Kimberly Williams Crenshaw

Exactly two African American men came to the Capitol, and one was Luke Charles Harris, with whom I later founded the African American Policy Forum.

It was just stunning how little was known about the role that black women had historically played

And even creating the cause of action called sexual harassment.

Many of the early plaintiffs were black women.

Black women have experienced sexual harassment at work since we arrived on these shores.

So the sensibility that my being an employee in this house, in this firm, or in this governmental office does not give you license to assume that I am sexually available to you.

That's very much a part of black women's consciousness.

and history.

It's what Rosa Parks understood.

It's why she got her start defending Recy Taylor, who was a black woman who was gang raped.

So our whole history of the civil rights movement and fighting anti-blackness had this gender dimension, but it wasn't one that was told to people.

So when Anita Hill came forward, a lot of black people saw her as just representing white women's issues.

And therefore, we weren't able to stay together.

The same division that made it difficult for large numbers of African Americans to see in Anita Hill, a black woman, I saw in the white women's vote.

So majority of white women did not vote for Anita Hill.

They did not see in her a woman who

who could constitute a repudiation of all of the deeply patriarchal and gendered dimensions of this MAGA movement and candidate from the horrific things that the current occupant of the White House had said about women, what you can do to them,

And the fact that women had lost the reproductive freedom.

But she did not and could not represent that or carry a gender forward commitment through the election.

So I call this intersectional failure.