Quotes from Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

We might have to broaden our scope of how we think about where women are vulnerable, because different things make different women vulnerable.

Ideally, schools should be supportive environments for students. Unfortunately, zero-tolerance policies tend to funnel vulnerable students out of schools and into prisons, low-income jobs, and poverty.

Having a monolithic view of feminism is suffocating.

It's hard not to question whether the harsh verdict of Winnie Mandela is a reflection of discomfort with women warriors or, more broadly, with the militant ethos that ultimately became a foil for the popularized representation of Nelson Mandela as the open-armed father of a non-racial nation.

What many people, I think, don't really understand is how much their rights really turn on the interpretation of the Supreme Court.

Antiracists must acknowledge that patriarchy has long been a weapon of racism and cannot sit comfortably in any politic of racial transformation.

When people talked about O.J. Simpson being race-neutral, that was a race card. It just meant we don't think of him as black. But race-neutral is just like flesh-tone Band-aids. It's not neutral; it's white.

Families, community leaders, and others must create the public will to address the challenges facing black girls and other girls of color as well by listening to them, valuing their experiences, and becoming actively involved in creating policies and innovative programs that promote their well-being.

We have to move back to the idea that education isn't about teaching people to bow to rigid rules. That's not what democracy is about.

We're never going to come to a moment where all of us who claim to be feminists can agree about what the first priority of feminism is.

People with problems are not problem people.

We must begin to tell black women's stories because, without them, we cannot tell the story of black men, white men, white women, or anyone else in this country. The story of black women is critical because those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.

We must all stand against both the continual, systematic, and structural racial inequities that normalize daily violence as well as against extreme acts of racial terror.

The way we imagine discrimination or disempowerment often is more complicated for people who are subjected to multiple forms of exclusion. The good news is that intersectionality provides us a way to see it.

When we advocate for violence against women to be eliminated on campuses, we say, 'Well, actually, it's not just on campuses we have to worry about.' We might have to worry about high schools. We might have to worry about police precincts and cars. We might have to worry about public housing.

I think that the same kind of openness and fluidity and willingness to interrogate power that we, as feminists, expect from men in alliance on questions of class should also be the expectation that women of colour can rely upon with our white feminist allies.

When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose.

Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity - whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics, or white wealth - to justify the brutal assaults against black people of all genders.

Sexism isn't a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. It doesn't happen to black and white women the same way.

Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.

There are many, many different kinds of intersectional exclusions - not just black women but other women of color. Not just people of color, but people with disabilities. Immigrants. LGBTQ people. Indigenous people.

Black women's intersectional experiences of racism and sexism have been a central but forgotten dynamic in the unfolding of feminist and antiracist agendas.

While white women and men of color also experience discrimination, all too often their experiences are taken as the only point of departure for all conversations about discrimination. Being front and center in conversations about racism or sexism is a complicated privilege that is often hard to see.

Intersectionality is not easy. It's not as though the existing frameworks that we have - from our culture, our politics, or our law - automatically lead people to being conversant and literate in intersectionality.