Devon W. Carbado

INTERSECTIONALITY: Mapping the Movements of a Theory.

Very few theories have generated the kind of interdisciplinary and global engagement that marks the intellectual history of intersectionality. Yet, there has been very little effort to reflect upon precisely how intersectionality has moved across time, disciplines, issues, and geographic and national boundaries. Our failure to attend to intersectionalitys movement has limited our ability to see the theory in places in which it is already doing work and to imagine other places to which the theory might be taken. Addressing these questions, this special issue reflects upon the genesis of intersectionality, engages some of the debates about its scope and theoretical capacity, marks some of its disciplinary and global travels, and explores the future trajectory of the theory. To do so, the volume includes academics from across the disciplines and from outside of the United States. Their respective contributions help us to understand how intersectionality has moved and to broaden our sense of where the theory might still go.

Race to the Top of the Corporate Ladder: What Minorities Do When They Get There

Racing to the top of the corporate hierarchy is difficult, no matter how qualified or capable the candidate. Producing more widgets than ones competitors is not enough. Negotiating the political landscape of the institution is also required. More specifically, individual corporate officers have to be appeased, powerful interest groups have to be co-opted and made allies, and competitors have to be undermined or eliminated. The more bureaucratic the organization and the more opaque the promotion process, the more important this institutional game to climbing the corporate ladder. This chapter identifies the kind of racial minorities or racial types who are likely to play this game well and, consequently, race to the top of the corporation. It then explains why these racial types might not have the racial commitment, or feel institutionally empowered, to lift other people of color as they climb the corporate ladder.

Afterword: (E)racing Education.

Critical Race Theory(CRT) emerged in a context of protest—more specifically, protest about the lack of diversity at Harvard Law School.2 Significantly, this protest challenged not only the racial identity of the faculty (which was —and remains— largely White and male) but also the racial quality of the curriculum, that is, the extent to which the curriculum marginalized concerns about race and racial equality. Over the past decade, improvements have been made on both fronts. Indeed, in 1998, Harvard Law School hired Lani Guinier as the first tenured woman of color on the faculty. And currently, the law school offers at least two courses that directly and substantively engage the relationship among race, law, and society. I should be clear to point out that I do not invoke these developments to suggest that the battle over race and legal education has been won, and that CRT is the victor. I mean simply to point out that, even at America’s most elite and traditional site for legal education, Harvard Law School, there has been some change, which CRT has helped to effectuate.3 Given the political and institutional genesis of CRT, I am pleased and excited that scholars in the field of education are engaging our work.4 This could be the beginning of a wonderful and productive relationship.5 As with any relationship, there are issues to be worked out and tensions to be negotiated. The short of it, though, is that I believe we can help each other. My very limited aim here is to provide an indication of how we might do so, employing the essays in this volume as a point of departure. That is, in the context of commenting on these essays, I will highlight how they use and add to CRT, and I will suggest what else (my own perspective on) CRT might add to them. Cumulatively, the essays make the case for what I will call racecentricity—an explicitly race conscious approach to education. Informing each essay is the notion that race is a grammar that structures the experiences

Yellow by Law

Over the past decade, scholars have paid increasing attention to Japanese American constitutional history. For the most part, this literature focuses on the United States government’s decision during World War II to intern people of Japanese ancestry. This body of work is designed to demonstrate the extent to which, and precisely how, the U.S. Supreme Court acquiesced in various aspects of internment—curfew, evacuation, and detention—and to reveal the continuities between that acquiescence and current legal doctrine and social practices.

THE INTERSECTIONAL FIFTH BLACK WOMAN

In 1989, Kimberle Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics , an article that drew explicitly on Black feminist criticism, and challenged three prevailing frameworks: 1) the male-centered nature of antiracist politics, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual Black men; 2) the White-centered nature of feminist theorizing, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women; and 3) the “single-axis”/sex or race-centered nature of antidiscrimination regimes, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women and Black men. Crenshaw demonstrated how people within the same social group (e.g., African Americans) are differentially vulnerable to discrimination as a result of other intersecting axes of disadvantage, such as gender, class, or sexual orientation. This essay builds on that insight by articulating a performative conceptualization of race. It assumes that a judge is sympathetic to intersectionality and thus recognizes that Black women are often disadvantaged based on the intersection of their race and sex, among other social factors. This essay asks: How is that judge likely to respond to a case in which a firm promotes four Black women but not the fifth? The judge could conclude that there is no discrimination because the firm promoted four people (Black women) with the same intersectional identity as the fifth (a Black woman). We argue that this evidentiary backdrop should not preclude a finding of discrimination. It is plausible that our hypothetical firm utilized racially associated ways of being—performative criteria (self presentation, accent, demeanor, conformity, dress, and hair style)—to differentiate among and between the Black women. The firm might have drawn an intra-group, or intra-intersectional, line between the fifth Black women and the other four based on the view that the fifth Black woman is “too Black.” We describe the ease with which institutions can draw such lines and explain why doing so might constitute impermissible discrimination. Our aim is to broaden the conceptual terms upon which we frame both social categories and discrimination.

From Stopping Black People to Killing Black People: The Fourth Amendment Pathways to Police Violence

2014 to 2016 likely will go down as a significant if not watershed moment in the history of U.S. race relations. Police killing of African Americans has engendered further conversations about race and policing. Yet, in most of the discussions about these tragic deaths, little attention has been paid to a significant dimension of the police violence problem: the legalization of racial profiling in Fourth Amendment law. This legalization of racial profiling is not a sideline or peripheral feature of Fourth Amendment law. It is embedded in the analytical structure of the doctrine in ways that enable police officers to force engagements with African Americans with little or no basis. The frequency of these engagements exposes African Americans not only to the violence of ongoing police surveillance, contact, and social control but also to the violence of serious bodily injury and death. Which is to say, Fourth Amendment law facilitates the space between stopping black people and killing black people. This Article demonstrates precisely how by employing a series of hypotheticals to reveal the ways in which the extraordinary violence police officers often use against Africans Americans can grow out of the ordinary police interactions Fourth Amendment law empowers police officers to stage.