Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

The struggle against patriarchy and racism must be substantively robust and inextricably intertwined.

I have a wonderful, diverse, and young staff at the AAPF who pretty much work around the clock trying to figure out how we promote the idea that social justice requires us to be intersectional in our thinking and in our scope of vision.

If you don't have a lens that's been trained to look at how various forms of discrimination come together, you're unlikely to develop a set of policies that will be as inclusive as they need to be.

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.

Having a monolithic view of feminism is suffocating.

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.

All too often, girls are ignored because their challenges aren't thought to be as serious as those faced by boys.

The empowerment of black women constitutes the empowerment of our entire community.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

When you ask people to name victims of police brutality, for the most part, nobody will give you a woman's name.

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

Our democracy cannot be left in the hands of those who would rather watch or participate in a train wreck than stop it.

Some of the worst racist tragedies in history have been perfectly legal.

We are a society that has been structured from top to bottom by race. You don't get beyond that by deciding not to talk about it anymore. It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again.

Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.

To never think about race means that it doesn't really shape your life, or more specifically, the race that you have is not a burden to you.