Unit 9 - Critical Race Theory/Intersectionality

Question 1

double consciousness

Answer 1

Du Bois’ term, Harris
- racial minorities in the U.S. have 2 identities (split identity): who they are as a POC and who they are as an American
- white people have an integrated identity

Question 2

whiteness as property

Answer 2

Harris
- legal mandates that remain constant over a large period of time shape social institutions
- these institutions shape cultural expectations and identities
- in a society whose legal framework has treated black people as commodities to be bought and sold, that legal history will inevitably shape social structures and cultural expectations and identities into the present

Question 3

white privilege

Answer 3

Harris
- comes from a history of laws and legal decisions that treat whiteness as an exclusive property
- describes the systematic advantages that white people enjoy over racial minorities regardless of whether they describe themselves as racist or not
- privilege that subordinates blacks

Question 4

race

Answer 4

Harris
- legal fiction designed to exclude and keep a historically oppressed group “in its place”
- race does exist, and there is a biological basis - race as experienced in the U.S. is a legal fiction and an ideological construct designed to keep one group in subordination, another in a dominant social position with all the privileges that entails

Question 5

color-blindness

Answer 5

Harris
- perpetuates an unjust status quo by making itself blind to those social dynamics
- the social norms that flow from social and legal structures constructed by white privilege seem natural and fair to those who are white - its well-worn practices of domination, now social custom, render structural racism invisible

Question 6

matrix of domination

Answer 6

Collins
- grid with intersecting lines - each represents a different type of subordination - racial, gender, citizenship status, sexual orientation, disability, etc.
- she’s most interested in race and gender, black feminist thought
- certain types of resistance suffered by minorities - they criss-cross - possible to be hit from both sides

Question 7

black feminist intellectual

Answer 7

Collins
- broad definition - novelists, blues singers, activists, social theorists, other scholars
- there is authority in anyone who has thought deeply about the experiences of being black and female in a white-dominated U.S.
- job = to “articulate” what experience already teaches black women
- sharpen consciousness among black women
- dialogical process: experience gives rise to thought, thought sharpens and defines experience, and helps direct it into political action
- the critical perspective of black feminism remains engaged

Question 8

intersectionality

Answer 8

Crenshaw
- goal = a full recognition of the humanness of those different than the majority
- dignity and human treatment of all, wholeness
- legal theory in regard to cases of legal discrimination
- example: woman that sued a company that denied her a job - got away with in because they employed women AND black people, but not black women