In a new memoir, the legal expert shares how her experiences as a Black woman gave rise to frameworks the far-right has tried to weaponize.

A teacher who wouldn’t cast her as a princess in a kindergarten skit shaped Kimberlé Crenshaw’s views. So did her efforts to diversify the hiring process and courses at Harvard Law School while she was a student. So, too, did the appointment of Clarence Thomas as the second Black Supreme Court justice in 1991, and the erasure of Black girls and women in the 2010s who were victims of police brutality. 

Crenshaw’s successes as one of the leading voices on law and equity have come against a backdrop of interpersonal and systemic racism and sexism. In the foreground have been resolute Black women who have molded, guided and inspired her work.

All of this, said Crenshaw, a legal scholar and professor who just released a memoir, “Backtalker: An American Memoir,” shaped her analysis on race, class and gender in the United States. And together, they show how ignoring the injustices of Black women contributes to the erosion of our democracy altogether.

“I can’t say I know for sure whether the stakeholders in a real democracy have actually recognized fully the consequences of this assault on Black women for them,” Crenshaw said in an interview with The 19th.

Critical race theory

Crenshaw’s work has been instrumental in shaping how scholars see inequities in the United States. In 1988, she coined the term critical race theory, or CRT,  a legal framework created by Derrick Bell, a Black legal scholar, that examines how racism is ingrained into societal and institutional structures like the law and education. She expanded the framework of CRT by also coining the term intersectionality, a concept that suggests a person’s overlapping identities, such as their race, class and gender, create a unique social experience that can result in either privilege or discrimination.

Crenshaw hopes that her memoir negates false claims once and for all that intersectionality was created from abstract ideas on race and gender, as many of her detractors have suggested, or that it’s un-American or a foreign import. She also hopes it inspires people to talk back. The key to resisting authoritarianism, she told The 19th, is to argue against its logic and expectations. 

“I hope that they are able to understand that the knowledge that comes out of our lived experiences, being born in a country that once defined us as property that subsequently defined us as second-class citizens, a status that extended to the time I was born and beyond, is the foundation for critical thinking about race,” she said. 

In recent years, far-right pundits like Christopher Rufo have co-opted the language she built to generate a divisive culture war replete with disinformation. It has led to the dismantling of programs aimed at helping people from historically marginalized backgrounds, such as the change in hiring and college admission practices. President Donald Trump called CRT “ideological poison” in 2020. Politicians have introduced 870 anti-CRT bills since September 2020 and passed more than 20 state laws, making it public enemy number one for education throughout the United States, despite it never being a part of K-12 public school curricula.

Intersectionality

As Crenshaw studied the 1976 federal court case DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, in which a Black woman sued the company for discrimination and a judge ruled that she could either sue as a woman or a Black person, but not both, her idea of intersectionality was born.

In 1991, a few years after Crenshaw coined the term, Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court to replace Thurgood Marshall, who was the first Black justice. When sexual harassment allegations against Thomas by Anita Hill, a Black woman, came to light, Crenshaw found herself watching what she called an intersectional failure unfold. Hill and Crenshaw had met about a year earlier and, as a fellow Black woman lawyer, Crenshaw felt it was imperative that she support Hill. That’s how Crenshaw ended up seated behind her as Hill testified before the U.S. Senate. Crenshaw said Hill’s allegations not being taken seriously has had consequences, pointing to Thomas’ key votes on money in politics, in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission in 2010, and on Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013.

“Those two alone account for a distressing amount of our diminished ability to fight against plutocrats who are taking over our democracy,” she said “There were other decisions that were made, and it all forces us to ask, why wasn’t Anita Hill believed, and what are the consequences, not just to Black women, not just to communities of color, but to the entire nation?”

Crenshaw and the Obama White House

Crenshaw’s work took on new challenges when Barack Obama was elected as the first Black president in 2008. His win supported the idea that the country was moving past race, and many hoped that he would be a “color-blind” president. Crenshaw, however, often felt as though Obama’s responses fell short of addressing these issues from a broader, systemic perspective.

“The president did address racial inequality from time to time, but his comments typically emphasized the deficits in Black attitudes rather than opportunity gaps in white structures,” Crenshaw wrote in her book. 

Then, in 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, who was Black. The nation reached a tipping point in regards to race. Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s not-guilty verdict were watershed moments that sparked a new wave of protests and racial justice efforts, including the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the aftermath, the Obama administration started a program called My Brother’s Keeper, which aimed to close opportunity gaps for Black boys and other young men of color. 

In 2014, Crenshaw and other Black women advocates had a tense meeting at the White House as they pushed the administration to expand the program to include girls of color.

After the meeting proved unsuccessful, Crenshaw penned an op-ed in The New York Times titled “The Girls Obama Forgot.” She launched a campaign, #SayHerName, aimed at raising awareness about the fact that Black girls and women are also disproportionately brutalized by law enforcement and that their mothers needed support as well.

Crenshaw and the Trump era

Her work of spotlighting and including Black women in cultural, legal and political conversations continues under the current presidency. She sees Trump’s ability to return to the White House in 2024 as a sign of our society worsening from telling Black women to “wait their turn” to “we don’t want to see your face at all.”

“We as Black women are fully aware, perhaps even more so than we were before the election, that there are consequences to being silent about misogynoir. There are consequences of not being able to identify and contest with everything we have, the disparagement and disregard of Black women,” Crenshaw told The 19th. “The disparagement comes from the right. The disregard sometimes comes from our own leaders. Neither of those things can be tolerated in a society that is sliding toward authoritarianism, with Black women being targeted as one of the first points of erasure.”

The loss of then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 — Trump’s defeat of the first Black woman to be a major party’s presidential nominee  — led many Black women to take a strategic posture of pausing or purposeful quietness. But Crenshaw believes there was some misunderstanding of what Black women were actually doing in the aftermath of the race. Harris’ loss after an election cycle littered with misogynoir, Crenshaw believes, required a period of lamenting. But that didn’t mean Black women threw in the towel in fighting for democracy.

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