Naming, blaming, and “Framing”: Kimberlé Crenshaw and the rhetoric of Black feminist pedagogy

Abstract

This article examines Kimberlé Crenshaw’s interview on Democracy Now! in 2015 and her 2016 TEDTalk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” to theorize Black women’s “activist rhetoric of blame.” Crenshaw enacts three distinctive features of Black feminist pedagogy in her activism for the #SayHerName Campaign. She challenges traditional “frames” of antiBlack police brutality, uses blaming vocabulary from a Black woman’s standpoint to create new frames, and names an audiences’ “revolutionary potential” in dismantling misogynoir in the justice system. An activist rhetoric of blame expands frames in dominant discourses so that the collective blame toward an institution can encompass intersectional oppression.