Fresh Air - Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s path from ‘Backtalker’ to legal scholar

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

Crenshaw named two of the most contested ideas in American politics: intersectionality and critical race theory. Her new book is called ‘Backtalker: An American Memoir.’ It takes us to her childhood in Canton, Ohio, and along her path through Cornell, Harvard Law, and the University of Wisconsin, where, in 1988, as a graduate student, she sketched a diagram of an intersection to explain how race, class, and gender overlap. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about these moments in her career, and how she’s thinking about America’s 250th anniversary. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, is a legal scholar responsible for naming two of the most contested ideas in American politics, intersectionality and critical race theory. She has written a new memoir about how she came to those words and what it has been like to watch the courts, legislators, and the media weaponize and redefine them. The book is called Backtalker, an American memoir. The first. The first of those words came together one late night in 1988 at the University of Wisconsin. Crenshaw was a young legal scholar pulling apart one of the most important court cases of her career. A black woman had sued General Motors for discrimination and a federal court told her she could sue either as a black person or as a woman, but not both at once. Crenshaw took a legal pad and drew two roads crossing. One road was race, the other was gender. She put an X at the intersection and wrote the woman's name there. The law, she would later argue, could not see this woman because it could only look down one road at a time. She named that X, intersectionality. A few years later, with 30 other scholars of color,

she helped name a second idea, critical race theory, a body of legal scholarship that argues race is not incidental to American law, but built into it. The scholars were responding to a legal world that insisted it was neutral. More than 20 states now restrict how it can be taught. Crenshaw's memoir argues that the language she named comes from everything she has seen, heard, and felt, from her childhood in Canton, Ohio, to the halls of Cornell, Harvard Law, and the University of Wisconsin. Kimberly Williams Crenshaw is a professor of law UCLA and Columbia Law School and the founder of the African American Policy Forum. And Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you so much for having me. You know, this title, Backtalker, you know, it's the word that adults use when a child won't shut up, you know, it's not a compliment. But your use of the word, it's like a flag in the sand. That's my intent. I was always encouraged to talk and was always encouraged to call out conditions, experiences that I thought were unfair or inexplicable. The two came together when I was young, but as I moved into my career, moved into thinking about the things that still exist in this world that are not fair, that are reflections of hierarchies and exclusions of the

past, those things exist. So talking back to them, first of all, acknowledges that we're not living in a world in which we are all standing on equal footing. And secondly, many of those moments in which we recognize that things are not equal, expect us to simply fold our objections into it or to silence how we're thinking or feeling or questioning, often as a condition for fitting in or for moving forward. So we're basically being told to be seen and not heard in this moment, and we have to muster the courage, the willingness, quite frankly, the righteous indignation to talk back against these expectations. Well, you first learned this as a young girl in Canton, Ohio.

Your parents expected you and your older brother to come to dinner every night with something to say, something you'd learn, something you'd thought about, kind of like homework for dinner. I think that's how you put it in the book. Exactly. Tell me about those conversations. Well, my parents were not of the belief that dinner is just a ritual of nourishment and not family time and not educational time. The first thing to recognize is my parents were both educators, my mom and my dad. And that didn't stop when they left the school house.

You know, they came home with the same kind of commitment to prepare their children. for a world that we were trying to create, that we were hoping for. So part of that preparation is to, you know, speak when you're spoken to, to have something to say, to have some thoughts about what you're seeing in the world, and to be able to defend what it is that you are talking about. So that started from a very early age, and my friends did used to tease me when I had to stop playing, you know, a little bit before we were called in for dinner,

I had to think about what am I going to talk about at the dinner table tonight. And many times, you know, it was about things that kids think about. So, you know, I used to, I press them all the time about, tell me about this Santa Claus thing. I just, I really don't understand it. So I'm looking around the neighborhood and I'm seeing this number of houses and a lot of them don't have chimneys. So, you know, it started when I was really, really little. But as I grew older, the conversation would turn to a neighbor who was called Barefoot Annie. She was an Italian immigrant and was pretty much, I guess, from her perspective, left behind as the neighborhood transitioned from an all-white neighborhood to a largely black one.

