The Idea That Reshaped Identity Politics Has a Complicated Backstory

Plenty of scholars and journalists have written histories of these contentious terms, “intersectionality” and “critical race theory.” Now Crenshaw has written something different: a history of herself. In “Backtalker: A Memoir” (Simon & Schuster), she frames her life and her remarkably influential career as one long fight against various forms of exclusion and unfairness. Like many radical thinkers, she seems to harbor a certain ambivalence about radicalism itself. She tends to present her ideas as sensible and traditional—the reasonable conclusions of a clear-eyed intellectual who simply refused to shut up about what she witnessed and experienced. At times, she seems genuinely puzzled by the controversy her ideas have aroused, among both potential allies and dedicated opponents. Near the end of the book, she writes about what it was like to hear her coinages taken up by people who had doubtless never opened a law journal. “Fox TV jumped on the bandwagon, amplifying efforts by a few dedicated extremists to attack critical race theory as ‘divisive,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘un-American,’ ” she writes, and though it’s clear that the people on television didn’t consider these descriptions to be compliments, Crenshaw might have taken them as such. Neither of the movements she named was designed for mainstream acceptance. C.R.T. was born as an insurgent project, and intersectionality was once a critique of the civil-rights movement. What are they now?

On a quiet street on the north side of Canton, Ohio, there is a sign marking Kimberle Gardens, a small public-housing complex. It was named for Kimberlé Crenshaw by her father, Walter, Jr., who worked for the city’s public-housing authority. Crenshaw’s mother, Marian, was a teacher, and when she was pregnant she agreed to let Crenshaw’s big brother, Mantel, name his baby sister. He chose “Kim,” for his favorite actress, Kim Novak, and the family transformed “Kim” into “Kimberlé,” a name that few would guess had any connection to a blond movie star. Walter was an accomplished singer and Marian played the piano, but Crenshaw evidently did not inherit a talent for music. Her mother offered her a consolation that proved accurate: “Don’t worry baby, you can talk!” Crenshaw delivered her first speech at the age of eight, in church, in 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr., had just been assassinated, and the pastor asked for comment. “Before I thought better of it, I was on my feet,” she writes, and she remembers “exhorting everyone not to let Dr. King’s death be the end of our freedom struggle.” At least in retrospect, Crenshaw’s childhood unspools like an extended freedom struggle. When she was six, she writes, a white teacher stubbornly declined to cast her in the role of princess in a classroom game, so her parents had the teacher come to the house to make amends. (It was, she writes, a “profound recognition,” and a way of counteracting the “thoughtless devaluation faced by little Black girls.”) In seventh grade, a racist classmate tormented her, enabled by the careful neutrality of many so-called friends, whom she likens to Swiss bankers hoarding Nazi gold. As an adolescent, Crenshaw clashed with her aunt’s new husband and, she says, found herself on the receiving end of a “rage-filled verbal assault,” while her aunt declined to intervene. (“This was male supremacy at work,” she writes.) And, after some unhappy years at an almost all-white Christian school, she transferred to a more diverse public school, writing, “I went running from that dreadful place like Harriet Tubman.”

Not all of Crenshaw’s struggles held obvious political lessons. Her father died young, when she was ten—and so, shockingly, did her brother, who was shot to death at Wilberforce, the historically Black college he attended, during a student brawl. Crenshaw went to Cornell, where her life was almost derailed, even ended, by an ex-boyfriend she describes as obsessive and abusive. Inspired by her father, who had been studying for a law degree when he died, she made her way to Harvard Law School, where she fell in with a politically engaged group of students who were pushing the school to hire more Black professors and to offer a course specifically about race and the law. (They also agitated, unsuccessfully, for what was known as a “no-hassle pass,” which would have given students the right not to be catechized by professors.) Their activism was a tribute to Derrick Bell, an influential legal theorist who had become Harvard’s first tenured Black law professor, in 1982, and had recently left, precisely because he felt the administration was moving too slowly in diversifying the senior faculty. (In 1998, Lani Guinier became the first Black woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law.) In Crenshaw’s view, the school offered courses full of “cold artifacts” rather than warm-blooded evocations of the Black people and neighborhoods she wanted to help. In some ways, her life at Harvard was the logical continuation of her life in Ohio, and of her precocious determination to find a way to continue the struggles of Martin Luther King, Jr.