“Reach Everyone on the Planet . . .”: Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality

Abstract

Reviewed by: “Reach Everyone on the Planet . . .”: Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality Angelica Fenner Gunda Werner Institute in the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Center for Intersectional Justice. “Reach Everyone on the Planet...”: Kimberlé Crenshaw and Intersectionality. Ruksaldruck, 2019. 107 pp. Open-access publication: www.boell.de/en/2019/04/16/reach-everyone-planet The occasion for this Festschrift (commemorative publication) is the thirtieth anniversary of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s landmark article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” in which she coined the term intersectionalityas a means to name overlapping forms of discrimination otherwise overlooked when only accounting for one vector of identity. Originally applied to the double discrimination women of color in the United States faced in the context of a specific job-discrimination lawsuit, the term’s capacious implications identify, in Crenshaw’s words, “the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members, but often fail to represent them” (18). One form of discrimination can occlude other, overlapping vectors, such as ableism, phobia of gender fluidity, ageism, and religious profiling, among others. Indeed, as contributor Mîran Newroz Çelik writes, “Every time that I try to understand how discrimination functions, I can only do so by trying to understand how different forms of discrimination work together” (24). Celebrating the impact of Crenshaw, one the most influential scholars and activists of our time, this volume was mobilized by Dr. Ines Kappert, head of the Gunda Werner Institute at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and [End Page 115]Dr. Emilia Roag, founder of the Center for Intersectional Justice. Their aim was to anchor intersectionality within the European context by recruiting its scholars, theorists, and activists to share how their encounter with Crenshaw, or with the concept she has advanced, has shaped their work and thinking in this geopolitical framework. What ensues is a series of personal, engaging, and highly accessible four-page testimonials that concretize how ideas travel thorough space and time to ignite further thought, action, and transformation. Although the realities captured by intersectionality predate the concept’s existence, the fact that these realities can now be named enables possibilities for social change to be more clearly plotted and enacted. Crenshaw has been a pivotal role model and mentor for generations of European scholars and activists of color, empowering them to name and theorize their own experiences and social observations. In Germany, among those who came of age in the 1990s and participated in the founding of ADEFRA e. V. (Schwarze deutsche Frauen und Schwarze Frauen in Deuschland, ein Verein; Black German women and Black women in Germany, an organization) and the ISD (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland; Action group of Black people in Germany), personal narratives and scholarly research on Black European history afforded a means both to redefine the terms of historiography and to write themselves into that history from an intersectional perspective. Following the migration of Crenshaw’s term to Europe, contributor Dr. Maisha-Maureen Auma recalls the pivotal role the Black experience plays in the term’s implementation, although not all contributors to the volume apply the term this way. Also raised by several authors are the complications of negotiating between the German term Rasseand the English race. Whereas invocation of Rassehas remained taboo for its historical association with biological and hereditary definitions of difference, raceis implemented as a sociopolitical category that needs to be named in order for an intersectional conversation about blind spots to take place. This volume also includes a glossary explicating textual markings used by some contributors that evince how language itself can serve as a site for performing intersectionality; these include an asterisk to inflect gender terminology, capitalization of the noun and adjective Black, and lowercase italics for the noun and adjective white. In response, I have found myself musing, however inconclusively, what subconscious affective charge the printed word whitemight elicit for disparate readers. In journalism, setting a word in italics often introduces an ironic or distancing [End Page 116]tone, or signals an authorial undertow of resistance, even irritation, akin to an inner monologue conducted parallel to official discourse. As such, this practice may aid what Auma identifies as “one of...