Cultural Pedagogy

I had recently learned about Kimberle Crenshaw and her work with intersectionality during the research I had done for an Honors Project I was conducting on intersectionality and social justice education. The article I had read by her was actually a piece written as a law document explaining the horrible abuse faced by women of color and the systemic factors involved in their lives that prevent them from getting the proper treatment that they deserve. Reading her words had been very empowering last semester, but actually hearing her speak sent chills down my spine, especially as she and the crowd named the women who had been killed in acts of police brutality within the past two years. Crenshaw at one point said, “if we can’t see a problem, we can’t fix a problem” and that part really stuck with me. When talking about intersectionality, it’s interesting to see it as something that society kind of forgets about. For example, when Crenshaw was listing off the names of the men and women who had been killed by police brutality at the beginning of the Ted Talk, I, along with the rest of the crowd, knew who the male victims were and not a single one of the female victims. And as someone who is trying really hard to identify themselves as an intersectional feminist, that was kind of a shock to me and a real eye opener. But, if we’re not going out there and looking for these issues within media that are hiding the news about women of color being killed in actions of police brutality then we’re truly doing a disservice to ourselves as educators.
This makes me think of the piece that we read about culturally relevant pedagogy. I think that Crenshaw’s work with intersectionality would be really interesting to bring into this idea of culturally relevant pedagogy. I think that in our culture it’s important to talk about issues of race and gender and how that effects students. But also, it’s important to take that step back and look at the intersection of where those two lines meet, just as Crenshaw said. Using culturally relevant texts in ELA classrooms that take into account intersectionality would be one way of doing this. I recently picked up a YA novel called “The Hate U Give” that would be a great way to be culturally relevant and keep up a discussion on intersectionality because it deals with police brutality, race, and gender. Overall, I think that discussing how Crenshaw’s intersectional theory can work into a culturally relevant pedagogy would be a great combination within a classroom.