#SayHerName: Intersectionality and Violence Against Black Women and Girls

"I'm exhausted and frustrated watching black folks accuse me of being a traitor for wanting to protect black girls. I just wish some of y'all would admit that when you say Black people you mean Black men."

-Tarana Burke, (founder of #metoo), January 20, 2019

Which #blacklivesmatter? How, when and why must we #sayhername? Who listens when black women shout #metoo? Black women confront epidemic levels of interpersonal and state violence, and the surrounding conversations lead some, including #metoo founder Tarana Burke, to question whether or not black women are indeed understood as forming a part of the black people. Burke raises a pressing question, and one that will be explored over the course of this lecture series. 

Led by Susan J. Brison, Professor of Philosophy, and Shatema Threadcraft, Associate Professor of Government, the #SayHerName lecture series on intersectionality and violence against black women and girls invites Kimberlé Crenshaw, the pionerring thinker who first positoned the notion of intersectionality, Brittney Cooper, Salamishah Tillet (one of the founders of A Long Walk Home a non-profit that mobilizes young people against the violence against black women and girls), Beth and Laurel Richie, Dora Santana and Kristie Dotson to share their work.

As Brittney Cooper has written, the term ‘intersectionality’ was "[c]oined and elaborated by Crenshaw in a pair of essays published in 1989 and 1991, [asserting] an analytic frame that disrupted the tendency in social-justice movements and critical social theorizing to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of expereince and analysis. This single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the expereinces of otherwise-privileged members of the group.” This lecture series will bring the intersectional framework to bear on the problem of violence in black women's lives.

Lecture Series Program:

* All events are free and open to the public.

July 9 • Filene Auditorium

4:30-5:45pm:

Beth Richie, Black Feminist Responses to Gender Violence: The Case for Abolition Politics and Practice 

6:00-6:45pm

Beth Richie and Laurel Richie, From Margin to Center: Our Journeys to Academic Leadership 

July 11 • Rockefeller 3

4:30-6:00pm

Brittney Cooper, The Future of Black Feminism (In Theory)

July 18 • Filene Auditorium

4:30-6:00pm

Salamishah Tillet, Self-Care as an Act of Political Warfare

July 25 • Filene Auditorium

4:30-6:00pm

Dora Santana, Presente! On black/trans (im)possibilities of proximity, intimacy, and togetherness

August 1 • Filene Auditorium

4:30-6:00pm

Kimberlé Crenshaw, From #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter to #SayHerName: Centering Black Women and Girls

August 8 • Filene Auditorium

4:30-6:00pm

Kristie Dotson, Beyond the 'Now': Epistemic Oppression and the 'Common' Sense of Mass Incarceration

Co-sponsored by Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Office of the Dean of Faculty, Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, African and African American Studies, Department of Philosophy, Department of Government.

Co-organziers: Shatema Threadcraft and Susan Brison.

For Further information, please contact Kelly L. Palmer at kelly.l.palmer@dartmouth.edu