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In the spring, when the coronavirus outbreak was concentrated mostly in the liberal Northeastwith a particularly vicious assault on New York Cityconservatives balked at the idea of economic aid and mandatory mask-wearing. President Donald Trump didnt even believe that the city was running low on personal protective equipment for its beleaguered health care workers. Why should the rest of the country be forced to live by so-called New York rules, was the question that some conservative intellectuals posed as they distilled the resentment of the Republican masses. It was frustrating to watch, since clearly the virulence of the virus meant that no region would be spared. And yet, I found some solace when I imagined that once the virus appeared in the states mostly run by Republicans, red state leaders and their constituents would realize the error of their ways and quickly dial back their indifference to mandatory public health in orders to save lives.

Wrong again!

Fast forward eight months. More than 250,000 people have died, daily infection rates are the highest on the planet, and the possibility of Republicans taking the gravity of the science seriously seems like a drug-induced dream.

The second wave that every public health expert told us would come crashing down in the fall and winter, overwhelming our hospitals and killing thousands of people each week, has arrived. And yet, despite the dire straits that the entire country is in, and will be in for the foreseeable future, many Republican elected leaders across the country have followed their presidential role model and completely abdicated responsibility.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a clear way to combat the rate of infection as the world awaits a vaccine: Pay business owners and workers to stay home, make mask wearing mandatory, and restrict activities that are known superspreader events. But the so-called most powerful country in the world (declining fast) made an inhumane political calculation. Whats a couple of hundred thousand deaths in the name of keeping the economy and the Republican party robust? Of course, this has led to a predictable outcome: The United States is now at the intersection of economic calamity and mass death. But as infections skyrocket and the bodies pile up, it appears that the Republican Party has gone from being indifferent to the suffering and death toactually embracingit.

Trump has been stunningly indifferent to the death toll and instead has engaged in a bender of baseless claims of voter fraud while blocking president-elect Joe Biden from getting a running start on a comprehensive, scientifically-based, public health response and vaccine distribution plan. Meanwhile, Trumps counterparts on the state-level have behaved just as badly. On Wednesday, the White House offered Republicans a deadly playbook. After the Senate adjourned for the Thanksgiving recess without passing legislation for desperately needed economic aid (Enjoy your vacation! Well just be over here dying!), Stephen Moore, one of Trumps economic advisers parroted the same line from the spring, implying that all this suffering and death is simply a blue state problem; everything is just fine in red states.

Dear reader, everything is not fine in the red states.

According to the New York Times, the top five states with the worst outbreaks are run by Republicans. In North Dakota, the situation isespecially dire. Approximately one out of 1,000 resident has died from the coronavirus. Infections spiraled out of control and Republican Gov. Doug Burgum finally implemented a mask mandate, eight months into the public health crisis. By the time he took action, there were only 18 ICU hospital beds available in the entire state and nearly 800 people had died.

The virus is also out of control in South Dakota. Gov. Kristi Noem, who could certainly medal in the best Trump-like response olympics, has downplayed the seriousness of the threat, denied that masks work despite the mounting scientific evidence, and has essentially abandoned South Dakotans to fend for themselves. So far, more than 700 deaths have been reported there. The state, which is home to just 885,000 people, has the highest test positivity rate in the country at 60 percent. In Michigan, which is led by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmire, some Republicans in the state legislature proposed impeaching her for the crime ofimplementing coronavirus restrictions.(When theyre not busy protesting life-saving measures, the Michigan Republicans can be found at the White House, trying to help Trump overturn the will of the voters in their own state.)

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott infamously opened up his state much earlier than public health officials advised and tried to ban cities from implementing their own mask mandates before relenting and ordering a statewide mandate in July. Even as infection numbers trended in a dangerous direction, Abbott resisted another a lockdown. This strategy has led to disastrous results. In El Paso, Texas, the situation has become so dire that local officials hired inmates from the county jailat $2 an hour to help move bodies from overflowing morgues. Hospitals are so choked with patients that health care workers are rationing care and sending patients to other facilities. In an effort to slow the spread, city officials implemented a shut-down order. But a group of restaurants and the State of Texas took the city to court, where the order was thrown out. Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is being investigated for a litany of white collar crimes, praised the decision saying its important that we do not shutdown the economy ever again.

