Tanya Mosley

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?

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?

And I should have you, I think, define in the simplest way possible critical race theory.

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?

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.