Читать книгу The Invisible Woman - Joanne Belknap - Страница 48

Chapter 1 addressed how many people associate “feminism” with white women and how much of the earlier work written by white feminists (and sadly, sometimes still) assumed a monolithic experience of “womanhood” without recognizing the diversity of women’s experiences based on their race/ethnicity, class, sexual identification, nationality, religion, immigrant status, and so on (see hooks, 2000). Similar to the centuries of documentation of white women’s struggles and activism to fight sexism (as well as other forms of oppression), women of Color have a long history of advocating against sexism, as well as other forms of oppression, particularly racism. Records of African American women’s resistance to slavery authenticate the many ways they resisted other forms of racism, sexism, and numerous types of abuse and oppression beginning in the 1600s (see Crafts & Gates, 2002; A. Y. Davis, 1981; Guy-Sheftall, 1995; D. K. King, 1988; Shaw, 1997).

Feminist jurisprudence was developed by white feminist legal scholars in the 1970s to address ways that law-making and enforcement work to the detriment of women and girls. CRT emerged as a response to the view by some left-wing academic women and scholars of Color that CritLS was limited by its framing by largely elite, white, male left-wing academics. In turn, the emergence of critical race feminism (CRF) was a response, largely by U.S. women of Color law professors in the early 1990s and since then, indicating concern that feminist jurisprudence was dominated by white female law professors and CRT was dominated by African American male scholars. Just as the designers of CRT accused the CritLS theorists of limitations using the (white) lens through which they see the world, CRF scholars suggest that CRT and feminist jurisprudence are not appropriately equipped to address women of Color’s double and multiple marginality when racism and sexism are combined with each other and/or additional forms of oppression (e.g., classism, homophobia, etc.). Table 3.1 provides the tenets of CRF as described by Evans-Winter and Esposito (2010, p. 20) and Delgado and Stefancic’s (2017, p. 96) examples of CRF aims in assessing and changing laws and society. Significantly, numerous scholars have used a CRFT lens to study African American girls’ school discipline as part of the school-to-prison pipeline, and all of these studies confirmed the theory (e.g., Annamma et al., 2019; Evans-Winters & Esposito, 2010; Evans-Winters, Hines, Moore, & Jones, 2018).

Table 3.1

Sources: “Tenets” adapted from Evans-Winters, V., & Esposito, J. (2010). Other people’s daughters: Critical race feminism and Black girls’ education. Journal of Educational Foundations, 24(1/2), 11–24. “Topics Examined” adapted from Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York: New York University Press.

Potter’s (2008) application of CRF to explain the intimate partner abuse of African American women confirmed the utility of relying on CRF as a framework for understanding these victims and the important ways that racism and sexism intersect with each other, as well as with classism and sexuality, within the context of intimate partner abuse. Evans-Winter and her colleagues applied CRF in their analysis of the hypercriminalization and policing that Black girls experience even following President Obama’s 2015 enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). They criticize ESSA for failing to address the intersections of marginalizations and how “race does not operate as a silo—race, gender, social class, and other parts of our identity are layered and form a mosaic” (Evans-Winters et al., 2018, p. 1). In her powerful book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, M. W. Morris (2015) documents how Black girls are pushed out of school (as opposed to dropping out) in addition to being criminalized. J. Flores (2016) documents similar findings about Latina high school girls in the book Caught up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wraparound Incarceration. Although Uggen and Thompson’s (2013) study of the impact of Bill Clinton’s 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—a federal “bundle” welfare reform act—does not mention CRF, it strongly supports this theory. More specifically, in addition to other highly negative impacts, PRWORA’s restriction on public assistance or people with felony drug convictions resulted in a steep increase in women’s property and violent arrests, particularly the latter (Uggen & Thompson, 2013).