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LESSONS STILL UNLEARNED

The Continuing Sounds of Silence1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2014

Luke Charles Harris
Luke Charles Harris*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Vassar College
*
Professor Luke Charles Harris, Box 397 Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 12604. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this essay, I contend that the elevation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and the evisceration of civil rights it has enabled, should be understood in part to reflect a tragic mistake on the part of Black America writ large. I will argue it represents the absence of a fully embodied vision of racial justice—one that genuinely symbolizes the entire panoply of concerns that must be addressed if the quest for racial equality is to ever be fully realized in the United States. Importantly, what this essay will point to is a political and discursive failure to center the concerns of Black females at the heart of our racial justice agenda.

Keywords

IntersectionalityBlack FeminismSexual HarassmentAffirmative ActionCivil RightsSupreme Court
Type
Intersectionality
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 2013 , pp. 513 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2013 

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Footnotes

1

I have benefited greatly from numerous comments and observations from colleagues, including Devon Carbado, Andy Davison, Marianne Engerman, Eve Dunbar, Kiese Laymon, Alvin Starks, Michael Hanchard, Adelaid Villamoare, Rachel Gilmer, and Paul Butler. I also want to offer very special thanks to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Barbara Tomlinson, and George Lipsitz who pushed me to complete this essay when I was about to give up on it, and to the Negril Social Justice Writers Workshop where I workshopped an earlier version of this essay.

References

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