A Quote by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race.
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Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
When a person looks through a colored lens, everything seems to be that color. If the lens is tinted yellow or blue, everything seems yellow or blue. A person who looks at life through the lens of gratitude will always find things to be grateful for.
Having a strong race lens means you understand racism is threaded through and institutionalized in all of our systems and our very perceptions, threaded through how someone looks at you, treats you, thinks about you and your potential.
Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.
I think feminism has always been global. I think there's feminism everywhere throughout the world. I think, though, for Western feminism and for American feminism, it not so surprisingly continues to center Western feminism and American feminism. And I think the biggest hurdle American feminists have in terms of taking a more global approach is that too often when you hear American feminists talk about international feminism or women in other countries, it kind of goes along with this condescending point of view like we have to save the women of such-and-such country; we have to help them.
I think it's important for people to understand that dance, movement, choreography is about an experience and entertainment but it's also about perception and a lens. So when we're talking about a Black female's experience through a Black female's lens, that's going to be totally different from a Black female's perspective through a Black male's lens.
I think when people talk about race relations in America, they talk about African-American and white people. Asians are not often brought into the conversation. But there's a historical legacy of issues between them. It's hard to be like, 'What about us?' But we are a little underrepresented.
Every American in uniform, in the White House or at home - USA! USA! USA! - we must be a force for unity in America, for a vision that includes all of us. All of us. Every man and woman, every race, every ethnicity, every faith and creed, including the Americans who are our precious Muslims. And every gender and every gender orientation.
I still think that we have a hesitance to talk about things racial. And I think we do it at our detriment. We go from incident to incident, and we have spikes in which race becomes something that we talk about, as opposed to talking about race in those less contentious times when I think we might make more progress.
What I resist is techniques. I find techniques very problematic. So when critics talk about my work in those terms, I find that they miss the condition. I am comfortable with the notion of pattern and ornament as a system of organization, [but] for me it acts as a textile. So it's not about pattern, but the notion of architecture through the lens of textile, rather than architecture through the lens of brick and mortar.
On one hand, I think it's very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it's not talked about, then we won't progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.
The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.
I have compromised down the line. I've disliked it intensely in the old days when you were trying to talk race relations and they would not allow you to talk about the legitimacies of race relations. In the old days, you didn't talk about black, you talked about Eskimo or American Indian, and the American Indian was assumed not to be a problem area.
I guess the subject of race is so natural to me I never think of it as hefty. It's something I talk about and joke about and discuss with my loved ones every day of my life.
We always think from where we come from. We always think from the sources that shape our understanding. I think about the world through the lens of my Islamic tradition. I accept this but I must also have intellectual humility.
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