And when we rode by on our bicycles, she would, you know, call us names. would use the water hoses to spray us. And I would come home and report this and try to understand what had we done to her that made her so hostile to us. And these were the kind of ways that as a child I began to understand what and who I was seen to be by people like Barefoot Annie.

And my parents would walk me through or ask me how I thought or how I felt about that. So it was coming to consciousness with active interrogation and conversation rather than sort of the silent immersion into the racial order that I was born into. Yeah, and we're talking about the 1960s. Yes. And there's this, there's the night that you write about so beautifully. It's also, of course, one of our biggest.

tragedies for our country. One night, the phone rings in the middle of dinner. Your mother answers, singing the words Crenshaw residents like she always did. And then she sucked in her breath because she had been hit with the news that Martin Luther King had been killed. And you write that you had never seen your father cry until that moment. Take me to that night. And my father was a big man of former football player, 6-2, gregarious, son of a minister. I called him the Martin to my mother's Malcolm. And when he picked up the phone and heard my grandfather tell him what had happened, I mean, he heaved, he bent forward. I had just, I'd never seen him be emotional like that, him being hurt like that.

It signified for me that there was a tragedy that it occurred, not just to him individually or us as a family, but to a bigger group of us. I call it the we throughout the book. And it just seemed that everywhere people were, It's like the wind had been taken out of us. The spirit had been taken out of us. There was such a feeling of an upward trajectory.

We were clearly aware that we were in the middle of a fight over equality. I was born at a time where some of the basic things that we take for granted now were not yet legal, including the Voting Rights Act. but there was still some sense that, you know, we were arriving somewhere. And this was just like not just air out of the balloon. It sort of exploded, you know, our sense of possibility. So I remember it clearly, and I think it also was punctuated by the next day when the activist brought all of us together in a church

and asked all of us, you know, did anyone have anything? to say about this moment. And we were kids from kindergarten to high school, and we were all sitting in the church. And it pained me because no one had anything to say. Maybe the words weren't there. You know, our emotions were, you know, all confused. But the silence just was devastating to me. What I remember the most is the feeling. Like, we cannot let them turn us around. We cannot let them take our dreams away from us by just killing our leader. We know that's what they're trying to do.

And we just won't stand for it. That feeling has been what I sense from you, the fuel that has really driven you for a big part of your life. And, you know, you can hear these stories so much growing up that you kind of become a little desensitized to them. There's something palpable about you telling it right now as we really sit with what the Supreme Court has ruled regarding the Voting Rights Act and the overturning of so many elements of the Civil Rights Act. And I just want to know how are you, how are you feeling right now? Got it, of course, because, you know, this moment that I'm retelling was a part of a legacy of fighting back, part of a legacy of sacrificing. You know, people actually died for these laws. They, you know, were beaten.

some of them, you know, damaged for life because it was more important to insist on the promises that were made to us as a people, to us as a democracy, than it was to hide their light or just to fold into a status quo that was unlivable. And having lived through that moment, albeit as a child, I mean, I watched this stuff unfolding. on television. I watch the Selma marchers being beaten. I watch children, my age, being

tortured, frankly, by dogs being, their bodies being tossed into the air by water hoses simply because they were demanding to be given the same access, being treated the same

way as any other American and having been able to enjoy the fruits of that labor and the fruits of that sacrifice through the creation of the Voting Rights Act, which, you know, is called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, seeing it systemically dismantled piece by piece by piece. To see that history basically be unwritten right now, being erased right now, Seeing us being pushed back right now, it makes me want to weep, but we don't have time for that. This is a time to talk back against that erasure. You seem to have had a front row seat to so much through your parents.

Your mother inherited two homes in an apartment building from her grandfather, who brought them in the 1930s. And then you write about the city of Canton taking them through something called urban renewal, which has a polite name and a long history of moving black families, wealth into other people's pockets, essentially. Your mother went to City Hall to fight. She lost, but tell me briefly about that fight. Yeah. Well, this was actually a property that she inherited from her father, who was, one of two black doctors in town.