Their economic policies with generous tax cuts to the wealthy have yet to make prosperity trickle down to the masses, but the selfish antics of the GOP have certainly reached the wider public. With Thanksgiving right around the corner, public health officials and some elected officials are warning people to stay home and avoid large indoor gatheringslest dinner turns into a superspreader event. But because the GOP has weaponized every facet of American life into a cudgel for their ridiculous culture wars, there was a revolt among conservatives. Why? you may reasonably ask. Because being told to stay home is an infringement on one of the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving: the right to spread disease. After all, the Pilgrims also shared their germs with unsuspecting Native people at the very first Thanksgiving.

How dare the government take away the right to accidentally kill grandma while eating flavorless potatoes with 25 of family members? Sensible people will skip big celebrations, but conservatives are planning giant indoor celebrations that will certainly lead to more death, with the collateral benefit of owning the libs. One looks in vain for a single responsible Republican leader with enough sway, not to mention courage to distance him or herself from Trump, to convince these people that their lives and the lives of their loved ones are worth more than sticking it to liberals.

While the Democratic Party has had its public fumbles (California Gov. Newsom had to apologize for attending an indoor dinner at a high-end restaurant) and have sowed confusion with restrictions, the Republican Partys inaction shows the level of disdain for the people who didnt vote for them and even those who did. (The virus is shockingly non-partisan.) Despite their outward messaging of being the party of freedom, of a strong economy, and ardent pro-life policies, their dereliction of duty has revealed them as the party of mass death. After a quarter million lives lostand many more to cometheir debased version of freedom is akin to a pitch from a crooked salesperson: For the low, low price of your life, you too can be free.

Originally posted here:
The GOP's COVID Response: Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death - Mother Jones

File photo by Stephanie Costello

On any given day, a sizeable band of hardy swimmers take to the sea across Dublins riviera: in Dollymount, Sandymount, South Wall, Seapoint, Vico Road, Hawk Cliff, White Rock.

For many Dubliners, these are the names of summer afternoons, but for this disparate group of water worshipers, they are locations of choice in both summer and winter, come rain or shine.

The benefits of cold-water treatment are legendary. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans used it as part of their bathing regime, and hydrotherapy was revived by the Victorians and later used to treat mental-health issues and alcoholism.

In fact, Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Bill W. to his friends was apparently a proponent, and more recently, an as-yet-unpublished study by Cambridge University researchers suggested that it might help protect the brain against degenerative diseases like dementia.

With lockdown, a whole new generation of adherents to the benefits of a daily short, sharp cold-water endorphin shock mean that jostling for space to dry and change, while keeping a respectable two-metre distance, can be a challenge.

But in Sandycove, home of the famous Forty Foot, a new struggle is emerging. Its not between male and female bathers that battle was fought over 40 years ago. Nor is it the regulars and locals versus the day-trippers that is more evident at the weekend, when the locals get their fix early, and then concede the space to the hordes.

This new struggle is between new money new arrivals and old-money seasoned swimmers. Specifically, its between the people who use trendy, pricey brand-name changing robes, and those who think that flaunting money in that way is gauche, even offensive.

This is, of course, not really about the robes. Its about socio-economic changes taking place in the neighbourhood.

Given the Irish geography, climate and weather, an item of clothing that facilitates a quick change while in public, and in the open, and possibly in the wind and rain too, sounds like a winner.

It is an improvement on the traditional habit of trying to hide your modesty behind a towel or a dressing gown. But the changing practice of choice, at least in Sandycove, has become a cultural weather vane.

While taking my daily dip one recent morning, a printed notice pinned to the wall caught my attention: This is a dryrobe free area, it read, referring to a specific brand of changing robe.

Being a blow-in, I had wanted to fit in with the locals, and so I had been having discussions with my wife about buying her such a garment.

