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00:00Bye.
00:01Bye.
00:02Bye.
03:59She was my professor and we just, we learned about something that was pioneering and we
04:06didn't even know that the world was going to be talking about this.
04:09So thank you so much, Professor Crenshaw, for joining us for the first time on the stage.
04:15How are you feeling?
04:16I'm excited.
04:17I'm excited.
04:18Okay, now let's dive in.
04:19Are you ready?
04:20I'm ready.
04:20I hope y'all are ready because we got some exercises for y'all.
04:23Yeah.
04:23I said she's a professor, so we're going to have some things for y'all to do, okay?
04:27Right.
04:27So, Professor Crenshaw, let's just talk about what's hot off the presses.
04:32We keep seeing these headlines where racial justice is under attack on all fronts.
04:39All fronts.
04:40Whether we're talking about voter suppression, we're talking about book bans, we're talking
04:44about words like woke, people saying anti-woke.
04:47And just yesterday, we heard about the Supreme Court's ruling striking down affirmative action.
04:54And we learned a lot about affirmative action in your class when we were 15 and when I was
05:0015 and when I was 15 and when I was 25.
05:00Exactly.
05:01So what does all of that, all of these attacks have to do with critical race theory and the
05:07war on woke?
05:08Yeah.
05:08Well, this conversation couldn't be more timely, but it's also, I guess, poignant and frustrating.
05:16That a multi-year campaign to eliminate one of the most significant measures that was
05:24ever invented to actually dismantle many of the barriers that kept African Americans from
05:30becoming all they could be has now been struck down as discriminatory.
05:36So I'm going to get in a minute to how we should think about what it means to have lost
05:42affirmative action.
05:43But the real issue is that there's been a campaign over the last two years to eliminate
05:50our ability to think about race and racism, to talk about race and racism.
05:55And, of course, if you can't think or talk about something, guess what?
05:59You can't change it.
06:01So critical race theory has been used by those who want to take away our ability to transform
06:08our world to scare us away from the ideas that brought us this far.
06:14So the real question, according to them, is all of these critical race theorists in the
06:19classroom who are trying to indoctrinate our children.
06:22So I thought it might be interesting for us to understand who are the critical race theorists
06:30among us.
06:31So would you guys want to participate, like, in a five-minute exercise to see who are the
06:35real critical race theorists?
06:37Okay.
06:38You know I can't help do this because I'm a law professor, so this is what I do.
06:42I do.
06:43So if you can, stand up for me for a moment.
06:45I'm going to stand up with you.
06:47Okay.
06:48So the challenge is to see how you think about the world that you're in.
06:54I'm going to give you three scenarios.
06:56So you're reading the paper and you see a notice about an Oscar-winning African-American actor
07:05who was arrested for shoplifting a sandwich, a sandwich, in a New York bodega, New York delicatessen.
07:15Now sit down if you think, oh my, how the high and mighty fall that even an Oscar-winning
07:22actor will shoplift the sandwich.
07:27Keep standing if you recognize this is another doing-anything-while-black moment of racial profiling.
07:34All right, so if you're still standing, you're in the running.
07:39Okay.
07:40You are in your company, your work.
07:43You come up with an idea that you've thought about for a while, it's a great idea, it saves
07:48your company money, they actually are more successful at what they want to do, you wait
07:53to the right meeting at the right moment, you introduce your idea, and then they're crickets.
07:59No one says anything.
08:01Even Karen or Ken, whoever, says the same thing that you said and people say, oh my God, the
08:10second coming, this is the best idea ever.
08:14Sit down if you think, well, maybe you didn't say it as clearly as you might have.
08:19Maybe you're not as articulate as Ken or Karen.
08:24Or maybe the idea wasn't as good as you thought.
08:28Keep standing if you know that this is how implicit bias works.
08:32Our brilliance is undervalued.
08:34Our ideas are undertaken seriously.
08:39This is how it happens.
08:40Okay.