Your grandfather, right? Yes, my grandfather. And he was, you know, obviously in a position to be able to begin to acquire property, which, of course, is, you know, the great American way. So he passed this on to my mother. But then in the 60s, there was a move to, remove what was called urban blight and hundreds of millions of dollars were made available to local communities from the federal government to effectuate this policy. And in addition, there was

highway development dollars that were also made available. So we are talking about a reality in local communities, in which African Americans still you know, didn't have the same kind of local political power as their white counterparts. So when the debate about how to use this money comes, you know, to the city council and to the city managers, whose property is most likely to be sacrificed to build industrial plants and to lay out highways to attract businesses. It's the black corridor. It's the black commercial area. And these are often policies and practices that play out over several years. So if a community is designated as one that is going to eventually be raised and built over with highways, a lot of things start happening. Banks stop lending for development in that area. The area becomes red lines. it becomes less valuable. There's market forces that kick in

that consistently rob the property of its value. So by the time the moment arrives to take this property, it's worth less, sometimes worth less than it was when it was purchased. So my mother was given pennies on the dollar for her apartment building, for her homes. And of course, what that meant was the ability of generational wealth to build is basically robbed of black property owners. And this was all legal. That's what turned my interest to thinking more critically about what the law facilitated.

Because in no place other than in the conversation about urban renewal being effectively black removal, was there a race explicit justification? But it was equally devastating to see it unfold, and it made it clear that whether or not law is explicitly calling out its racist intentions, racial harm can still happen. That was the observation that I took to college, to law school, and ultimately became part of how I thought about critical race theory. You know, when I read that story about urban renewal and your mother's fight, which she lost,

it's like it's decades before you write your first paper on how American law uses neutral language to do unequal work. And I wanted to know, though, as a child, you're watching all of this happen. You're watching your mother lose this fight. And you know, even from a child's mind, that she's not wrong, but there's something else working to make this work not in her favor. Is there another lesson that you were learning? Like, what does that kind of mother teach a daughter about losing within a system that's not meant for you to win? Like, tell me about how your mother continued on in spite of her losses. is. You know, I think that there was never a question about whether it was the right fight or whether it was a

good fight. The only question was, how could the fight have resulted in a different conclusion? And I think that is probably what turned me more to thinking about, well, what does our community need to be prepared to do better? How can we see it coming at? an earlier period of time so we can get ready for the battle that is ahead. So it made me think more strategically. It made me think, why was mom one of the few who actually thought, well, let's take this fight to City Hall? So I saw my mom as a warrior.

I saw my mom as holding down in her generations the stories that she learned from her mother and her father. My mom was a warrior, but also a grillo. So she would take me around town and show me the palace theater that didn't want to allow her to sit in the middle of the theater and tried to make her go up to the balcony. She showed me the root beer stand that wouldn't serve them in the glass mugs, but would, you know, try to serve them in paper cups. So passing on that history was important in understanding that some of the consequences of discrimination, if we aren't available or don't know the story about how it came to be, we're more likely to infer that this is just the way things have to be, or this is a product of our failures as opposed to

it's the product of power, sometimes racial power, to overdetermine the work that we do to make a good life for ourselves. Our guests today is scholar and author Kimberly Williams Crenshaw. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is fresh air. I want to talk a little bit about loss. And some of what you have learned from loss, you learned about losing early. Your father, he was a beautiful singer with a wonderful voice. He was a public housing administrator. The man who taught you that law could be a tool for fairness. Then in 1969, he died when you were 10 years old. And your mother carried the loss of your father while raising you and your older brother. And then a few years later, you all lost him too. Can you tell me just a little bit about what happened to him?

So my brother miraculously survived the Vietnam War. And my mom, the warrior that she was, was able to get him honorably discharged, in part because some of the things he encountered as a black soldier. Her hope was that he would now get back on track as a college graduate eventually. He wanted to go to Kent State. She didn't want him to go to Kent State because in the year or two before, the National Guard had opened fire on protesters at Kent State and it killed four students. So the last thing she wanted him to be involved in was anti-war demonstrations. She knew he would be in the middle of that. So she sent him to Wilberforce where she thought he'd be safe.

