In her new memoir, “Backtalker,” reviewed recently in The New Yorker, the legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw traces the deeply personal origins of “intersectionality” and “critical race theory,” two academic frameworks that migrated from obscure law journals to the volatile center of American political discourse.
Published by Simon & Schuster, the book chronicles Crenshaw’s journey from a grieving daughter in Ohio to a transformative figure at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, where she was hired as a professor in 1986. The narrative anchors her intellectual milestones in a life punctuated by profound early losses, including the premature death of her father and the fatal shooting of her brother at Wilberforce University.
Before arriving at Harvard Law School, Crenshaw’s academic trajectory was nearly derailed during her undergraduate years at Cornell University by an obsessive and abusive ex-boyfriend. This harrowing personal ordeal deeply informed her later insights into the distinct, overlapping vulnerabilities faced by women of color in both private and public spheres.
Crenshaw entered Harvard in an era of intense ideological friction, joining a politically engaged cohort determined to honor Derrick Bell, the university’s first tenured Black law professor. Bell had famously departed the institution in 1982 to protest the administration’s sluggish approach to diversifying its senior faculty, leaving behind students who hungered for courses that reflected the lived realities of marginalized communities rather than sterile legal artifacts.
Her activism was heavily influenced by Bell’s unsentimental 1976 essay, “Serving Two Masters,” which controversially suggested that the singular focus on school desegregation did not always align with the immediate educational needs of Black children. Bell argued that a movement genuinely responsive to Black parents might have prioritized resource allocation over integration, a pragmatic philosophy that deeply resonated with Crenshaw’s desire to help specific, disempowered neighborhoods.
This academic crucible forced Crenshaw to navigate between the traditional integrationist strategies of the civil rights movement and the emerging cynicism of Critical Legal Studies, a leftist movement whose adherents dismissed constitutional rights as naive tools of the privileged. Prominent theorists like Mark Tushnet argued in 1984 that the First Amendment primarily protected the powerful, prompting Crenshaw and her peers to forge a new path that would eventually be known as critical race theory.
By insisting on the practical necessity of civil rights for those historically denied them, this insurgent cohort of mostly nonwhite scholars seized the term “critical” to demand systemic accountability. Crenshaw’s 1988 essay, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment,” perfectly distilled this tension, challenging both the old-guard liberalism of the civil rights establishment and the detached radicalism of her academic contemporaries.
The terminology Crenshaw forged in these academic battles eventually bled into the mainstream, occasionally mutating beyond her original intent. By 2011, the concept of intersectionality had achieved cultural ubiquity, famously appearing on protest signs at a feminist SlutWalk in New York City and prompting the writer Flavia Dzodan to declare in a resonant essay, “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit.”
By the time National Public Radio was praising the playwright Lorraine Hansberry for being intersectional before the term existed, the framework had fully escaped its academic moorings. In an era dominated by social media politics, intersectionality provided an intuitive vocabulary for demanding that progressive movements remain accountable to multiple constituencies at once.
Decades after its inception, critical race theory underwent a similarly dramatic public evolution, transforming into a catchall target for conservative anxieties regarding educational curricula. During a 2020 campaign rally, Donald Trump explicitly promised to ban the framework from federal government training, branding the once-obscure legal doctrine a “hateful Marxist” ideology.
Crenshaw’s reflections reveal a profound ambivalence about the trajectory of her own radicalism, framing her foundational ideas not as deliberate provocations but as the logical conclusions of a clear-eyed observer. She expresses genuine bewilderment at the fierce controversies her work has ignited among both dedicated opponents and potential allies who eagerly commodified her terminology on unlicensed merchandise.
The memoir underscores a critical paradox in modern identity politics, where frameworks originally designed to critique the civil rights movement are now demonized as existential threats. Crenshaw observes this bizarre media ecosystem directly in her writing.
Fox TV jumped on the bandwagon, amplifying efforts by a few dedicated extremists to attack critical race theory as ‘divisive,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘un-American.’
When political commentators amplify efforts to label critical race theory as a threat to the republic, they inadvertently validate the framework’s core premise regarding the enduring nature of racial anxiety in America. Ultimately, Crenshaw’s historical account reclaims the intellectual rigor of these concepts, reminding readers that intersectionality was never meant to be a superficial badge of progressive virtue.
Instead, it was forged as a precise analytical tool to expose how overlapping systems of racial and sexual subordination uniquely burden Black women, demanding a more robust and accountable approach to legal justice. As educational institutions nationwide continue to face legislative bans on discussions of systemic racism, Crenshaw’s memoir serves as both a historical corrective and a strategic blueprint for future legal scholars.
The ongoing battle over school curricula ensures that critical race theory will remain at the forefront of American political warfare well into the next decade. Moving forward, the true test of Crenshaw’s legacy will not be whether her terminology survives the current wave of partisan hostility, but whether the underlying demand for structural equity can still influence tangible legal reform.
As new generations of activists inherit these fiercely contested frameworks, the fundamental challenge of serving multiple marginalized constituencies simultaneously remains as urgent today as it was in 1989. The intellectual foundation laid at Harvard and U.C.L.A. continues to demand that the American legal system confront its deepest contradictions.
The Canadian Council on Animal Care is investigating allegations of severe mistreatment and neglect involving research macaques. Leaked records and covert video reveal systemic injuries that experts warn could compromise the university’s federally funded neurological studies.
Many of the technologies we rely on daily, from GPS to spreadsheets, originated in university labs, driven by pure scientific curiosity and federal funding. This foundational academic research, not corporate competition, quietly shaped our modern world.
While corporate titans get the credit, academic researchers fueled by public funds are the true architects of modern innovations like GPS and spreadsheets. This foundational work, essential for America’s innovation economy, is now threatened by severe funding cuts.