That is, until I saw the price, which was north of 150. And she, in no uncertain terms, told me that her uncle, who had swum in the Forty Foot every day of his life, would have scorned such an item of clothing.

The requirement for a swimming costume since the 1970s was one thing, but if you are hardy enough to swim in the sea, you are hardy enough not to need an expensive and flashy coat to keep you dry and warm.

The dryrobe yes, the brand-name is styled with a lower-case d is the item of clothing of choice (other brands exist, though seemingly not in Sandycove), and this printed A4 notice uncovered a lot more about social tensions in the neighbourhood than any voluminous (and shower-resistant) changing robe could cover.

In the traditional, old-money corner, is the tradition of sea-swimming. For decades considered to be a pastime to be enjoyed in the company of your own sex, the Forty Foot was for males, and around the headland, the Sandycove for females and families.

Wealth, as with semi-naked bodies, was not for flaunting in public. That all changed with the action by the Dublin City Womens Invasionary Force in 1974, which the said-uncle attended and is visible in RT footage of the day, and since then mixed swimming is the norm.

Similarly, it seems that decadent public expressions of wealth which might have been previously socially unacceptable are now more prevalent, and with this, the seeds for culture wars in suburbia were sown.

In the new-money corner, certain upwardly mobile youngsters in their thirties and forties (young for this neighbourhood), see having gone wild-swimming as the new dinner-party boast or that it will be when dinner parties are allowed again.

For them, the outlay of 150 on the robe is a worthwhile investment, which goes far beyond the useful physical garment, but is a uniform a symbol providing what Pierre Bourdieu called social recognition and a statement of belonging.

This divide here is superficially economic, but at its heart is cultural and perhaps territorial too.

Its like when someone wins the lottery, and suddenly has money but not the social status they desire, so they buy expensive items to signify belonging to that higher social class they aspire to.

It might have been a pocket watch when Sandycove was built, an outsized mobile telephone a decade after mixed swimming had been finally allowed, or a branded, all-weather changing robe today.

After four years living in Sandycove, I am undecided I dont want to be part of suburbias culture war and the weather really isnt really that bad. Also, 150 can go a long way feeding a family for a week and providing a formerly homeless person with a moving-on pack from Crosscare as they move into a new home.

While cold dips were once considered an antidote to alcoholism, nowadays this activity encourages a post-dip drink, alcoholic or otherwise. In these Covid-19 times, whether you culturally identify as a wild-swimmer or a sea-swimmer, a splasher, or a dipper, or indeed a sceptic, or a non-swimmer, perhaps the warm glow of charity might be the better course of action?

For those of you considering taking part in the annual Christmas Day dip, a major charity fundraiser, maybe you can do both. A bathing suit, nowadays, is advisable. A changing robe? Well, that is up to you.

Read more:
Paul: On the Sandycove Swim-Robe Wars - Dublin Inquirer

(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

From a global pandemic and nationwide protests to a contested presidential election, this year seems tailor-made to expose Americas partisan fault lines. Those hoping for a blue or red wave to unite the country on election night were undoubtedly disappointed. What the returns revealed instead was a divided electorate.

Even before the election results underscored Americas political gulf, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her faith became something of a national Rorschach test for where Americans line up on the partisan spectrum. Some viewed Barretts Catholicism, and her involvement with the charismatic Christian community, People of Praise, as tantamount to Margaret Atwoods dystopian novel, The Handmaids Tale. For others, Barretts faith was evidence of her character and integritya signal that shed live up to her oath to impartially discharge the dutiesof the office.

What explains this divergence?

The data suggest that our national divide is deeper than just knee-jerk partisanshipit involves a confluence of religio-geographic trends in the United States that all but guarantee the kind of political gridlock we saw manifest this month at the ballot box. The United States is not a purely secular nationnor is it a fully religious one. The country stands out among its international peers as distinctly balanced. And acknowledging this reality may be the first step to burying the countrys cultural weapons of war and embracing a posture of greater political pluralism and cooperation.

