Barack Obama just gave the most important racial justice speech of his presidency. Here’s why

On Saturday, President Obama gave an unprecedented speech focused exclusively on the social plight of Black women and girls at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual weekend of events. This speech represents a moment of triumph for intersectional politics, a term Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw invented to describe the ways that racism, sexism and classism work in interlocking fashion to make Black and other women of color invisible in the broader body politic. But Black feminists have also argued for several decades now that placing Black women at the center of political discourses about race and gender would have a positive effect on every marginalized group. Addressing the disproportionate poverty Black women face necessarily helps other women who struggle with poverty. Combating racism helps all people of color and not just Black women. And dealing with the war on women and its effects on Black women automatically improves the condition of other races of women.

As the president noted, Black women’s work “to expand civil rights opened the doors of opportunity, not just for African-Americans, but for all women, for all of us – black and white, Latino and Asian, LGBT and straight, for our First Americans and our newest Americans.” Using Black women’s narratives to highlight the struggles of other groups of marginalized Americans in the extensive way that Obama did on Saturday simply has never been done before in American public life.

Obama did not arrive at this thinking about the importance of Black women solely out of a sense of altruism. Though he quipped that Black women are a “majority of my household,” a fact about which he “cares deeply,” the president arrived at the expansive view of the problems and possibilities that shape Black women’s lives because of many months of committed advocacy work from groups focused on the well-being of Black women and girls.

When the president announced his My Brother’s Keeper initiative focused on the structural challenges faced by men and boys of color in Winter 2014, more than 1,500 Black women signed a letter demanding that the program include remedies for Black women and girls. This public push led to months of closed-door meetings in which a series of reports about the dismal outcomes Black girls face with regard to the school-to-prison pipeline and the sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline forced the president’s team to reconsider what it might mean to suggest that only one sex was worthy of his attempts to address structural racism.

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http://www.salon.com/2015/09/23/barack_obama_just_gave_the_most_important_racial_justice_speech_of_his_presidency_heres_why/