Rhetorical Analysis of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Speech “The Urgency of Intersectionality”

George Floyd, Freddie Gray, Daunte Wright, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner. You most likely recognize most, if not all of, these names. But what happens to our individual and collective memories when the victims of police brutality are women? Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights lawyer, critical race theorist, and minority advocate, noticed that despite Black women also being killed by police, the media (and so the populace) has focused primarily on Black male victims. In her speech “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” she argues that due to our society’s lack of a framework for intersectional groups, equality advocates remain blind to the ways in which police brutality impacts women of color. To convey her argument successfully, Crenshaw employs repetition in the forms of anaphora and epistrophe, which serves to further the emotional impact of her message of intersectionality. 

Crenshaw most prominently uses a form of repetition called anaphora, which describes a repeating phrase at the beginning of each sentence to emphasize each point she makes, furthering the emotional impact of the words that follow.  She starts her speech by asking her audience to stand, and to then sit when they do not recognize a name. When she notices only four audience members are left standing, she reveals that the last few names have belonged to Black women killed by police, demonstrating her audience’s (and so too the country’s) lack of exposure to the police brutality experienced by Black women. To demonstrate the urgency of her message, Crenshaw explains that she has done this with “women’s rights organizations… civil rights groups… progressive members of Congress,” and more (Crenshaw 2:16), all of whom failed to recognize the Black women, and all of whom she introduces with the phrase “I’ve done it with,” (2:15). By repeating this key phrase, she tells her current audience of the numerous times she has seen the same, disheartening result, and illustrates just how diverse her audiences have been. The fact that she obviously practiced this part of the speech and has performed it dozens of times demonstrates just how confident she was that her audience would not be familiar with the recent police brutality of Black women, further strengthening her message on the importance of intersectionality.

Crenshaw also employs anaphora most prominently when she describes the everyday situations in which Black women have been killed by police, repeating the phrase “They have been,” (12:18) before such innocuous places as being “killed in their living rooms…. [and] in their cars,” (12:19) and in such violent, dehumanizing ways as being “stomped to death… [and] suffocated to death,” (12:34). She highlights just how often, and how horrendously, Black women are killed by police, while repeating “killed” to signify the weight of each death. Her audience, from what they have been told, should rightfully be distraught. No one deserves such an end. In this manner, Crenshaw intends not only to raise awareness of Black female victims of police brutality, but also to create a new way of seeing and remembering both the crimes and the police who inflicted these crimes. The audience should now be easily persuaded into shouting the names of Black women killed by police (as they are told to do at the end of the speech, and which they comply with), thus creating a framework in their minds to understand and fight for the intersectional groups that continue to be marginalized invisibly, a framework that Crenshaw has worked hard to create through repeating emotionally charged statements.

Crenshaw also relies upon repetition at the end of her clauses and sentences, using a technique known as epistrophe, to carve into her audience’s memory who is being fought for: Black women. Crenshaw employs epistrophe to create a mental framework in which her audience can understand the abuse that Black women face, due to their intersectional, marginalized identities. Her first use of epistrophe in her speech displays the importance of a framework: “These women’s names have slipped through our consciousness because there are no frames for us to see them… to remember them… [or] to hold them,” (3:30). This is followed by a display of the institutional significance of frames: “As a consequence, reporters don’t lead with them, policymakers don’t think about them, and politicians aren’t encouraged or demanded that they speak to them,” (3:41). These two subsequent quotes relay the imperative nature of creating frames for intersectional groups; otherwise, the deaths of Black women (i.e., “them”) at the hands of police may continue to be an unnoticed phenomenon. This leads into a quote later in her speech, where Crenshaw states “if we can’t see a problem, we can’t fix a problem,” a short statement that demonstrates to her audience the importance of a framework for Black women’s rights (18:05). In finally seeing the struggles that Black women face, her audience can spread the word, protesting on behalf of the recently forgotten Black women to ensure that their lives and deaths retain power.

Crenshaw knows that heavy topics such as Black women being killed by police must be tackled head-on. One cannot speak of police brutality without naming the victims, nor will the impact of such a gruesome act be truly appreciated without facing it with blunt language. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses her platform, in a time of rebirth for civil rights advocacy, to illustrate that, while Black victims and female victims are being fought for, intersectional groups such as Black women are being forgotten. In her 2016 speech “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” she uses anaphora and epistrophe to ensure that Black women are not forgotten due to their intersectional identities.  Crenshaw names the victims of police that have gone overlooked to demonstrate the urgency of protesting and the continuance of such unjust deaths. Her use of such rhetoric is successful for her audience, as by the end of her speech, they are shouting out the names of Black women killed by police along with her. Crenshaw employs such emotional retellings as a way to illuminate the often invisible plight for Black women, and does so in the interest of equality and advocacy quite effectively.