MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Whether you know the name Kimberle Crenshaw or not, you probably know her work. That's because her work as a foundational legal theorist of the concepts of intersectionality and critical race theory have become pivotal to some in understanding the forces that shape their lives and a political weapon in the hands of others - a symbol of liberal insanity. And now Kimberle Crenshaw explores the origin story of these theories in her own life in a poignant new memoir. It's called "Backtalker," and she's with us now. Professor Crenshaw, thank you so much for joining us.
KIMBERLE CRENSHAW: I am so thrilled to be in conversation with you, Michel.
MARTIN: Your memoir is very plain-spoken. Anybody can understand what you're saying in the stories that you tell. You describe just incidents in your life, starting from when you were a little kid, that made you realize that your girlness and your race were connected. It's hard to pick just one, but I'm going to pick the one from the Fly Club at Harvard. It's like a social club, right? I mean, it's kind of like a frat, but not really a frat. What happened?
CRENSHAW: So our one friend was so proud of being one of the first Black members ever of the Fly Club. As a celebration for the end of the semester, he invited us to go. And my other friend and I - we weren't so sure that we really wanted to go to the Fly Club. But we said, whatever happens, we're not going to take any disrespect. So when we got to the Fly Club and we knocked on the door, our friend came out. And our friend said, I just forgot to tell you that because Kim is a woman, she has to go through the back door. We don't allow women to come through the front door.
MARTIN: OK, wow. Let's just stop. Like, wow.
CRENSHAW: That's when I realized that there was fine print. Our solidarity extends to the things that treat us with disrespect in the same way. We're not having to go around the back door because of our collective racial identity. You've got to go around to the back door because of your gender identity.
MARTIN: As a legal scholar, you came across this 1976 case in which that kind of thinking had real-life consequences.
CRENSHAW: It involved a Black woman who was representing other Black women, effectively saying that they were being discriminated against as Black women. The court that was listening to the case just summarily sort of dismissed the case, effectively saying, look. This company hires Black people and this company hires women, so you can't prove race discrimination and you can't prove gender discrimination.
MARTIN: Can I just jump in here for a second? It's true they hired women, but they only hired women in secretarial roles...
CRENSHAW: Exactly.
MARTIN: ...Which they never hired Black women for.
CRENSHAW: Right.
MARTIN: And, yes, they hired Black men. But they only hired Black men for the factory floor, and they didn't hire women for those jobs. So Black women were boxed out, but the courts couldn't see it.
CRENSHAW: As far as the court was concerned, because Black women were the only ones in this setting who needed to be able to say, it's the combination of racial and gender discrimination that I'm suffering from, to give that to them was to give them preferential treatment. And so when I read that, it just blew my mind, right? These are very erudite judges, but they weren't able to understand something that, to me, was very basic in the lived lives of Black women like me.
So the intersection was basically a metaphor to say, look, judges. You go through intersections every day. You can understand this. Just think about the race structure as one avenue. Think about the gender structure as another. Think about the policies as the traffic that's traveling along those structures, and imagine, then, where this traffic overlaps. That's what intersectionality initially was.
MARTIN: And that, along with your work in critical race theory, which frankly deserves kind of its own conversation, are part of the reason that even if people don't know your name, they know your work. It's the rare scholar whose work becomes such a topic of public discussion - people talking about CRT, critical race theory, in school board meetings as something to be kind of fought against. And I just wondered if you saw that coming.
CRENSHAW: Critical race theory, intersectionality - those were articulated in the '80s. So the thought that decades later, they would skip the rails and travel into mainstream culture as avatars for, as one critic has said, everything crazy that has come out of the liberal left - no, that was hard to predict or anticipate. I would say, in American society, forward momentum has always been met by retrenchment. Going all the way back to Reconstruction, after eight years of active effort to create full citizenship for the freed slaves, there came decades after that of retrenchment. The same with respect to the Civil Rights Movement, the election of Barack Obama. And then after the George Floyd reckoning in 2020, we are now in a period of retrenchment.
So the general cycle, I anticipated and predicted. But I would say, honestly, Michel, the thing that was the most surprising to me was the way that so many other stakeholders in race and gender justice would think that the play in response was to try to pivot away - to just say, well, we can keep doing what we're doing. Let's not use the word that will draw the negative attention. And I thought it was just incredibly shortsighted, I think, as we see now, that it was never just about a few words or a few letters.
MARTIN: Does it leave you feeling politically homeless, in a way?
CRENSHAW: It's kind of funny because even I find myself sometimes complaining about this to some of my mentors and friends. And at the same time, I realize that opponents don't go after things that don't matter. When ideas move possibilities, these are the moments that the ideas come under stress and pressure and elimination, and lifted by all the people that I meet all the time who talk about how the ideas have been helpful in putting meaning and narrative to their own lives. So that keeps the frustration at bay.
MARTIN: That's Professor Kimberle Crenshaw. She's a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Columbia Law School. Her latest book is called "Backtalker." Professor Kimberle Crenshaw, thank you so much for talking with us.
CRENSHAW: Thank you.
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