08:41Last example.
08:43If you read a newspaper article about a black family, bought a house, made improvements in
08:48the house, went to get it appraised.
08:50The appraiser gave it a value at $500,000 less than the money you put into it.
08:58So the family removes all the black art, removes all their family pictures, gets rid of the African
09:04textiles, all the nice things, and gets a white friend to come in and pose as the homeowner.
09:10And all of a sudden, the house is worth $750,000 more than what it got appraised at.
09:16Sit down if you think it was a clerical error.
09:20Keep standing if you know this is how black wealth doesn't get passed on from generation
09:27to generation because our wealth is undervalued because of who we are and where we live.
09:33Now, I want you to look around, and I don't know whether to congratulate you or give you
09:38consolation.
09:39You are critical race theorists, so you can go ahead and sit down.
09:43So I hope you understand.
09:45The point is that critical race theory is a prism.
09:48It's mother wit.
09:49It's how we've learned to interpret the world we live in.
09:52It's how we know that we do not live in a colorblind world.
09:56It's how we know that the health, wealth, and other disparities that mark our lives are
10:01not a product of who we are.
10:03It's a product of the world we've been born into.
10:06It's a problem of the structures that we continue to operate in.
10:09It's a product of the implicit biases.
10:12These are the things that the anti-woke, anti-CRT people don't want us talking about
10:18and don't want us teaching our children about.
10:21Come on, clap it up for that.
10:23Professor Crenshaw, thank you for that brilliant exercise from a brilliant woman.
10:28And you've been doing this work for quite a while.
10:31You are a co-founder of the African American Policy Forum based at Columbia University.
10:37And it's the same organization, as I mentioned before, that coined the term and the hashtag,
10:42say her name.
10:43In fact, it was just a few short years ago that we were marching for victims of police violence,
10:49George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
10:51And at the time, it felt like there was a widespread commitment to dealing with the legacy of racism in this country.
10:58So tell me what happened over the past few years.
11:01Because y'all turn on the news.
11:03It's just one attack after another really on black people.
11:07So how do we get to this point with this war on woke?
11:10There is a part of our history that repeats itself.
11:14Wherever there's reform, there is retrenchment.
11:17The bigger the reform, the wider and deeper the retrenchment is.
11:22So when George Floyd and when the killing of Breonna Taylor prompted people to come out in the streets,
11:29they came out in every state of the union.
11:32All 50 states had major George Floyd, Breonna Taylor protests.
11:37And the important thing about this protest is it wasn't just us.
11:41It wasn't just other people of color.
11:43It was white people.
11:44Young white people who were saying enough of this kind of racism.
11:49How could we be born 50 years after the end of formal segregation and still watch a black man actually lose his life in the streets?
11:58So there were demands to do something about police violence.
12:03There were demands to understand structural racism better.
12:07There were demands to seek accountability.
12:09And you remember watching television and seeing all the corporations and the banks saying,
12:14we're committed to racial justice, we're committed to black people, we're standing by you.
12:19That actually prompted a movement, a very highly resourced, very highly coordinated, dark money movement.
12:28It was not our movement.
12:30It was the movement of retrenchment.
12:32So out of that moment of possibility came a huge backlash.
12:37And the backlash was focused on the ideas that many people on the other side think put all those people in the street.
12:45So using the frame critical race theory, they went after structural racism, implicit bias.
12:53They go after all of the ideas that we have used in order to advance our demands for racial justice.
13:00If you actually look to see what they've done in 24 states, they have enacted legislation that makes it impossible for teachers to teach the truth about our history.
13:12Nearly half of public school children now go to school in a place where they cannot learn the actual history of the Tulsa massacre.
13:22They can't learn the honest history of enslavement, of segregation.
13:27There are even efforts to edit books so that the real story of Rosa Parks cannot be told.
13:34They don't want to talk about segregation as a product of white supremacy.
13:38They don't want to talk about internment as a product of racism.
