and learn about, which I think is a very key part of what is trying to be erased right now.
25:42
The power that could come from telling those stories too.
I've got to bring you into the international context for just a minute.
The United Nations General Assembly is gathering.
We have ongoing, you know, efforts to bring human rights abusers and commiters of genocide to any kind of court of international justice.
26:08
One of the things that I know that you've followed over the years is not just the development of new legal precedent and innovative legal theory in the US, but also internationally with the creation of things like international conventions against the, you know, the, the violation of the rights of, of women, of people of color, and of course, the Convention on the Prevention of, of Genocide.
26:30
What can you tell us about how those two things relate, those two schools of law relate?
And where do you think that effort stands right now?
Well, one of the ironies of the United states making the claim that we are the leader of the free world is that the United states has been derelict with respect to some of these most important conventions.
26:53
The United States was slow and and dubious in its embrace of of the World conference on Racism.
In the end, ended up repudiating significant dimensions of the World Conference on Racism.
27:08
Slow to adopt CDAW.
That is the Convention on the Protection.
Of discrimination against women.
Against women exactly and and of course with respect to genocide and and other conventions, the United States has always looked at the implications of these conventions for its own accountability and has frequently been a drag on the international commitment to address these issues.
27:41
So you know, the world Conference on racism was a 2001.
We are now seeing the consequences of the United States failure to fully embrace and endorse these these conventions.
And we also see it at home.
27:57
We see that, you know, one of the things that you cannot cite in the Supreme Court in with any hope that the Supreme Court is going to say you're right, is these conventions, unlike other countries in which international law, human rights law actually has some gravitas, not so much here.
28:17
So this is the long term consequence of the attitude that the United States has frequently had.
Nobody's going to tell us what to do.
It's the attitude that suggests that these are conventions and ideas and frameworks that may not be consistent with our political global interests.
28:37
So we're not going to bind ourselves.
By now we're seeing some of the consequences of that playing out right now in in human history.
28:58
One of the things I have learned through, well, thanks to you largely, is that for all of the ways that our media tend to discuss legal cases having to do with discrimination as about the discriminated person or the discriminator as which is to say, individuals.
29:17
The key thrust of change in the law, as I understand it, learning from you over the last century, is the idea that groups exist as a have rights under the law, groups of workers, groups of people.
And it does seem to me that if we are ever, for example, going to be successful in bringing claims around Environmental Protection against abusers of our environment, that notion that groups have rights is going to be critical.
29:52
And yet it is exactly that that has been under attack all this time, almost in the subterranean way that if you don't know the law, you don't understand that that's actually what's going on.
We might think about the effect, the attacks on affirmative action are just about people of color and women.
Not only that, so this may be getting into the weeds, but insofar as I've benefited from your laying this out, can you lay that out for us again?
30:15
Yeah.
So, you know, there has been a debate, and this isn't just a conservative, liberal debate, oddly enough.
This is actually debate between liberals, progressives, and critical thinkers about how to conceptualize illegitimate power.
30:33
The narrowest view is that discrimination happens when an individual is treated badly because of prejudice, because that person is seen as having certain inherent characteristics that justify giving them bad treatment.
30:50
I'll treatment now.
The reality is that yes, that is part of discrimination, that it plays a role.
But the larger part of discrimination is how inequality is structured into our society in a way that visits disadvantages to people based on their membership in certain groups, based on where they live, based on what their grandparents or parents had access to or not, based on ideas about this entire group.
31:23
So civil rights law, when it was most expansive, acknowledge the fact that we lived in a society that had been structured based on some groups having privilege and access and other groups being set aside.
31:39
In the moments where the civil rights laws did the most is when the court said our objective now is to dismantle these inequalities, root and brand.
So we're not talking about taking one person here and putting them there.
We're talking about dismantling the entire system that it was built on, the idea that some people deserve more than others.
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That has since disintegrated, largely based on some of the conservative viewpoints.
That number one said we have to limit our expansive view of equality to what the framers thought, right?
32:18
So they want to go back to what George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have thought is legitimate inequality to be addressed and that which he thought they thought was just natural.
We're talking about people who basically thought that that black people were inherently inferior or that women, you know, couldn't be lawyers because their wounds would drop out.
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I mean, this is the kind of ignorant set of ideas that they think that the Constitution should be bound to.
And the second most important aspect for people to know is that when we build our understanding of equality based on the shared inequalities that people in groups face, it helps everybody because we're able to see what kind of employment practices are unfair, what kind of barriers to being a police officer or a fireman or or even a lawyer actually impacted the the aspirations of everybody.
33:16
So, so this this current moment that we have is the reaction to the collapse of far more inclusive broader understanding that we need to pay attention to how groups are situated with respect to all sorts of institutions.
33:35
That loss that has been experienced by women, by queer people, by people of color, is a loss that everyone, at the end of the day, with the exception of the billionaires, stand to have some interest in clawing back into our understanding of equality.
33:52
And This is why you say the critical race theory, in fact, critical thinking is, is kryptonite to fascism.
