Breonna Taylor, say her name.
Her name was carried to the U.S. Open, to the NBA bubble, to millions of internet posts, to thousands of placards held high in the streets.
It was Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw who told us to say her name. The specificity of a murdered Black woman’s name transcends a statistic, a slander, an erasure. She is human: sister, daughter, dreamer, citizen. She has a name.
The power of interpellation, theorized in abstracted texts you will never read, was brought home by Professor Crenshaw in her relentless quest to make us see that extrajudicial killings of Black women are, as the young ones say, a thing.
Say her name. See the blood on her walls. Don’t forget this beautiful young woman, killed in her own home.
In Race, Reform, and Retrenchment, Professor Crenshaw posited three ideas about race and law that became central to the emerging project of Critical Race Theory:
- “Rac[e] is a central ideological underpinning of American Society”;
- formal equality under color-blind civil rights law falls far short of a “societal commitment to the eradication of the substantive conditions of Black subordination”; and
- “the most valuable political asset of the Black community has been its ability to assert a collective identity and to name its collective political reality.”
Race is the underpinning. This was an invitation to study history, to understand the creation of the concept of race, and to understand the operation of race in law. Who needed racial categorization, and how did they deploy it? Who was deemed destined to rule and who was deemed destined to toil without reward? What makes poverty seem inevitable? What do liberty and equality mean on a landscape of white supremacy?
The conditions of Black subordination are the problem to solve: Why did declarations of formal equality not lead inexorably to equality-in-fact? There are two alternative explanations: 1. the natural proclivity and preference of Black people for a degraded existence, or 2. the persistent culture and practices of white supremacy. If we reject the racist belief in natural inferiority, we must reject reforms that legitimize Black subordination. This means we interrogate everything, from mass incarceration to disproportionate deaths during the pandemic, as structures built on racist foundations.
Naming a collective political reality: Our experience of resistance to racism tells us there is nothing wrong with us. We go up against a powerful structure. Every effort to rise is met with violent resistance, every fact of our subordination is explained away by false justification. We know this because of our centuries-long experience in struggle against racism.
The most valuable political asset: Professor Derrick Bell’s Civil Rights Chronicles, followed by Professor Crenshaw’s breakthrough article, brought Black consciousness to the pages of the Harvard Law Review for the very first time. The use of Black consciousness to understand, critique, and remake US law is the project called Critical Race Theory, and the crew Professor Crenshaw called together has not stopped working for the eradication of the actual conditions of Black subordination as a fulcrum for the eradication of all forms of subordination. That is what we do, in Critical Race Theory, holding fast to a liberatory vision that is an “asset of . . . collective identity.”
The Law Review’s choice to republish this work in a historical moment of racial reckoning is more than a step into the zeitgeist. It is part of a greater intuition, now shared by millions who marched with Black Lives Matter, in every state, in the summer of 2020: our collective denial of racism is part of a generalized practice of denial that is killing us.
I write as the climate chaos of fire and flood churn through neighborhoods once thought safe for human habitation.
I write from a house-turned-bunker that I have barely ventured out of for 6 months because a killer virus runs free in my community.
I write thinking of the student who asked with tears in her eyes, at the end of Zoom class, “Can you please say something hopeful?”
Where did we learn to deny science and tolerate hungry children, to gift the gains of human endeavor to billionaires, leaving legions unhoused, while our brilliant, debt-burdened students lose hope for the future? Professor Crenshaw’s focus on the collective political reality of Black America will tell you where we acquired habits of denial and cruelty, where we learned to accept the unacceptable and turn away from the horror.
Where we learned it is where we will unlearn it. A United States of America that becomes righteous enough to make a “substantive commitment to eradication of the conditions of Black subordination,” is a nation righteous enough to eradicate a killer virus and to turn back climate chaos. The muscles of intellect, theorizing, empathy, organizing, historical awareness, vision, community building, and human kindness overflowing are all required. We exercise those muscles as we say her name: Breonna Taylor.
As a young professor back in the 80s, I knew I had to get beyond my affinity for the gentle 4/4 time of the folk revival. I asked Professor Crenshaw, “So what are we listening to?”
“Today?” She said, “Today it is P-Funk.”
Vijay Iyer — a jazz musician who reads Critical Race Theory — writes of the inability of western music theory, grounded in tonality and structure, to explain funk. It is not just the lack of notation for complexity, he said. It is the failure to see the lived history that is carried in rhythmic organization, what the jazz critic Nate Chinen, contemplating Iyer’s thesis, called “a world of human experience over a single palpitating chord.”
Professor Crenshaw’s mother, Marian Williams Crenshaw, was an elegant woman and a gifted teacher of music. She told a story of once entering a swimming pool as a brown-skinned child. Suddenly the waterline dropped all around her as the pool was drained, by someone in power who considered the pool contaminated because a lovely brown child had entered it. The single, palpitating chord of that embodied experience, carries across generations, as Professor Kimberle’ Crenshaw organizes online teach-ins, and young people march. See our humanity, stop killing us.
“Breonna Taylor, say her name,” they chant, and I say to my students: after decades of teaching, you are the first cohort I have taught that shares such a grim view of the future, a collective consensus that everything is broken, a willingness to leap into radical remaking as the order of the day.
And that deeply felt call to remaking is the one hopeful thing with which I will close this class.