Convincing of the Urgency of Intersectionality

Without a frame to contextualize the view, one can be blind to a dead body in plain sight. In her 2016 TED Talk “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that because the public has no “frame” or point of view that includes women of color in discussions of racial and gender discrimination, women of color are ignored, and that has led to unseen prejudice. To combat this problem, Crenshaw creates the concept of intersectionality, a frame that would include both race and gender, to aid women of color. The UCLA law professor and pioneering race theorist (TED) recognizes that she is faced with a hefty task: she must not only elucidate this problem’s existence to an unaware crowd but also convince her audience that her proposed solution is badly needed and that they should care. Crenshaw takes this on with gusto by bringing the audience to care about this exigent issue through the stories of real, forgotten women lost to violence and by guiding the audience forward to linguistic and mnemonic activism.

Recognizing that active audience participation will be essential in order for her audience to not dismiss her argument as crying wolf, Crenshaw opens her TED Talk with a participatory poll. The activity entailed members of the audience sitting down when they heard a name of someone killed by the police that they did not recognize. Crenshaw points out the devastating discrepancy between the recognition of black male victims and the recognition of black female victims (Crenshaw, 0:12). In witnessing the limited number of people aware of the female names themselves, the audience isn’t simply taking what the rhetor says as fact – they can see that very few in the audience know the names of the black female lives taken by police violence. By stopping the activity at only four audience members standing, Crenshaw successfully communicates that something is occurring to remove black women's deaths at the hands of the police from public consciousness. Crenshaw points out that she has performed this experiment with a variety of audiences across the nation, repeating “I’ve done it with” (2:23) before naming an audience – scientists, civil rights activists, even Congresspeople – and saying that the conclusion on each occasion was the same (2:55). No matter what the constituency, including civil rights activists, people have been conditioned subliminally to forget the names of black women--even victims of police brutality.

Now that the audience knows that the problem exists, Crenshaw must prove that intersectionality is necessary, and she pursues a line of rhetorical questioning and anecdotal evidence to explain the importance of the intersectionality frame. Crenshaw begins by describing what framing is, calling upon the knowledge of “communications experts” (3:25) to assert credibility in saying that a frame is a point of view from which one integrates new knowledge on an issue (3:48). She then simply says, “now, you might ask, why does a frame matter?” (3:55). An attentive audience would notice that Crenshaw previewed the answer to this question moments earlier, when she said that when people lack a frame wide enough to cover all relevant topics, information is lost (3:48). Is there a frame wide enough to accommodate black women? Crenshaw’s answer to that implied rhetorical question is a resounding ‘no’. One would assume that issues affecting black people also affect black women and that issues affecting women would also affect black women (Crenshaw, 4:17), but these frames are separate and too narrow to encapsulate the struggles of black women in their entirety. Black women specifically fall through the cracks, and Crenshaw argues that a new, more inclusive frame is necessary to combat this problem. Crenshaw goes on to describe intersectionality, a frame that includes both race and gender in the consideration of an issue, and applies it to the case of Emma DeGraffenreid. DeGraffenreid, a black woman, went to court with the claim that a potential employer had denied her an opportunity on the basis of race and gender discrimination; her case was dismissed because the employer had previously employed white women and black men, and thusly the judge was unable to see the issue (5:33). This anecdote makes the break in logic caused by a lack of frame obvious – the court considered gender and race discrimination mutually exclusively and didn’t assemble the truth that the treatment of women of color like DeGraffenreid in this situation was unjust (6:43).

Crenshaw then features several powerful examples of black female victims of violence, using the similar feelings and suffering behind them to get the audience emotionally invested in this exigent situation. She points out that black women of all ages and walks of life have been killed in all sorts of locations and situations. Crenshaw hammers this home with a dense forest of repetition, saying “they’ve been killed” (12:17) fourteen times and repeating “to death” (12:33) and “while black” (13:00) two and three times respectively. These women have been killed in an assortment of grotesque ways, “shot” (12:33) and “stomped” (12:36) and “suffocated to death” (12:40) in front of their families (12:30), all in unique but mundane circumstances like being “on the cell phone” (13:19) and “laughing with friends” (13:20). The audience, who themselves have experienced normal situations like these but perhaps never the horror tied to them, can personally connect with the loss of strangers and see the need to stop the senseless murder. The emotions evoked through this body of anecdotes does well to make the audience care that this issue be addressed.

After this point in the talk and to the end, Crenshaw uses more inclusive language than before – the audience understands the issue and has joined her emotionally, so she takes the opportunity to pursue group action. The word “we” (14:29) and the phrase “to bear witness” (14:29) are abundant in the final paragraphs of this speech. “We” (14:29) implies that the audience has become part of a bigger whole within society combatting the erasing of women of color from public thought. “To bear witness” (14:29) acts as a sort of weight, appearing at weddings, when one attends to witness the sanctity of love, and appearing in courts, where one bears witness to uphold truth. By saying we must bear witness, (14:29) Crenshaw gives the moment incredible importance as though having been educated on the horror of police violence against black women and their being forgotten means that the audience has a duty to speak out. This is capitalized on when Abby Dobson sings “say her name” and the audience actively says the names of these women so that they will not disappear. The song, inclusive language, and use of sacred phrase “bear witness” (14:29) ends the talk on an emotional note, sealing the audience’s interest and implying their duty to help going forward.

In using audience participation, anecdotes, and inclusive language in her TED Talk, Kimberlé Crenshaw not only educates her audience on the existence of intersectional identities below the public radar but also evokes their sympathy for those women of color struggling against a system that has forgotten them. Perhaps after the rousing final note of her speech, the audience would be compelled to spread the word and greater understanding of intersectionality so that these women no longer are left by the wayside, and so that police brutality against black women would be made visible.