According to our recent survey report sponsored by the Wheatley Institution, a non-partisan research center at Brigham Young University, slightly less than one third of the U.S. population is deeply religious, frequently attending church services or engaging in other religious activities in their homes. Another third is fully secular, never participating in any sort of religious practice, whether its prayer, reading holy writ, or attending services. Meanwhile, a final third of Americans are nominally religiousattending services infrequently or engaging in other practices with varying levels of devotion.

These findings align with the 2020 National Religion and Spirituality Survey from the NationalOpinion Research Center as well as findings from the Pew Research Center, which estimates that roughly a quarter of American adults today are religiously unaffiliated.

The story of secularisms rise is well-documented. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the worlds more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little, notes political scientist Ronald Inglehart in Foreign Affairs. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. The Atlantics Derek Thompson similarly notes the rapid ballooning of the religiously unaffiliated, tracing its relative size from around 6 percent of the U.S. population in 1991 to more than a quarter today.

So, what happened?

Theres no simple answer. And, certainly, people stop affiliating with their religious tradition for many reasons. However, sociologists Michael HoutandClaude Fischer have published research suggesting that an aversion to the religious rights involvement in politics throughout the 1990s (and beyond) may have influenced the decision of self-identified moderates and liberals to disaffiliate from religious institutions during this period.

Organized religion, they write in their 2014 study, gained influence by espousing a conservative social agenda that led liberals and young people who already had weak attachment to organized religion to drop that identification. The scholars note a causal link between the religious rights entrance into public conservativism and disaffiliation among certain pockets of the population: Political liberals and moderates who seldom or never attended services quit expressing a religious preference when survey interviewers asked about it.

These findings are significant, but they dont tell the full story of American faith in the twenty-first century. Much like the bifurcated reaction to Amy Coney Barrett, the same trends that seem to push some toward secularism may also help crystalize faith in others. Indeed, even as the nation is becoming more secular, in another sense, its also becoming more religious as well.

For example, a 2017 study from Indiana Universitys Landon Schnabel and Harvards Sean Bock suggests that intense religion has persisted even as more moderate religion has seen declines. In other words, ascendent secularism is accompanied by a deepening of religious intensity. Speaking to The Washington Post, Schnabel compared this phenomenon to a container getting smaller, but more concentrated. So, yes, the steady stream of cable news chyrons on waning religious affiliation are accurate (the religious landscape is shifting) but the real story is more complicated.

The fact is that the highly religious in America havent gone away. Theyve remained steady as a percentage of the population, which means their overall numbers have grown with the population and their higher-than-average fertility patterns are one sign that the trend probably wont reverse. Thus, those anticipating a full conquest of secularism in the United States shouldnt hold their breathneither should those rooting for a modern-day Great Awakening.

It may be that recognizing the nations religious and secular demographics as both stable and balanced could broker the kind of dtente that recognizes cooperation and the search for genuine understanding as a productive path forward.

Pluralism, after all, has always been what makes America exceptional on the world stage. In our report, we analyzed data from more than 16,000 survey participants in eleven countries, looking specifically at how religion in public life varies across populations. In Latin American nations like Columbia and Peru, most respondents were both religiously affiliated and active in their faith. As you would expect, in European countries like France or the United Kingdom, religious affiliation and participation were much lower. Whereas religion was once predominant in these nations, today, secularism reigns.

The United States, meanwhile, stands out for its unique demographic mix of both seculars and the highly religious. Of the eleven countries analyzed, only in the United States do these two groups have to deal with each other on somewhat equal grounds.

Specifically, we estimate that there are a little more than 100 million American seculars and about 85 million Americans who might be considered highly religious. In other words, there are more seculars in the United States than there are people in all of the Nordic countries combined plus Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, Austria, and Switzerland. Likewise, the church-attending population of the United States is larger than the combined populations of Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

Thats a lot of seculars. And thats a lot of religionists. So, its easy to see why one side or the other might feel like they own the country and they should control the nations levers of political power. An October poll showed that Christians, particularly white evangelicals, supported Donald Trump by a very wide margin (78 percent) whereas atheists and agnostics supported Biden by an even larger margin (83 percent).