We've got to address what has been happening in the last few days.
And one of the most standout things having to do with race is the Supreme Court decision basically okaying racial profiling for the purpose of immigration detentions.
34:11
In that case coming out of California.
What do you make of that?
At the very same time, we're of course, not allowed to take race into account when it comes to college admissions, affirmative action and so on.
What's going on?
Yeah, Well, this is the moment where the quiet part is being said out loud.
Up into this moment, you know, one could have had a fight with conservatives around whether they really do embrace color blindness.
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Now, I've always been of the belief that the conservative assault on affirmative action, on expansive civil rights was never really about color blindness.
It was about defending the status quo against any effort to effectively say the status quo is discriminatory and we do not have to continue to recreate it.
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But in this moment, it's 100% clear their objection to affirmative action to expansive civil rights is not a repudiation of the idea that race should ever play a role in decision making.
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They don't.
That's not what they believe.
They believe race should not play a role in creating greater access to equality and inclusion.
They do believe race should play a role in deciding who should be surveilled.
They do believe in race when it comes to who should be collected up and potentially put on buses and planes and, and, and sent out of this country.
35:43
They're telling us that race can be a factor when it comes to the worst burdens that our society is willing to place on people who live here.
And race cannot be a factor in actually addressing some of the ongoing consequences of being part of a group that is seen as a pariah or they don't really have a right to be here, or they don't have a right to the best things in life.
36:09
So this is never been about color blindness.
Don't believe any conservative claim that all they want is everybody to be treated the same.
If that is what they really believe, they would be as up in arms about this recent decision as the rest of us are.
36:25
Well, while we're talking about being up in arms or just attitude, let's talk about the attorneys general that you convened over the summer in an event that I am so sorry that I missed.
But you had Letitia James, you had Keith Ellison, you had a lot of the biggest, most frontline folks.
36:42
They're gathered in Oak Bluffs at Martha's Vineyard, talking about where the sort of levers of resistance might be.
In a nutshell, as we're running out of time here, what came out of that?
Was there a strategy that was clear, something that gave you hope, something that we can look for emerging?
36:58
Well, it's, it's it's a brilliant moment for us to recognize that in fact, states do have power.
In fact, states rights that we typically associate with the Daughters of the Confederacy with right wingers who oppose Brown versus Board of Education.
37:17
The longer history of states rights was protecting Friedman in the states against the long reach of the slave ocracy that would come into the States and just what bring black people to the South and and and enslave them.
It turns out states oppose that.
37:35
And so this long history of states rights being used to protect the civil rights of individuals against federal overreach has precedent.
And this precedent is what the attorneys general of some of the most populous blue estates are now doing.
37:55
They are on the front lines.
They are saying, no, you don't get to dictate what happens within our borders.
So they were laying out of a, a, a calling to all of us to fight.
They're saying that there is no inevitability in this moment.
38:13
The only inevitability is if we don't fight.
So they're doing their part, but they're saying we can't do it alone.
They, they sent out a rally cry to everybody to resist, to recognize that there are legal means of resisting and there's also the means of resisting, to say, I will not be silent in this moment.
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The reality is, fascism happens when we fail to resist, both in our minds and our hearts and our bodies and with every resource we have.
So we left there with a renewed commitment that the fight is on, it's real, it's now and it's when.
38:50
I hear some marching orders.
What are your thoughts on the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, one of those who went after critical race theory?
I know I speak for millions of people in denouncing this kind of violence.
I think it's also abundantly clear that this kind of violence in this tinderbox is all the more reason why we need to be vigilant against increasing the temperature.
39:21
And so we have to fair be very, very careful.
Hope the media will play its role in in suppressing the tendency in this moment to ratchet up the the discourse, making it clear that this is not something that we can afford.
39:42
And hoping that whatever that thing is, that makes people believe that we are exceptional, that there's some evidence that we've come to the brink and are willing to step back from it.
Thank you.
I can't let you leave Kim without asking you the question.
39:59
I ask all our guests.
At the end of our episodes, which is what is the story you think the future will tell of now?
What do you think the future?
I don't know 2550, a hundred years will say about us today.
I will tell you the story that I hope is is the reality without saying whether it really will happen.
40:18
I hope the story is that this society was brought to the brink and people who value this multiracial democracy, we're willing to ask the hard questions, we're willing to have the tough conversations.
40:34
We're willing to say what ways did we assume things were just going to work out that didn't and now require us to show up and show out for democracy.
So nothing is automatic.
We're not inherently the democracy that's going to survive this.
40:52
We survive it by exercising using our agency to come together and to understand what the conditions of this possibility have been.
That's what I'm hoping the story will ultimately be when people dig out the time capsules and see how the resistance actually ended up being successful.
41:14
Kimberly Crenshaw, thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you, Laura, always a pleasure to be with you.
Thanks for taking the time to listen to the full conversation with Kimberly Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia and UCLA law schools, executive director of the African American Policy Forum, and host of the podcast Intersectionality Matters, which includes the series United States of Amnesia, The Real History of Critical Race Theory.
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42:00
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