Kimberle Crenshaw’s “The Intersection of Race and Gender”

Kimberle Crenshaws arguments and research in The wargon of Race and Gender offer an insightful and probing look into the commonwealth of women of color in the current racial and sex activity climate of our culture. Her master(prenominal) point, that women of color experience both their race and their gender unneurotic in a way that is NOT mutually exclusive, as they are so often treated, and are informed one by the other and as they occur simultaneously, is one that almost sparks a flippant attitude of No kidding.When the argument is first introduced, it seems to simple and so self-evident as to be self-explanatory (and taken for granted) at first it almost seems like a waste of time to be delving into something so painfully obvious. However, by her rattling thorough research and her carefully pieced argument which clearly shows how X relates to Y relates to Z, Crenshaw is able to take something that does indeed seem like it should be seemingly obvious and more or less proves , as a great deal as it can be proven, that even still today race and gender are not given the adequate attention the two unitedly deserve.As Crenshaw is painstaking to point out, both issuesissues of race and gender, that isreceive quite a bit of popular attention in our current culture climate. In fact, the issues have been made so big that they are difficult to pack in any one argument.Nowadays, so many things become each an issue of race or an issue of gender, it is difficult to discern which issues lawfully need to be addressed by these isms and which have exactly been lumped into them by sheer popular appeal (i.e., race and gender issues are the raw(a) hot-button It topicif any discussion is going to occur on the large mainstream popular platform of the media, one of the two had better be involved). However, through all of this seeming social desire to focus so some(prenominal) on gender and race, the fact that the two can also hybridise and create a whole new array of complicated issues for a someone and a culture seems to have been totally missed.That last slender bit is my own digression, and not part of Crenshaws argument this is only when what struck me as so entirely shocking. While weve been so caught up discussing race and gender, weve completely missed the discussion of race with gender. Crenshaw has a superfluity of information and examples to cite which show how race with gender has been entirely unattended by everyone, including the antiracists (who predominantly serve black men) and the feminists (who predominantly serve face cloth women).Here, Crenshaw further contains the overall argument into speaking strictly in term of violence against women, and how violence against women of color is treated and viewed as being the selfsame(prenominal) as violence against women in general, completely ignoring the deeper-lying complications of layers of different of social structures which allude women of color that DO NOT affect whit e women (something that, if women of color are to be treated in a way that is beneficial and acknowledging of them and their plights, simply cannot be ignored).Again, Crenshaw b peal so much evidence to the table that her point rings loud and clear the separate and distinct plights of women of color are not recognized by any other vocal group as being anything noteworthy. And this attitude further perpetuates this belief of their own negligible experiences in the minds of those very same women of color. And so is the vicious cycle.I found Crenshaws leaven to be extremely culturally important and incredibly relevant. For as much as antiracist and feminist groups preach about Otherness, they too are chargeable of Othering in order to further their own causes (or, worse than Othering, ripe flat-out ignoring).Any hard-hitting kind of identity politic must be informed by all aspects of a persons identity not just race, and not just gender (or, for that matter, class, religion, sexual orientation, age, profession, education, employment history, disability, proclivity to ticker disease, or anything else), but a combination of all the various intricacies that creates a persons identity. To separate one out makes a person no less of the other, and the only way to truly address them is to do so in a way that accommodates how they all come together to form their own separate and unique experience. Perhaps this is where the postmodernists really got it overcompensate identity is fluid, after all.