Seculars and religionists may share this much in common: a mutual fear (and misunderstanding) of the other. This idea explains why they often fight so hard to gain and maintain political advantage. The phenomenon is also likely exacerbated by geographical segregation. Seculars often live on the coasts or in other urban settings, while religionists are more commonly found in the rural South and Midwest. According to a 2017 survey from The Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation, fully 78 percent of rural Republicans said, Christian values are under siege. If these geographically separated groups bump into each other, its usually through the less-than-humanizing lens of social media.

With these interests so evenly spread, knowledge of the nations demographic balance cant help but prompt seculars and religionists to see the culture wars as a battle with little prospect of a full victory. But, given the current political environment, moving from an acknowledgment of demographic realities to actual political cooperation may be asking for a miracle of biblical proportions. And yet, at least we know that there are many Americans who might be willing to pray for one.

Spencer James, Hal Boyd and Jason Carroll are faculty members in Brigham Young Universitys School of Family Life. They are each affiliated with the Wheatley Institution.

See the original post here:
Why the Partisan Divide? The US Is Becoming More Secularand More Religious - Religion & Politics

As I write this, most world leaders, the media, state election officials across the country, and the majority of American voters now agree that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election by a clear margin. Joe is now acting more presidential almost two months from his inauguration than the orange menace has in four years

But beyond the obvious, who else has come out of this strange election in a better or worse place? In other words, who really won? In a word, the oligarchs, 1-percenters, or billionaires, choose your label. Just look at how much money theyve raked in during our mismanaged pandemic ($10.2 trillion worldwide).

Many people saw this election and the Trump presidency as the main problem and the only solution to what ailed America. Wrong. Trump is just a very orange, very visible symbol but by no means the cause.

Systemic racism has always been here; he just made the racists comfortable enough to come out in the open. Income inequality is now at world-beating levels. But thats just an acceleration of what Reagan started.

The true winners right now are the super wealthy. The eight individuals (and others we never hear about) who now hold more wealth than the next billion folks on the planet. That group. The shadowy folks who fund the right-wing think tanks, Fox News, Breitbart, the Federalist Society, One America News, and so on.

This crew, folks like the Kochs, the Walton family, Betsy Devos and her brother Eric Prince of Darkness have been funneling money and buying influence for decades all in hopes of ultimately taking over everything. In their world, our only purpose is as replaceable wage slaves whose lives are devoted to making them ever wealthier.

The level of division in our country now and in many other countries, is a direct result of their influence played out over mainstream media, social media, and general propaganda channels. The more divided the populace is and the more divided government is, the less likely it is that the oligarchs will be encumbered by irritants like higher taxes, environmental regulations, strong unions, and strong governments. Make no mistake, we are at war with the 1-percent and they are winning in many places.

One of the big things to come out of the disaster that is/was the Trump presidency is the widespread recognition of the incredible racism that rules our country. And why did it finally come to such a head? Was it just Trump and his dog whistles and overtures to the Ku Klux Klan? Was it police violence against people of color?

Trump and his father before him were avowed racists. To have a racist in the Oval Office was a David Duke wet dream.

Now we see much more clearly just what our Black and brown neighbors have been dealing with for a couple of centuries and just how far we are from true equality. Folks, theres a ton of work still left to do.

But keep in mind that the oligarchs are behind a lot of the racism in terms of funding and messaging. Again, it keeps us divided.

And lets not forget the constant attacks on women and their rights by the Rapist in Chief and the right wing of our society led by rabid evangelicals and demagogues of all sorts. But the right-to-life folks (forced-birth people) have always been in it to control women, not save lives.

If they truly cared about lives, theyd do away with the death penalty, fund social programs, and come out strongly for gun control. Never happen. These are gun-toting, bloodthirsty misogynist bigots hiding behind the Bible and the flag.

And again, these folks are funded in large part by dark money funneled through fronts and fake charities directly from the coffers of the oligarchs. Its just another way to keep the culture wars going and keep us divided.

