LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - NOVEMBER 17: Honoree Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw accepts the Humanitarian of the Year award onstage during EBONY Power 100 Gala 2024 at Nya Studios on November 17, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images for EBONY)

Getty Images for EBONY

Few thought leaders have so profoundly shaped how we understand power, equality and justice as pioneering legal scholar and movement leader Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School and cofounder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF). Her groundbreaking coining of the term and framework “intersectionality”—which describes how overlapping forms of inequality intersect—along with her key role in developing Critical Race Theory, not only changed the way the world thinks about race and gender, but also gave us language and tools to identify and address systemic discrimination and exclusion.

Now, in her candid new book Backtalker: An American Memoir, released today, Crenshaw turns inward. She reveals the formative moments from her childhood and young adulthood—personal experiences and observations of unfairness, injustice, racism and sexism—that prompted her to become a “backtalker” and challenge the status quo, ultimately leading her to develop the two foundational frameworks she is known for. As Crenshaw writes, at the heart of the memoir is “the story of a Black girl born into a state of unfreedom, but on the cusp of a civil rights revolution that changed the trajectory of my life.” She weaves together intimate storytelling of her family life, work and activism with pivotal touchpoints in U.S. history that shaped her journey and perspective.

The book arrives at a moment when the very ideas Crenshaw helped bring into public discourse are facing renewed backlash, amid rollbacks to DEI initiatives, a wide range of attacks on the rights of marginalized communities and efforts to erase or minimize histories of injustice. But as Crenshaw has always taught, knowledge of our past offers lessons that can help us chart a course toward a more equitable and just future. In Backtalker, she shares her own history to “help provide a roadmap to the next generation of backtalkers—the leaders and resisters in the ongoing fight for democracy who will help carry the torch.”

In this interview, Crenshaw talks about the messages in the book, what it means to be a backtalker, how we can support Black women leaders, what gives her hope and why this moment “requires active engagement” and collective action.

Marianne Schnall: Why did you decide to write this memoir now, and what do you most hope readers will take away from it?

Kimberlé Crenshaw: It is a real interesting way to respond to attacks on an idea. I think a lot of people probably expected this to be a treatise, or a philosophical text, or at least a brief of what intersectionality really is and isn't. But the attacks that I was most inspired by were the attacks that identified intersectionality as identity politics on steroids, others that called it a religion, but most specifically those who said it was a European import, a sort of grand theory, social Marxism—all of these ideas that framed intersectionality as just a thought, a set of ideas that traveled from somewhere else, rather than the efforts to actually articulate the actual conditions of real lives.

So when I started thinking about intersectionality, I didn’t have a word for it, but I knew something was up. Being a Black girl growing up in the sixties, I knew there were some things that were happening to me as a Black girl that weren't being discussed and weren't being framed as part of the wider civil rights movement, and then later on as part of the feminist movement. And that gap wasn't something that I just went into an Ivy Tower office and thought about—it was something that I was living, and I was looking for ways of expressing this thing. Because it was clear that if you didn't have a word for something, or if you didn't have a way of lining up all other kinds of experiences that were like this thing that I was looking at, then it was not real enough to demand accountability, to demand intervention, to even demand that anti-discrimination law pay attention to it. So I thought the best way to respond was to say, “Okay, I got your import. This happened right here on this soil. This is part of our history.” So the book tries to tell the story of coming up with frameworks, not as a top-down process, but as an experience of reality.

Schnall: You titled your book Backtalker. What is the significance of being a “backtalker”—in history, in your life, for all of us generally—and why is it especially important right now?

Crenshaw: Well, backtalker implicitly brings into the frame the preexistence of authority, the preexisting power, that basically is telling us to accept, to sit down, to shut up and to go away. That is the essence of a fascist, authoritarian, white supremacist, patriarchal regime. That's what it's telling all of us. So what is it that we are to do in the face of that preexisting power? We talk back to it. We don't accept the terms that it gives us. We do not go quietly into the good night, but we go into it screaming, we go into it with resistance in our bones, we go into it with a commitment to countering all of the frameworks that tell everybody else that this is the way things have to be, that this is the way things are, have always been and always will be.

I know we have thoughts about that. The question is, do we have words to express those thoughts, which are preconditioned to actions, that push back against the deeds that create the terms of our subordination? So I wanted to signify that I know there's power out there. I know that that power can be debilitating, but I also know that we have a long, long history of resistance against it. And it starts with an attitude. It starts with, “I'm not taking this as the gospel truth.” So everyone can be a backtalker in small ways or in large ways. I wanted to bring people into my process of becoming a backtalker, and it started when I was little.