About six weeks after he got there, as we were told, there was a fight between Wilberforce students and Central State students. And for years, we'd been told that there was some kind of a scuffle over a movie on Halloween, which made no sense to me. And my brother was a bystander, and someone shot into the crowd and hit him for years. Thank you for that. That's the story you knew. That's the story that you believed. That's the story.

And it wasn't until I began to write this chapter of the book, with the assistance, interestingly enough, of the newly. digitized archive of newspaper reports that I was able to find out a little more. I didn't know that the story had been covered from coast to coast. I didn't know that there was a suspect that had been brought in. I didn't know that the local police said that charges were imminent. And I didn't know that suddenly all that just disappeared until within the last couple of years where I was able to read about it. And then reading these stories about the possibility of finding some kind of justice and accountability, and then the fact that it just went away, and there was no investigation after that. And then later when my mom tried to, they said that the records had been

destroyed, knowing that she as a mother could do nothing to seek justice for her son. That just broke my heart all over again because I know how that must have felt. She couldn't protect him and then she couldn't see to it that justice was served. You know, Kimberly, I've always known that grief is a kind of knowledge, but I've never really been able to articulate what the knowledge is outside of grief itself. And you write a book about a life of seeing, of being able to name things other people couldn't. And so many black families have experienced in some former fashion, especially during that time period. It's a common story of investigations that don't make it through fully or you don't know the full story and you learn things later or you never learn at all.

What do your grief teach you to see? I've struggled with this, especially later in life, when I've heard about how grief can be that shadow and that there are ways of getting beyond it. And I believe that there are possibilities there, but I also believe that for us to be able to hold us. on to the imperative of justice for us to realize that our struggle is to be agents in our own life and that any moment can bring conditions, it can bring a dynamic that you don't see coming and that you cannot protect yourself against. That's, I think, what made it easier for me to see the links between the past that we sometimes want to believe that we are no longer living in and the current moment. So growing up and knowing about lynching, knowing about how successful you can

be as a black business owner, and because of that success, you could lose your life. Or growing up knowing about Tulsa, how a community could survive and thrive. And because of that success, you stand to lose everything. One has to hold on to that sense of loss in order to be appropriately cautious and aware that no matter the fact that you can have a black family in the White House. You can also, in 10 years or 20 years later, find yourself struggling to actually have the right to vote. I think that sense of I'm never going to forget how quickly things can turn is what being woke is all about. If you're just joining us, my guest is legal scholar Kimberly Williams Crenshaw. Her new memoir is called Backtalker, an American memoir. We'll be back

shortly. This is fresh air. I'm fast forwarding now all the way to graduate school. You're in Wisconsin. You have gone through Cornell. You have gone through Harvard Law. And you are sitting down with this important case. And one night you're trying to figure out how a federal court could look at a black woman and say that her injury did not exist. You drew an intersection on a legal pad and you wrote her name at the X. Did you know what you had at that moment when you were trying to find the language to articulate what this woman was experiencing both as a woman and as a black person? I had no idea how the framework or the word would travel, especially because it was in the context of trying to create a remedial framework for people who consider themselves very smart judges,

but couldn't figure out something that seemed pretty obvious to me. So the idea was simply to use an experience as a metaphor to build understanding into their legal decision making. So their understanding of what Emma de Graffin-Reed was asking for framed... That is the woman who filed a lawsuit. And she was working in an industry that was not atypical, you know, in the 70s, 80s, a industry that was structured both by race and by gender. By that, I mean, there were jobs that were seen as appropriate for people who were black, and there were jobs that were seen as appropriate for people who were women.

