# African American Policy Forum The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) is a New York–based think tank and advocacy organization co-founded in 1996 by [[Kimberlé Crenshaw]], who serves as its executive director. It describes its work as dismantling structural inequality and advancing racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of human rights domestically and internationally. Functionally it is the institutional vehicle through which Crenshaw's academic work — [[Intersectionality]] and [[Critical Race Theory]] — is translated into campaigns, litigation support, and public argument. ## #SayHerName AAPF's highest-profile project, launched in 2014, documents Black women and girls killed by police — Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson among them — whose cases were largely absent from a national conversation on police violence organized around Black men. The campaign is intersectional analysis applied rather than argued: a movement framed on a single axis will structurally fail to register these deaths, which is the same mechanism Crenshaw's 1989 article identified in employment discrimination law. The associated reports and the 2015 and 2023 books have made the hashtag a durable organizing frame within and beyond the [[Black Lives Matter Movement]]. ## Other work AAPF produces the *Under the Blacklight* series and hosts *Intersectionality Matters!*; it has run programming on school pushout of Black girls, [[Affirmative Action]] and colorblindness litigation, and — since 2021 — tracking and contesting the wave of [[Anti-DEI]] and "divisive concepts" legislation that targets the scholarship its founder produced. ## RWKB relevance AAPF sits on the receiving end of the [[Moral Entrepreneur]] pipeline the vault documents: it is the organizational face of the concepts that [[Christopher Rufo]], the [[Manhattan Institute]], and the [[Heritage Foundation]] converted into political brands, and it is one of the few institutions running sustained counter-documentation of the resulting [[Stop WOKE Act]]-family legislation and [[Book Banning and Burning]] campaigns. ## See Also - [[Kimberlé Crenshaw]] — co-founder and executive director - [[Intersectionality]] — the analytical framework the organization operationalizes - [[Critical Race Theory]] — the adjacent field - [[Black Lives Matter Movement]] — the broader movement context for #SayHerName - [[Anti-DEI]] — the legislative wave AAPF tracks and contests