Look at every divisive issue in our society and you will find wealthy people funding the divide to keep us from paying attention as they rape and pillage the planet. Bernie Sanders has been saying all this for the past 30-plus years and only recently have people picked up on it.

But for now, there is some light. Joe and Kamala are two real people with our interests first and foremost, and that gives me hope. But dont kid yourselves, they are imperfect and their efforts will be compromised by our broken government. Moscow Mitch McConnell has already gone public saying he would not allow Joe to appoint just anyone to his cabinet and approve them if theyre too radically left for his tastes. Of course, Mitch may be on shaky ground if he loses the two contested Senate seats in Georgia.

Its nice to look forward to four years during which it is unlikely our leaders will be a daily embarrassment on the world stage and a living menace to our rights and our democracy. I think Joe and Kamala will govern much like Obama did, with class, humility, professionalism, and a commitment to doing the right thing whenever possible.

Their opposition is secretive, well-funded, dug-in, and willing to break any laws or norms to stay on top. That is our fight now.

Never forget that the wealthy are typically apolitical, amoral, areligious, and sociopathic. They worship the twin gods of money and power and thats it. But it also makes them vulnerable and obvious after a fashion and weve seen the naked depravity, greed, and violence they wielded in the past four years.

Lets keep that in mind, folks. Your enemy isnt the guy in the MAGA hat or the person with the Biden sign on the lawn. Your enemy is the guy who pays Moscow Mitch to load the courts with unqualified political hacks who will reliably rule against unions, womens rights, the environment, clean air, clean water, equality and public education. The people who would clear-cut the Amazon rainforest for profit while we all choke on dirty air and the seas rise.

Thats public enemy number one and with Joe and Kamala on top, maybe, just maybe, we can get these folks where they live: tax them hard and regulate their criminal behavior. If they win, we all lose because our country and our planet are doomed.

Michael Seinberg is a columnist, social critic, and professional cynic. But he says hes sharpening his word processor and making new protest signs as the fight is just getting interesting.

Read more here:
The winners, the losers, and the rest of us - The Altamont Enterprise

It was October 1991 and Anita Hill was testifying against Clarence Thomas. At the judges US supreme court confirmation hearing, Hill, his former aide, claimed he had sexually harassed her. Kimberl Crenshaw was assisting Hills legal team and felt dejected and exhausted. As she left the capitol building in Washington DC that day, she saw a group of African Americans, mostly women, gathered at the bottom of the steps in a prayer circle. She let out a sigh of relief and walked towards them.

I thought: Oh, thank God, a place we can go and embrace each other, because this is a struggle, Crenshaw says. It was the day before Thomas confirmation, and she felt the future of the civil rights movement was on the line. But when she reached the group, she saw they were wearing T-shirts proclaiming their support for Thomas. She watched with dread as they sang songs of praise and called Hill a jezebel. It was like a horror film, she says. You think youre safe, but it turns out that the people youre running to are actually infected with whatever youre running from.

As she walked away from them, she thought about how the case exposed the theoretical gap in the legal profession when it came to black womens lived experience. During the explosive hearing, televised and watched across the country, Hill, then a teacher at the University of Oklahomas law school, spoke in great detail of her allegation that Thomas harassed her when he was her supervisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yet he retained tremendous support and, in his infamous defence, called the hearings a hi-tech lynching.

What Crenshaw saw was that, with feminists supporting Hill and anti-racist activists defending Thomas, twin calls for equality were being put in opposition to each other. The groups were weakening each others movements instead of supporting each others cause and it was black women who paid a significant price.

For Crenshaw, who is now one of the most influential black feminist legal theorists in the US, Hills case cemented her idea of intersectionality, set out in a paper two years before the hearing. The idea suggests that different forms of discrimination such as sexism and racism can overlap and compound each other in just this way. At the time of Hills case, Crenshaw was writing another paper, Mapping the Margins, on the erasure of black womens history of being sexually harassed and abused. The Hill case showed the result of the fact that sexual harassment had largely only been discussed in relation to white women.