13:43So they're really going for our ability not only to change the present because of the past,
13:49they're going after our ability to even remember the past as it was and to talk about it.
13:56So this has expanded to book bans.
13:59There are more book bans now than there ever have been.
14:02The majority of those books being banned are books that feature African American and other people of color and LGBTQIA people.
14:12And if you want to know concretely, we're talking about Zora Neale Hurston.
14:17We're talking about Angela Davis.
14:19We're talking about Toni Morrison.
14:21We're talking about some of the leading writers of the 20th and 21st century.
14:27And if you want to see some of these books, I'm going to put a plug in.
14:30The African American Policy Forum booth is trying to make real what it is they're trying to get us not to know and not to say.
14:38So after, when you get a chance, visit our booth.
14:41Take away one of the books that they're trying to take away.
14:45When they try to take something away, that should tell you that it's important.
14:49They don't mess around with something that's valueless.
14:52They're trying to take away our ability to know our history in order to pass it on to our children to change our future.
15:01It has been very distressing, but we know that there are some possibilities for our own resistance, as we have always done.
15:09And so we're going to get into some of that.
15:11So make sure you check that booth out, highlight and support those authors.
15:16And there's there's so much that we actually can do.
15:20But just to shift gears a little bit, let's talk about something else that you've coined intersectionality.
15:26For our audience watching, what exactly is intersectionality and how does it relate to the work that you do?
15:35So intersectionality is also a prism.
15:38It's basically just like critical race theory.
15:41It is a way of looking at our lives to interpret how our lives are shaped, not just by race, not just by gender, class, sexuality, gender representation, by all of these things.
15:56So intersectionality just takes seriously. If you want to transform the world to make it more equitable, you have to understand how these different themes come together to shape what happens.
16:07If we want to have more inclusive movements, we have to have an intersectional lens.
16:13So one of the projects that Say Her Name attempts to advance is an understanding that anti-black police violence actually impacts black people of all genders, not just one.
16:26So we understood after the killing of Mike Brown that yes, police violence is a particular risk to the lives of African-American men.
16:36It is also a risk to the lives of African-American women.
16:40It turns out black women and girls as young as six, as old as 95 have been killed by the police.
16:48They've been killed while having a mental episode while black, shopping while black, having a baby in the backseat of the car while black.
16:58Our gender does not protect us from anti-black violence.
17:02But if we can't talk about it, if we don't have a frame in order to remember these stories, then we're not going to show up for the families that have lost mothers, sisters, daughters, others to anti-black violence.
17:15So Say Her Name was an imperative to remember that when we're marching for George Floyd, we need to be remembering Breonna Taylor.
17:25When we're marching for Mike Brown, we need to remember India Kager.
17:30So just this week, our book Say Her Name came out.
17:35It will be available July 17th, where you can see the stories that we all need to know in order to make sure our movement against police violence is gender inclusive.
17:48So you can also check out our one copy at the booth and make the order for the book.
17:54Come on now.
17:55Yeah, to make make sure intersectionality is in every part of our racial justice advocacy.
18:00That's right. And speaking of advocacy, you've done work around affirmative action and you've spoken on the importance of it.
18:08We as I mentioned, we learned about it in our classroom.
18:11Now we've all seen the headlines. We've heard the news about the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action.
18:19Can you give us your perspective on the ruling and how does it tie into this conversation that we're having today?
18:26It is such a perfect illustration of what happens when we don't have a critical perspective on race and racism.
18:34So take what I think is now going to be quoted by everybody, Justice Roberts' comment saying,
18:41eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.
18:45Well, what does that mean?
18:47He thinks it means that paying attention to race in any way is racial discrimination.
18:54Now, that is a non-critical understanding of race and racism.
18:59If we take a critical lens, however, we understand that it's not the same to be racialized as a person of African descent in this country as it is to be racialized as white.
19:11We understand that Linda Brown was experiencing something quite different when racial classifications were used to tell her that she couldn't go to the white school that was close to her home.
