Forging the Woke One Ring: Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins"

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4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2021

⏱️ 72 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 24 "Mapping the Margins," by Kimberlé Crenshaw, is an academic law paper that changed the world (abridged pdf here). It was published in the Stanford Law Review in 1991 and makes the case for putting intersectionality into all cultural analysis. It is also more or less unambiguously the birthplace of Wokeness, as in this paper, Crenshaw indicates explicitly that, to her, intersectionality is "a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory," that is, as Jordan Peterson has it, postmodern neo-Marxism. Crenshaw is no minor figure, by the way. She is the creator of intersectionality as well as the co-creator (with her mentor Derrick Bell) and namer of Critical Race Theory. This paper is, in all likelihood, by far her most influential. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay reads through the introduction to "Mapping the Margins" and offers his commentary on the paper and its role as the birthplace (though not gestation) of the Woke movement and, as he and Helen Pluckrose named it in Cynical Theories, applied postmodernism. It is in this paper that intersectionality became the Woke One Ring, which would bring all of the other aspects of identity politics and Critical Theory under the dominion of one mode of analysis from which they cannot deviate. Join him as he reads through the text of the paper and explains what Crenshaw means, where she is coming from, and where she intends for this idea to go. This episode of the New Discourses podcast is the first part of a two-part series reading an abridged version of Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins." Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: https://newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, you are listening to the new Discourses podcast.
0:24.2	My name is James Lindsay and welcome you to the show.
0:29.6	I'm going to continue a little bit in my new tradition.
0:34.2	I maybe will do quite a bit of this.
0:35.8	We'll see here on the new Discourses podcast a while ago.
0:39.3	I read through Herbert Marcus' essay, Repressive Tolerance.
0:44.6	And I did that in four parts, four segments.
0:47.5	I read the entire essay and I added my commentaries.
0:50.2	We went.
0:51.2	I wanted to try to bring the essay to light, to clarity,
0:53.3	to make sure that people could read it and could read along with it as I went through.
0:58.4	I think that that was actually a successful means of presenting
1:02.0	woke literature directly to people.
1:03.7	So I want to kind of continue that a little bit with some other pieces.
1:07.7	Sometimes it's a bit difficult.
1:09.4	And in this case, I actually want to go to the forging of the one ring,
1:16.7	the ring of power, one ring to rule them all, one ring to bind them.
1:24.4	However, it goes in the darkness, bind them.
1:26.0	I don't remember the poem.
1:27.5	So anyway, I want to show you the creation, the birthplace of woke,
1:32.8	the one ring, the ring of power that we are now up against.
1:36.2	And its name is intersectionality.
	...

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