But the black jobs were usually the industrial jobs, the dangerous jobs, the dirty jobs. And the women's jobs were receptionists and secretary and telephone operators. So we're already dealing in an industry that has race and gender structure to it, which is discriminatory. But then on top of it, there was sort of the multiplication of the discrimination because, of course, the black jobs were not appropriate for black people who were women. and the women's jobs, secretary, etc., were not appropriate for women who were black. So there was precious little space for a black woman to get hired and to advance, you know, in this industry. When Emma DeGraffin-Reed said, I am being discriminated against not just as a black person and not just as a woman, but as a black woman, so I should be able to seek the law's protection against race and race.

and gender discrimination. The courts basically said, well, no, you can't do that. This is foul. You can't put two causes of action together to make a claim. Title VII says you can make it on the basis of race or gender. It doesn't say and. So sorry, Emma DeGraffin-Reed. We can't help you here. And it just blew my mind. I thought, how can these very smart people not get that if you're protected against race discrimination, you're protected against all of it? So I turn to a metaphor basically to say, you just go through intersections all the time. You're never on one course or another. So in the same way that traffic going north and south sometimes overlaps with traffic going east to west, discrimination on the basis of race sometimes. overlaps with discrimination on the basis of gender. The law should provide a protection for that

kind of discrimination. So that's where intersectionality came from. Intersectionality has now become a word used to define so much as you said, and there doesn't seem to be as much controversy, at least now about it, not as much as critical race theory. And that is another way to describe something that is now very contentious in this moment. It's a graduate level field in legal studies. It has never been taught in K through 12 classrooms in this country. I mean, right now, more than 20 states now restrict how critical race theory can be taught. Your name is on a lot of the legislation. How does it feel to watch a coordinated political movement build itself out of a deliberate misreading of your scholarship?

Infuriating, of course. You know, these ideas have been around for decades before they were discovered and weaponized into the moral panic of the moment. And I should have you, I think, define in the simplest way possible, critical race theory. Critical race theory is simply the idea that race. power is not always expressed in explicit racist terms, but is and has been embedded in many of our institutions, especially in the law. I also just want to be clear about what has been misinterpreted, because when I hear that state legislatures throughout the country are banning critical race

theory for elementary and middle and high schoolers, when you're talking about a study, a theory that law students would learn. Am I right in that? Yes. Well, here's the thing. They're using critical race theory as the subject line for everything that has to do with race. So now that they have successfully said, if you're learning about the Tulsa massacre, that's critical race theory. If you are learning about the way that's that the Constitution embedded enslavement in it, despite the fact that slavery as a word never appears, that's critical race theory. If you talk about the Montgomery bus boycott and you talk about segregation as an anti-black policy and practice, that is critical race theory.

So effectively what they are trying to do with critical race theory is to say that, that any mention of race that talks about racial disempowerment, that talks about the hierarchies that were created between white people and everybody else, where these ideas are expressed, they are framed as divisive, they are framed as making white children feel bad, they're framed as being un-American,

even though this is telling a story that is deeply American, and it's a story that involves, It involves white people who actually came together with black people and others to fight against these injustices. So it's a storyline that they do not want told. If you're just joining us, my guest is legal scholar Kimberly Williams Crenshaw. Her new memoir is Backtalker, an American memoir. We'll be right back after a short break. This is fresh air.

I want to go back to 1991 when President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and to remind the audience Anita Hill, she was a law professor at the time, she worked for Thomas at the EEOC and she testified that he had sexually harassed her. And mainstream feminists defended Hill but couldn't speak to her race. In black communities, you know, there was this contentious thing that was happening of choosing between race and gender. And you were actually on Hill's prep team. What did the country show you that week when you were working on that prep team? There aren't a lot of moments in my life that I can say that was a disillusioning moment. But the Clarence Thomas

Indie Hill moment that when really stands out, I was there when Clarence Thomas denounced the as a high-tech lynching for black people who dared to think independently. And I thought that's not going to fly. People know Clarence Thomas has been an anti-civil rights figure for some time. He's been an anti-woman figure. He's talked negatively about his sister, you know, with all the stereotypes and the tropes of a black welfare queen. And finally, the fact that this was a black woman who was talking about her experiences. There has never been a case on record that I knew of where a black woman's allegation had led to the lynching of anybody. So I thought at that moment, all right, we're ready to rock and roll. Come on, black people. Come on African American men.

