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Kimberlé Crenshaw’s memoir describes a life shadowed by Jim Crow segregation and racism, but lit up by hope. That the social conditions of her early life did not destroy her family, as they had so many others, must be credited to their extraordinary grit and determination. The journey that led Crenshaw to create the influential legal theory of “intersectionality” begins with the “well of thoughtless devaluation faced by little Black girls”. And for all who think those days have long gone, Backtalker is a must read.
“Backtalking” is how Crenshaw responds to anything that does not make sense. Whether as a five-year-old kindergarten student who was allowed to portray a witch but not a princess in a school play, or decades later, lobbying Harvard’s dean of law to hire Black faculty and being asked whether she wouldn’t prefer “an excellent white professor over a mediocre Black one”, Crenshaw talked back. For her, backtalking is about resilience in the midst of struggle, which sometimes painfully includes talking back to the ones we love.
As a child in Canton, Ohio, she saw how white families left her neighbourhood after her own moved in. This was a tale already familiar to her mother. When Mariam Crenshaw was a little girl in the 1920s, she was taken to the local pool – in a largely white neighbourhood – to swim. While she was splashing about, the attendant demanded the other children get out and drained the pool of water. Not one to take things lying down, Marian’s mother rallied other Black families, and later that day, they returned as a group to the re-filled pool to swim. The attendant called the police, but there was nothing to be done, since no laws had been broken. Racism also backtalks, of course: eventually the pool was closed and filled with concrete, a common fate among public pools that had been forced to desegregate.
The law had always been held in high esteem in the Crenshaw household, “the abradcadabra to push back [the] shadows” of inequity. After a career as a teacher, her father enrolled in law school and got involved in housing policy. “And as I watched him pore over those heavy books with the tiny type, I convinced myself that I could do it too.” Walter, however, died suddenly while his daughter was still just a child. The family wasn’t left financially broken, since her mother “had a few cards that would help her make ends meet”: she owned property inherited from her parents that included two houses and a small apartment building, each purchased in the 1930s. They would provide rental income – until the city used eminent domain to take the property away.
Crenshaw describes eminent domain as the “legally authorized means of stealing Black people’s property for some purported ‘public use’. In this instance, the public use was a highway extension and an industrial park.” Not coincidentally, most of the Black residents of Canton lived on that stretch of land. While her family received “pennies on the dollar”, she later realised “had my mother been offered the value of two homes and an apartment building in a market not shaped by race, she would have been as financially secure as her white counterparts whose families had, like hers, acquired property in the early 20th century”.
After high school, Crenshaw was admitted to Cornell University, and her time there would prove transformational. She read Derrick Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law and came to realise that “law was not merely incidental to the racial order we had inherited. It helped to structure it. Nothing about how we lived and who we were was untouched by it.”
Her excitement at subsequently being admitted to Harvard Law was short-lived since, upon her arrival in 1981, there was only a single tenured Black faculty member, and Derrick Bell had departed, along with his Constitutional Law and Minority Issues course. Crenshaw was part of student protests to not only bring the course back on to the curriculum, but to hire additional Black faculty.After accepting a fellowship at University of Wisconsin Law School in 1984, she began to study the problem of Black women and employment discrimination. One case caught her attention: that of Emma DeGraffenreid, who sued General Motors in 1976 for workplace discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The judge hearing the case dismissed the claim because the company hired both white women (generally for clerical jobs) and Black men (generally manual labour jobs). Title VII protected against race or sex discrimination – but not the intersection of both. Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality was born.
Crenshaw went on to have a front-row seat for many of the well-known events discussed in the book: the Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearings; the OJ Simpson trial; and the election of Barack Obama. As described here in vivid detail, hers is not only a life well lived, but one worth learning about.
