Reconceptualizing Race

Kimberle Crenshaw at Tedwomen 2016

At the same time feminist historians were striving to clarify gender theory, women of color were looking for a way to integrate gender and race issues.  Kimberle Crenshaw wrote, “Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur mutually exclusive terrains.”¹ Crenshaw gave compelling examples to show how treating gender issues separately from race had hampered efforts to deal with domestic and sexual violence in communities of color.  She proposed the “intersectionality” of race and gender as a way of “reconceptualizing race as a coalition
between men and women of color.^" 2  In a similar way David Roediger observed that while the Marxist theoretical framework was a valuable tool for social historians, it was not enough on its own for analyzing race issues.  He demonstrated how the creation of the working class was so intersected with the development of racism in American that it could not be treated as a separate historical phenomenon.  Tracing the roots of racism to the need of white workers to emphasize their “whiteness” in order to get ahead, Roediger concluded, “One major problem with the traditional Marxist approach is that what it takes as its central task – pointing out the economic dimension of racism – is already done by those in the political mainstream.”³

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[1] Kimberle Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241.

[2] Kimberle Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins, 1299.

[3] David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007), 8.