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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, May 11th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show congratulating President Donald Trump on the 22-foot-tall golden statue of himself at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Florida. The statue was dedicated by televangelist and Trump ally Pastor Mark Burns, who posted an important clarification on Twitter, quote, “Let me be clear, this is NOT a golden calf.” You know, like pastors normally say about golden statues of presidents they’re dedicating at golf courses. [music break] On today’s show, Virginia Democrats are mulling over a plan that would replace all of the judges on its state Supreme Court. And President Trump finds Iran’s response to a ceasefire proposal, quote, “totally unacceptable.” But let’s start with words. Over the last year and a half, the Trump administration has made a big effort to limit which words are used in federal documents. In government memos and official and unofficial agency guidance, hundreds of terms and ideas have been explicitly or implicitly forbidden from use, or at best heavily discouraged. These terms include words like accessible, activism, anti-racist, inclusive, and injustice. Another example, intersectionality. But unlike many of the words on the government’s list, the term intersectionality has an origin story and an originator, Columbia University professor, Kimberlé Crenshaw. It’s been nearly 40 years since Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality. And in that time, she’s seen it grow into popular culture, turn into a divisive idea, and become a target of the federal government. Now she’s put it all into a book, Backtalker, an American memoir. I spoke to Crenshaw about her new book, her work, and how her past has given her the strength to keep talking back. Kimberlé, welcome to What a Day. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: So happy to join you. Great to see you again. 

Jane Coaston: It’s wonderful to see you again and we’ll talk about how it’s been a couple of years since we’ve spoken but actually it’s been now more than 30 years since you first coined the term intersectionality. What does that word mean?

Kimberlé Crenshaw: The word simply means that patterns of discrimination sometimes are not singular. You’re not discriminated against just because you’re a person of color or just because you’re a woman or you may be queer. But often discrimination is compounded. It happens to you because of more than one thing. Uh. And as a consequence of that compounding of discrimination or exclusion, some of the interventions that imagine discrimination just to be singular based on one thing or another don’t actually work. For people who are looking at compounded forms of exclusion. That really is all it is. It’s a metaphor for the idea that power can be overlapping, not singular. 

Jane Coaston: Right, it’s interesting. It’s a very simple concept, but for the last decade and a half or so, it’s become a part of a larger political zeitgeist conversation. In that time, has the meaning changed for you? 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: No, I mean the basic observation that discrimination and exclusion can be compounded is not a new thing. It wasn’t even new when I articulated it. I was articulating it to help judges interpret and understand claims that were made by Black women, for example, that they were discriminated against not just as women and not just as Black people, but as Black women. What has changed is the extent to which the idea has been used by multiple other communities and constituencies and in places and spaces outside of courtrooms. So that part has grown. It’s sort of skipped out of law into other disciplines and then into the popular culture and frankly internationally in human rights spaces uh and other contexts. But what has happened that is somewhat new is the use of the term to advance myths, to advance a defamatory way of framing social justice as woke. It’s basically become kind of the poster child of identity politics on steroids. So it’s been misinterpreted. I use the word sometimes gentrified. You know, it’s it’s space that created for ourselves to be able to express and communicate about some of the conditions of our lives. Now it’s been utilized by people who are not supportive of the overall agenda to create greater forms of equity and inclusion. 

Jane Coaston: Right. And I want to talk about that backlash in just a little bit, but we first spoke in 2019, and it was in the midst of this giant burst of conversation around the word intersectionality, where it did skip out of the courtroom. What was your reaction when you first started seeing intersectionality be at the center of political debate? 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Well, you know, at first I wasn’t shocked by it. There were ways that I was gratified by it because some of the issues that have happened since intersectionality was framed did not have the benefit of that kind of framing. And that has caused disasters. Like you think about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill when the whole world, it seemed, was watching a story unfold that was about sexual harassment between two African-Americans. I call that an intersectional failure. So when intersectionality started to be more readily utilized to talk about issues, I thought, okay, that’s a good thing because intersectionality is not just a legal concept, it’s the way that people’s lives are actually being structured. But you know, what became a moment of deep distress is when intersectionality was framed as one of those ideas that didn’t have a meaning that could be firmly identified and agreed upon, and instead it was being used to generate resentment, confusion, um uh expressions of, you know, replacement anxieties. A lot of people talk about intersectionality as basically trying to create a new pariah class out of straight white men, that’s a quote. So um, it is the misappropriation and the intentional distortion around intersectionality is problematic. I just got a report two weeks ago, uh, from some obscure foundation saying that intersectionality was a dangerous ideology that needed to be, you know, contained and destroyed. That’s kind of distressing. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, that is distressing and but I’m actually I’m really glad that you brought up the Clarence Thomas case because in the you talk about it in your memoir, which is excellent, by the way. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Thank you. 

