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This week on CounterSpin: After every police killing of a Black person, every announced policy singling out Black immigrants as the cause of crime and disorder, every declaration, like that from Arlington National Cemetery, that as of now materials on Black and female service people will be scrubbed from the website—we hear from corporate media about how, boy, this country is for sure “reckoning” with “racism.” But then: If we reckoned with racism every time elite media claimed this country was “reckoning” with racism, seems like we ought to be fully “reckoned” by now.
US corporate media have a white supremacy problem (and you see how that term lands differently than “racism”): They decide who they think, and hence you should think, is worth talking to, based on an accepted conflation of power with worthiness. They decide whose ideas are taken for granted and whose deemed marginal, and they tell us how to define progress: Is it moving toward actual equity, or just things quietening down? Who needs to be reassured, and whose lives is it OK to disrupt, whose basic humanity is it OK to question, day after day after day?
A new report titled Anti-Blackness Is the Point, from the African American Policy Forum, engages this age-old if ever-morphing narrative.
Kimberle Crenshaw is a leading legal scholar and justice advocate, the force behind the transformative ideas of intersectionality and critical race theory. She’s co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, as well as a professor of law at both Columbia and UCLA. We talk with Kimberle Crenshaw this week on CounterSpin.
Transcript: ‘You Cannot Change a Reality That You Cannot Name’:
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at nonprofits and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Why are we blaming *only* the overtly racist Trump for the attacks on intersectionality and Affirmative Action when the very ‘blue’ California voters repealed Affirmative Action in 1996, 20 *years* before Trump arrived with his more crass in-your-face racism?
Making this only about Trump dangerously disappears the far more deep and pervasive structural racism in the US. Young people especially are deeply dis-served by this because it hides the past from their consciousness.
And let’s please not laud Kamala Harris, who I as a social justice activist in San Francisco have watched build her political career on throwing black and brown people in prison and aggressively keeping them there to be slaves for the state of California.