Kimberly Williams Crenshaw

And it's the ways that black women have not been often seen as representing a set of interests and issues that

a forward racial justice agenda.

And similarly, you know, Black women have not been embraced by the majority of women.

This failure is not only damaging to people of color and to women, it's damaging to our entire republic.

This is what we're seeing unfold at this moment.

Oh, I would say accountability through accurate remembering of our history.

There are two things that jumped to mind at this moment.

I remember when I was at Girls Boys Nation, and this is a program in which 317-year-olds are brought to Washington, D.C., to learn leadership and to become patriots of our country.

And I remember they took us to President Washington's plantation.

And they tell us what happened there.

And what stands out is what is unsaid.

The life stories of the people who were owned by our president, who worked those plantations, who served these presidents.

And sometimes that service was material.

Sometimes that service was, in the case of Jefferson, sexual.

And this is all unwritten material.

in the celebratory history that we want to tell.

And efforts to recalibrate, to incorporate that, to acknowledge the fact that if there is a mother in this country, it's black women.

Because it's through our bodies that the wealth of the nation was able to launch the United States as the global power it actually became.

And so later in our history, when Thurgood Marshall was thinking about how he would engage the bicentennial, he wrote a piece, he gave a speech that was later published, and in it,

He basically said when he thinks about celebrating the country we've become, when he thinks about the rights that we take for granted, when he thinks about the legacy that we should be celebrating, it's not what happened in 1776.