Jane Coaston: In the book, you write about another incident a little earlier is you endured serious domestic violence. And a friend told you to drop the charges against this person to avoid quote, “letting the systems lock our brothers up.” And that struck me as intersectional failure. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: You mention that in the context of wanting to back talk to the people you love most. Was that a part of why you decided to write this memoir and share these stories, to back-talk even to the the people who agreed with you in the midst of an intersectional failure? 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Well, that’s clearly why I use the term backtalking, right? It’s not just speaking truth to power, which is real, but backtalking also implies that you are having contested conversations within um spaces in which respect and, you know, quietude are often expected. So backtalking against, you know, external parties that have always oppressed you. That’s not that hard of a concept. But back talking at home, back talking you know to fellow members of your community, of your political party or you know in your church and in spaces that are meant to be home to you, but in other ways are not treating you like you fully belong. That’s the kind of back talking that is often the most difficult, the most the most consequential um to your connection to those places and spaces. 

Jane Coaston: You mentioned the ways in which you’ve seen intersectionality be used as a cudgel, someone talking about how it’s a dangerous ideology. We’re in this moment where we’re seeing the erasure, the purposeful erasure in my view, of a lot of progress that has been made for women, for people of color, for queer people, for people who are even queer women of color. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: How about that? 

Jane Coaston: It can be done. They’ll let you do it now. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: And the Trump administration has even removed terms like intersectionality from school curriculums, from government websites. What do we lose when these concepts, these words disappear from public conversation? 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Yeah, you know, this has been the bane of my existence for the last several years. It’s not just that we have to contend with the Trump administration that has identified these ideas, the histories associated with these ideas. The artifacts in museums that prove the realities that these ideas represent. You know, that this has been officially called improper ideology. Which of course begs the question, what’s improper about it? And what is proper ideology? And I would just, you know, submit that we know all we need to know about that when we look at which books have been purged. For example, from the Navy Military Academy, they’ve taken out Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, or How Racism Takes Place. What do they leave on the shelf? Um. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Charles Murray, you know the bell curve. So we know that what’s improper is things that challenge the existing status quo, things that give us the history for why we have to pay attention to equity and inclusion. We know what they consider to be proper are the things that say, everything is the way it needs to be. So we know the end game. I think what was most frustrating for me is how difficult it’s been to persuade some of our allies, some of our uh social justice groups, some of the civil rights groups, that this was in the process of happening way back when the first thing they came after was intersectionality or critical race theory or the 1619 project. There was too much of a sense that, give them that, we can still do what we’re going to do. We know what justice is, we know what’s required. And my sense was that this is just the opening salvo. They’re not just going after some words or some letters. They’re going after the entire civil rights infrastructure, all the concepts framing that is necessary to establish it. And now we’re in a period of time where we can see that, in fact, that was always what they were going after. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. And I think that that goes with how we’ve seen some voices in the democratic party saying that concepts like intersectionality are the problem because that means Democrats can’t get elected because they’re too focused on wokeness. And, and I want it to be very clear. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Absolutely. 

Jane Coaston: I am using air quotes. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Yes. 

Jane Coaston: Um. So even as the Trump administration is trying to erase your work, do you think that the Democratic party is trying to like distract away from it, your work or do you think that Democrats are doing a good job of defending its importance? 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Um. It’s hard to say you know with some kind of totality, but I would say that there is um, let’s say, asymmetry in modern politics. And here’s how I would explain it. Uh. What’s left of the Republican Party is completely aligned with the idea that their fortunes turn on being able to suppress and repress as much as possible um the constituencies, the language, the history that has contributed to greater levels of representation about around people of color, women, queer people. I would say on the Democrat side, there is not alignment. There is not consistency. There’s not even the effort to continue to protect the contributions of the constituencies that allow the Democratic Party to actually compete for political power. So for this to be such an important part, you know, of the Democratic Party and for the messaging around the importance to be so muddled, so skewed for them not to turn up at every point along this pathway that they should have turned up in order to say, no, we’re not going to permit the erasure of these ideas, the disempowerment of these communities, the irrelevance of this history. For them not to have done that until this moment, one has to look at that failure as a condition of this moment’s possibility. So, you know, pivoting away from a fight when people are trying to destroy you? That’s not the best way to go about actually, you know, engaging in serious conflict about the future of the party and the future of the democracy. 