19:24By the lights of the Supreme Court, Linda Brown and the white kids who were in the better funded school that she had to walk by on her way across the tracks to the black school were treated in the same way.
19:36They were both subject to race discrimination.
19:39We all know that doesn't make any sense at all.
19:42What the white kids were experiencing was white privilege.
19:45What they had access to, what substance, what their teachers had access to was more money, more resources.
19:52The entire effort to dismantle that legacy when we use race conscious means to do so is not the same thing as excluding Linda Brown.
20:03So when you have a non-critical view, you accept this idea that, okay, we're beyond that history.
20:11We can afford to go forward without thinking and talking about race.
20:15When you understand how that history still shapes today, when you understand structural racism,
20:21when you understand the current access and lack thereof that many of our children have,
20:26you understand that not taking race into account is not treating people equally.
20:32That is the discrimination.
20:34So that's what this part, this case was all about.
20:37And we have got to fight like our lives depend on it from here on out because they do.
20:43Period.
20:44And on that note, on that note, what can audiences here do?
20:52What are some options for people to be able to fight?
20:55I think we got riled up.
20:56We did the exercise.
20:57We know it in theory.
20:58We know we're going to go out there.
20:59We're going to go to the concert.
21:00So when we go home or even when we're on our phones during this festival,
21:05what can people do about what's happening right now?
21:08So everybody has got to commit to doing something.
21:10We didn't get here without us all putting the shoulder to the boulder.
21:15That is how we were able to break the yoke of segregation.
21:20But look, liberation doesn't just exist on autopilot.
21:25When we disappear, so does the forward momentum.
21:28So does the effort to push back against efforts to erase our history,
21:33against our friends who take our ideas out of the classroom.
21:37One of the main things that makes us realize how much trouble we're in
21:42is that our college board created an African American studies curriculum
21:48that took out structural racism, intersectionality, implicit bias,
21:53took out Angela Davis, took out bell hooks,
21:56and gave it to us and thought we should be excited about it.
21:59We need to heighten the cost for that kind of erasure.
22:03We've got to make it clear that we're not just going to accept any old thing.
22:07We've got to make it clear that we are watching.
22:09We have to be the sentinels to pass the baton on to the next generation.
22:14So we have five by five. If you've got five minutes, you can text something.
22:19You can say, I support the freedom to learn.
22:22You can send a video that says, look, The Bluest Eye was my favorite book growing up.
22:28It helped me understand how being a black girl is subject to forms of discrimination
22:34that if we don't prevent it will hurt and harm other generations of black girls.
22:40So you can stand beside the ideas that they're trying to erase from us.
22:46You can get active. So we ask you to join something, anything.
22:51You can join us, AAPF. Join the Legal Defense Fund. Join Color of Change.
22:56We have got to get organized in a way that we've never been before.
23:00Freedom to learn. We also have critical race theory summer school that you can come online.
23:06If you like this conversation and you want to know more, join up.
23:12Freedom to learn. Critical race theory summer school.
23:15And run for something or support somebody who is running for something.
23:20Don't leave any power on the table.
23:23The elections that shape our lives are not just the presidential election.
23:27They're not just, you know, who goes to Congress.
23:30It's who's on the school board. Who's on, who's on the city council.
23:35Who's on the county commissioners. That's where our power needs to be felt.
23:40People need to pay when they try to suppress our right to vote.
23:44Our right to read. Our right to learn. Our right to transform our future for our children.
23:50And make sure you visit freedomtolearn.net. Let's clap it up for Professor Crenshaw.
23:56Thank you. So this was amazing. Thank you. It's an honor to be here, everyone. Thank you.
24:02Thank you so much.
24:05You know how I feel. Sun in the sky. You know how I feel.
24:15Breeze drifting on by. You know how I feel.
24:21It's a new dawn. It's a new day. It's a new life for me. Yeah. It's a new dawn. It's a new day. It's a new life for me.
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