Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity

The authors describe visiting key Civil Rights Movement sites in Montgomery, Alabama. Butler Browder (interviewed in the chapter) calls them to set the record straight. He is the son of Aurelia Eliscera Shines Browder, one of five women who led the movement. Along with Mary Louise Smith Ware, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Claudette Colvin, and Susie McDonald, she asked Martin Luther King Jr. to speak for them when they realized that gender limited their voices’ effectiveness. The authors realize they have limited knowledge about the Civil Rights Movement, in part because history erases women’s contributions. They explain that identity does not just encompass race but also factors like sex, ability, age, orientation, religion, immigrant status, gender identity, ethnicity, and class.

They explain intersectionality, a concept that has existed since the 1960s but was coined as a term in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw. While they asked interviewees about the impact of intersectionality on them, they note that the point of intersectionality is not merely to name “all of our oppressed identities [...] and, crucially, not to use them as excuses to avoid the central injustice of race” (85). Instead, they advise consideration of how people can unite to bring down the systems responsible for all discrimination; they also note the importance of seeing how race is linked to other identities.