Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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 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 at 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.
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Chapter 2: What are the foundational ideas introduced by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw?
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 learned, something you thought about, kind of like homework for dinner. I think that's how you put it in the book. 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 schoolhouse.
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 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 a little bit before we were called in for dinner because I had to think about what am I going to talk about at the dinner table tonight.
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Chapter 3: How did Crenshaw develop the concept of intersectionality?
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 call us names. She 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 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, a 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 never seen him be emotional like that, him being hurt like that.
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Chapter 4: What role did Crenshaw's childhood experiences play in shaping her views?
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 Graffenried was asking for That is the woman who, right, who filed the lawsuit. 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, et cetera, were not appropriate for women who were black. So there was precious little space for a black woman to get hired and to advance in this industry.
When Emma de Graffenried 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 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 DeGraff and 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 judges 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.
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