So we put out a call for African American men to speak up, speak out, talk back. Exactly two African American men came to the Capitol, and one was Luke Charles Harris, with whom I later founded the African-American policy form. It was just stunning how little was known about the role that black women had historically played in even creating the cause of action called sexual harassment. Many of the early plaintiffs were black women. Black women have experienced sexual harassment at work since we arrived on these shores. So the sensibility that my being an employee in this house, in this firm, or in this governmental office, does not give you license to assume that I am sexually available to you.

That's very much a part of black women's consciousness and history. It's what Rosa Parks understood. It's why she got her start defending Risi Taylor, who was a black woman. woman who was gang raped. So our whole history of the civil rights movement and fighting anti-blackness had this gendered dimension, but it wasn't one that was told to people. So when Anita Hill came forward, a lot of black people saw her as just representing white women's issues. And therefore, we weren't able to stay together. And then 33 years later, after Anita Hill, you watched Kamala Harris run for president, and something like 92% of black women voted for her, but the country by

enlarge did not. And when you watched all of that, what did you recognize? The same division that made it difficult for large numbers of African Americans to see in Anita Hill, a black woman, I saw in the white women's vote. So majority of white women did not vote for Anita Hill. They did not see in her a woman who could constitute a repudiation of all of the deeply patriarchal and gendered dimensions of this, this, you know, MAGA movement and candidate from the whole. horrific things that the current occupant of the White House had said about women, what you can do to them, and the fact that women, you know, had lost the reproductive freedom. But she did not and could not represent that or carry a gender-forward commitment through the election. So I call this

intersectional failure. And it's the ways that black women have not. not been often seen as representing a set of interests and issues that forward a racial justice agenda. And similarly, you know, black women have not been embraced by the majority of women. This failure is not only damaging to people of color and to women, it's damaging to our entire republic. This is what we're seeing unfold at this moment. You know, I'm talking to you, Kimberly, the week that the Supreme Court struck down congressional map that had been drawn to create a second majority Black District under the Voting Rights Act. Clarence Thomas was in the majority there in that 6-3 decision. This summer, our country turns 250.

And as America prepares to throw itself a party, What is the right word for what you are carrying right now? Oh, I would say accountability through accurate remembering of our history. There are two things that jumped to mine at this moment. I remember when I was at Girls' Boys Nation, and this is a program in which 370, year olds are brought to Washington, D.C., to learn leadership and to become patriots of our country. And I remember they took us to President Washington's plantation, and they tell us what happened there. And what stands out is what is unsaid, the life stories of the people who were owned by our president,

who worked those plantations, who served these presidents. And sometimes that service was material. Sometimes that service was in the case of Jefferson sexual. And this is all unwritten in the celebratory history that we want to tell. And efforts to recalibrate, to incorporate that, to acknowledge the fact that if there is a mother, in this country, it's black women because it's through our bodies that the wealth of the nation was able to launch the United States as the global power it actually became. And so later in

our history when Thurgood Marshall was thinking about how he would engage the bicentennial, he wrote a piece, he gave a speech that was later published. And in it, he basically said when he thinks about celebrating the country we've become, when he thinks about the rights that we take for granted, when he thinks about the legacy that we should be celebrating, it's not what happened in 1776. It's what happened in 1866. It's what happened at the end of the Civil War. It's the remaking of the Republic in a vision that truly celebrates the ideologically. idea of citizenship that everyone has access to, not based on race, not based on previous condition of servitude. So I think there is a way of celebrating America. It celebrates those

who fought for the true America. It celebrates those judges and lawyers and other actors who made good on a promise that we could be better. It is in that frame of mind that I'm going to celebrate their legacy this summer. Kimberly Williams-Krinshaw, thank you so much for this book and this conversation. Thank you so much. It's been an honor to be in conversation with you. Pioneering legal scholar Kimberly Williams-Krinshaw. Her new book is called Backtalker, an American memoir. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Freshier's executive producer is Sam Brigger.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with engineering help today from Jose Janice at WDET. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaliner, Susan Yacundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Roberta Shorak directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mousley. I don't know.