Schnall: So much of your work has been about naming things, so I want to thank you for that because you have given us so much of the language to make sure that we can point injustices out. For many people right now, there's so much to take in and worry about that they’re feeling really powerless and hopeless. What gives you hope? What are some things that you feel encouraged by or that sustain you to keep going?

Crenshaw: I was born at a time when we were not free. We were not free. And there was no real reason to think that we were going to get free. I mean, if we looked at the history of my mom's generation and her mom's generation, if anything the history was you might get a promise, but they're going to take it out off the table in eight years. And that was a few generations back. So there was really no solid reason for any of us to think that mobilizing, preparing, being race men and women of the 20th century was going to lead to anything substantially different from the way my parents and my parents' parents were. And yet we had people like Charles Hamilton Houston, like Pauli Murray, like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, who believed against the odds that the only way that nothing good can happen is if we didn't move as though something good could happen.

So I take that into this moment, and I think, look, things are bleak. I have to read the paper like this [covers her eyes and peeks through her fingers], like, can I take this right now? I’ve got to do it in little bits. But I also know, and I feel this, when a lot of us come together, when we’re at gatherings and seeing that we are not alone, that millions of people are seeing this, they might want to make us feel isolated, but knowing that we're not isolated and knowing that we've not lost our sight of what life should be like for us. We might not have all of the particulars filled in, but we know it's not this. And we know that this is not like the flu that's just going to pass—it's going to require us to fight, and it's going to require us to fight together better. So there are things that are in our control: how we mobilize, how we fight, what we say, how we lead, how we support—these are all things that actually are more in our control than reading the newspaper makes us think. That's the thing that gives me hope. We are human and we're not programmed, or we can un-program ourselves. So our future is not determined by an algorithm; it's what we do in the face of the algorithm.

Schnall: When I interviewed you in 2023, we talked about the specific challenges that Black women leaders face and how we can proactively invest in their leadership. Right now it feels like we're retrograding. What does meaningful support for Black women leaders look like now? What needs to happen so that we don’t continue to go backwards?

Crenshaw: Well, let’s start with Black women-led organizations, for example. Black women-led organizations never got more than 1% of all foundation dollars. I mean, Black people in general got about that much, so you can imagine how many dollars Black women-led organizations have received. There was an effort after 2020, 2021, to promise more. The retrenchment on that has been severe and swift and sudden. There's not a day that I don't talk to another Black woman leader who is sharing how tough it is to continue to function and to survive and to bring the value that our leadership brings to the table. I know organizations that have gone out of business, they no longer are able to do the work they do. My own organization, we're still kicking, but it is a struggle. So it's fascinating because I have many conversations with both institutional philanthropists and individuals. They'll say, “We love intersectionality, we do intersectionality.” And I say, “So what organizations do you support?” And then there's a little bit of a moment of reckoning that the rhetorical and the material are not aligned. We're seeing that a lot.

So I would say number one, just recognizing that Black women-led organizations are among the first to be cut off. That has been a problem. Scrubbing our leadership is another problem. So some will say, “We'll continue to support, but can you just take this stuff out of what you do.” I spoke with a woman last week who is doing Black maternal mortality work, and Black women's mortality during childbirth, it is a scandal. She initially got resources to do work on it, and then was told that she should change the images on the website, basically suppress Black women's presence in this.

When we're told to pivot, to deracialize, sometimes it means move the Black people a little bit further outside of the frame. When people succumb to that, that is a loss of support. That is a loss of power. That is an erasure of a presence that we've been fighting for the last century to put back into the center of our work. So that's huge.

And the last thing is just making sure that in the fight that we're having, that we're naming anti-Blackness as a condition of this possibility. I've been to protests and participated in teach-ins where every issue that we're facing, every legitimate issue is listed except anti-Blackness. It's like it's that thing that people feel they can't name. We're naming everything, but not naming the Achilles heel that caused this country to break the first time. And it's been a recurring fracture that is allowing it to break again. We have to be able to name it. So if we can't name anti-Blackness, we can't really support Black women leaders because they are subject to both the anti-Blackness and to misogyny and sexism in all of its forms.

Schnall: You've just written this incredible book and are fresh from sharing so many insights and reflections. What do you think is most important for people to understand right now? What would you really want to leave people with?

Crenshaw: I think it’s most important for people to understand right now that the final chapter hasn’t been written—and it won't get written without us. So this is not something that just passes by. It is something that requires active engagement. The only thing that is a hundred percent true is that we will be in a fascist decline if we don't try to write a different ending. Everything else is yet to be determined. And we have agency in that.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

For more about Kimberlé Crenshaw and her work, visit KimberleCrenshaw.com.