So many people were corralled by the idea that sexual harassment isnt a black womans issue, she says. So many people didnt understand that slavery was about institutionalised sexual harassment and abuse. There were 700,000 slaves in 1790; by the eve of the civil war, there were nearly 4 million. How did that happen? Its right in front of us and there are no words for it.

Her paper set out how feminism had failed to analyse that race was playing a role in making some women vulnerable to heightened patterns of sexual abuse. And it was also the case that anti-racism wasnt very good at dealing with that issue either.

Hills case, Crenshaw believes, was also a painful example of the failure of representation for representations sake. Thomas, the supreme courts only black justice, played a decisive role in gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013. The ruling struck down the system that blocked discriminatory voting policies before they harmed voters.

Crenshaws early academic work, meanwhile, was also an important building block in the development of critical race theory, which revolutionised the understanding of race in the USs legal system and is taught in law schools across the country. The heads of the University of Californias law schools explained in September how useful it was in unpicking how race has operated in our history and our present and understanding the structural racism through which racial inequality is reproduced in economic, political and educational systems even without individual racist intent. (Crenshaw is a professor at one of the schools, UCLA Law, and at Columbia Law School.)

In the 30 years since Crenshaw first wrote about intersectionality, the term has swept to the forefront of conversations about feminism and racial justice. It is used by activists, in HR training in some of the worlds largest corporations and is at the heart of the rightwing backlash against identity politics. At the end of October, the term critical race theory was spoken in the UK parliament for the first time, when Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, announced the government was unequivocally against fundamental parts of the concept.

My mom was more confrontational and my father was more Martin Luther King ... there are strains of both in my work

In some ways, Crenshaw is excited by the high profile her theories have gained, even if they are being condemned: It is far better that is circulating and being used than if only 25 law professors have read it. In September, Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop racial sensitivity training, labelling it divisive, anti-American propaganda. Crenshaw is happy to have the fight and point out how absurd this argument is. So, what are you saying American is having structural racism? If contesting it [racism] is un-American, then you are basically a witness to my side, she says. You are confirming why this work is so important.

Unsurprisingly, Crenshaw backed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the election: You dont have to describe Biden and Harris as being heaven in America to oppose the hell of a Trump administration. In a statement, she described their win as a historic night, thanks to Harris becoming the highest-ranking woman in US history, as well as the first black person and the first Indian American to become vice-president. Crenshaw noted that Bidens victory speech thanked the African American community, writing: We must hold him to that promise And we must move forward intersectionally, and with an eye towards our past.

Crenshaw knew from a young age that she wanted to be a lawyer. When she was six, she was sent to church with her 14-year-old brother. It was summer and her dad told them to stay together. But her brother wanted to leave early and use their collection money to buy sweets. They took their time walking home, enjoying the goodies, not realising their parents would go to the church to pick them up. When Crenshaw got home and saw her parents were not there, it was clear there would be trouble.

But, she says, it never occurred to me in a million years that I would get in trouble, because I was following his orders. She argued to her dad that this was in a lose-lose situation for her: she was in trouble for following her brothers rules, but she would also have been in trouble if she had not gone with him. In the end, her father told everyone: Dont let her get a word in edgewise. When she starts to talk, you will not know what you were trying to say. And thats when they started calling me a lawyer.

Crenshaw was born on 5 May 1959 in Canton, Ohio, a small industrial town in the midwest. Her mothers side of the family were heavily involved with the desegregation movement (her mother helped desegregate a paddling pool at the age of three), while her fathers side had a more spiritual advocacy for racial justice. My mom was a little bit more radical and confrontational and my father was a little bit more Martin Luther King and find common ground. Which is probably why there are strains of both of those in my work.

She remembers watching the civil rights movement explode across the country on her TV as she was growing up. Seeing a big, collective effort to change black peoples trajectory in the country shaped her identity. Her parents, who were both teachers, kept her on her toes. I remember being teased by my friends because, when we got called in for dinner, we had to come to the table with something to say about what another day on the planet was, what did we learn and what happened, Crenshaw says. Inevitably, she liked to turn the tables and question her parents on their day.