Jane Coaston: Kimberlé, thank you so much for joining me. 

Kimberlé Crenshaw: It is such a pleasure to be in conversation with you again. Thanks. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Kimberlé Crenshaw. She’s a pioneering legal scholar, executive director of the African-American Policy Forum, and the author of Backtalker, an American memoir. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Here at What a Day, there are no forbidden terms, except for moist, because that word is just gross. If you’re on the same page, make sure to subscribe. Leave a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK] 

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Kristen Welker] Would the United States ever agree to a deal with Iran that does not address its nuclear program, even if it’s a short-term deal? 

[clip of Energy Secretary Chris Wright] Oh I don’t know about interim deals or whatever, but we know where the end point is going to be. The end point is going to be free flow of traffic through the international waters that are the Straits of Hormuz and an end to the Iranian nuclear program. That’s where we’re going to end. 

Jane Coaston: I seem to remember the Strait of Hormuz was open before you closed it. Energy Secretary Chris Wright repeated Trump administration talking points about the Iran war during an interview with host Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday. Meanwhile, Iran sent its response to the latest U.S. ceasefire proposal via Pakistani mediators. President Trump quickly rejected it, writing in a post-Sunday afternoon, quote, “Totally unacceptable!” This is just another setback to efforts to resolve the standoff that has throttled shipping, and sent energy prices soaring. Later on Meet the Press, Wright and Welker discussed a plan to lighten the burden on Americans, as gas prices have risen as much as 50% since the Iran War began. 

[clip of Energy Secretary Chris Wright] We are working every day to to offset this rise in prices because of a critical conflict in Iran, to drive prices down, and we’re open to all such ideas. 

[clip of Kristen Welker] This is significant, what you’re saying. You’re saying that you, that President Trump, would be open to suspending the federal gas tax? 

[clip of Energy Secretary Chris Wright] We’re open to all ideas, everything has trade-offs, all ideas to lower prices for American consumers and American businesses. 

Jane Coaston: I hope he cleared that ringing endorsement with Trump first. Virginia Democrats are reportedly discussing lowering the state Supreme Court’s mandatory retirement age to 54, removing all sitting justices from the court. Why? Well, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a voter-approved congressional map that could have handed them four more seats in the midterms. Friday’s 4-3 ruling upended the state’s election plans and left some candidates without districts to run in. Virginia Democratic Representative Jennifer McClellan joined the Hill Sunday to discuss the fallout. 

[clip of Jennifer McClellan] At the end of the day, that means we need to fight to pick up these seats, and we can definitely pick up two, probably three, maybe even four, because Virginia voters are furious. And particularly when we see what’s happening across the Jim Crow South, our Black voters here are particularly furious, and they’re ready to come out and vote and turn that fury into action on Election Day. 

Jane Coaston: Virginia Democrats are also planning to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court according to a court filing. As Virginia Democrats try to figure out what’s next, other states are barreling forward with their own plans to redistrict. Republicans in South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana are laying the groundwork for new maps that could hand them extra seats in the House. Of course, there’s no guarantee as to how new districts would vote. South Carolina Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday that he thinks efforts to redraw his own state’s map could end up backfiring on Republicans. 

[clip of Jim Clyburn] All I’m going to say to that is, be very careful what you pray for, because what I do believe is that when they finish with the redistricting, there will be the possibilities of LH3 Democrats getting elected here in South Carolina to the United States Congress. 

Jane Coaston: One can only hope, Representative Clyburn. By now, you’ve probably heard about the cruise ship that was hit by hantavirus. On Sunday, the ship anchored in the Canary Islands, and passengers started flying home aboard military and government planes. Three people have died since the outbreak began, and five passengers who left the ship earlier are also infected with the rodent-borne illness. At a press conference, World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tried to calm fears. 

[clip of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus] This is not another COVID um and the risk to the public is low. So they shouldn’t be scared and they shouldn’t panic. 

Jane Coaston: The WHO’s top epidemiologist said it’s recommending that passengers’ home countries, quote, “have active monitoring and follow-up,” which means daily health checks either at home or in a specialized facility. And that’s the news. [music break] That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate how all the babies are named Olivia or Liam, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how for the seventh year in a row, Olivia and Liam have topped the list of the most popular baby names in America, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and here’s my question. When I was a kid, everyone was named Jessica or Ashley? But where are all the adult Jessica’s and Ashley’s? Please comment if you’re an adult named Jessica or Ashley! [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily Fohr, Erica Morrison, and Adriene Hill. Our team includes Hayley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Joseph Dutra, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.