If contesting racism is un-American, then you are basically a witness to my side

At one point, she was sent to a Christian fundamentalist school that had smaller classes and better grades. It was a horrible experience. One teacher told her that civil rights activists were not God-fearing and were, in fact, the people the Bible warned about in Revelation. It was like now, when people say Black Lives Matter protesters are thugs, Crenshaw says. But it also sharpened her skills in challenging authority and, to the discomfort of some teachers, the exceptionally bright Crenshaw represented the school in debating and spelling competitions.

She could handle being in conflict with her teachers, but struggled when another pupil called her the N-word and isolated her from her friends. It was the first time I had seen abject racism from a kid my age, Crenshaw says. That hurt more than any of the crazy stuff the teachers were doing. She begged her mum to pull her out; she transferred to the local school at which her mum taught.

She went on to study at Cornell University in 1981, then got a law degree at Harvard law school in 1984 and a masters in law at the University of Wisconsin the following year. It was within the critical legal studies a movement of legal scholars founded in the late 70s that dissected the idea that the law was just and neutral that Crenshaw developed her ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality.

Those ideas which she felt were obvious to everyone who had experienced racism and sexism were controversial among some leftwing legal academics. There were some folks who felt that the loose network could not survive centring a race project inside of it, she says. Crenshaws work asked people to think of the privileges they brought into a space and how, through their actions or silences, they contributed to the problem of racism.

Because of this, it is often criticised as somehow undermining the building of a multiracial working-class movement. In response, Crenshaw argues that the US will never be able to respond to the problem of class until it interrogates what she describes as the politically stabilising role of white supremacy in propping up American hierarchies. That has been the case since slavery. Why did so many white farmers who were impoverished by this economic system make themselves available, amenable, even champions of an economic system that didnt benefit them?

She points to a documentary about a white Klansman who said that, although he did not have much, he thanked God every day for being white. Why is that more important than the fact that he cant put food on the table? Crenshaw asks. When people tell me that intersectionality marginalises class, I say no, intersectionality is what we need to understand why its been so difficult to mount a fully class-centric movement.

Away from the classroom and courts, Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum, now one of the countrys leading social justice thinktanks. In 2015, it created the hashtag #SayHerName to highlight how black women were being overlooked as victims of police violence. As a longtime campaigner against police brutality against black women, Crenshaw was initially disappointed with the response to the killing of Breonna Taylor by police in March in a botched narcotics raid, which has since received nationwide attention. Her name didnt really get lifted up until after George Floyd was killed, she says. Had Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd not been killed, would we be saying the name of Breonna Taylor?

Nonetheless, Taylors death could be a turning point for the civil rights movement in the US, Crenshaw says. It could become the door through which people can see all of the other sisters whove come before her. That would be a shift in consciousness and awareness about how black women can be thought of and seen as the subject of anti-black violence, Crenshaw says.

She compares the killing of Taylor to the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Taylors death, and the deaths of black women in general, has not mobilised an entire movement, an entire way of thinking about anti-black racism, in the way they say that Emmett Tills killing did. But, she says, what draws them together is that, as far as the legal system is concerned, its rendered judgment was that no one would be held accountable for either of these deaths.

Crenshaw sees her work as an important recalibration of how the black struggle is understood. Rosa Parks came into politics not when she sat down on a bus, but when she took up the case of Recy Taylor, a black woman who was gang-raped, and the white men who did it were not brought to justice. These are the stories that a male-centric view of anti-black racism does not consistently remember, rehearse and retell, Crenshaw says. This results in a failure to challenge the myth that black women dont face sexual and state violence, leaving women like Recy and Breonna Taylor vulnerable and isolated. For Crenshaw, this rewriting of history that centres the violence black women experience is crucial for taking the black freedom struggle forward.

With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, Crenshaw says people are finally beginning to see how intimately the issues they care about are connected to the courts. In many ways, her career started at the USs highest court. Would she accept a nomination to be on the court? She laughs. I would do it, after I take my ice skates off, having skated across hell.

Read the rest here:
Kimberl Crenshaw: the woman who revolutionised feminism and landed at the heart of the culture wars - The Guardian