LA Review Of Books - Thursday, June 11, 2026

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1. Information available at www.theatricum.com and at kpfk.org.
2. You're listening to Fiercely Independent KPFK, 90.7 FM Los Angeles and on the web at kpfk.org.
3. Hello and welcome to the LARP Radio Hour, brought to you by Reader Supported LA Review of Books.
4. I'm your host, Eric Newman, and I'm thrilled and humbled to have legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw with me on the line today.
5. If you don't immediately recognize Kimberly's name, though I'm certain many of you listening will, you can be sure that you have heard of her work as the progenitor of the phrases and frameworks for critical race theory and intersectionality.
6. emerging within her chosen field of legal studies these frameworks which first came out in the early
7. 1980s before breaking into mainstream discourse in the 1990s and 2000s seek to understand the
8. way in which race and racism are rooted in the civic institutions legal systems and daily rhythms
9. of our society kimberly joins me today to discuss her memoir backtalker which chronicles how the
10. conflicts, ideals, and interests that shaped her vision of intersectionality and critical race
11. theory emerged from her Midwestern childhood through her Harvard Law education and her
12. prestigious career as a groundbreaking legal scholar. A personal history, Backtalker is also
13. a history of the dramatic changes in American life from the mid-20th century to the present,
14. decades that appeared to augur progress along the telos of racial and gender equality,
15. even into a moment of what was foolishly called and perhaps even more foolishly believed to be a quote-unquote post-racial America
16. before descending into the racial, gender, and sexual revanchism we find ourselves in today.
17. Welcome to the show, Kimberly. It's a pleasure to speak with you.
18. It is an absolute delight to be in conversation with you as well.
19. So let's start with where did this project start?
20. I mean, what made you want to—you're no stranger to writing.
21. You've written many, many, many thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of words over your career.
22. But what made you want to write a memoir?
23. Yeah, well, initially it was a suggestion that was made by an agent that eventually decided to work with me.
24. He asked me if I had any writing available to review that was targeted to a general audience.
25. And I had written some essays. They were more like introductions to my academic essays that tried to ground the essays in something that had happened in my life and some of the contemporary issues that were being debated at the time that I wrote the essays, the academic essays.
26. So I shared these with him and he said it would be a waste to put these essays in an academic text that maybe a thousand people were ever going to see.
27. So he persuaded me to take them out of the academic text and try to put them together into a memoir.
28. So that was the first idea around the possibility of a book like this.
29. I think the more immediate prompt for it was the backlash against the George Floyd Breonna Taylor moment and the way that that backlash focused on concepts like critical race theory and intersectionality And in particular there is a narrative about these ideas that frames them as un as foreign as abstracted ideas that are dangerous
30. And it struck me that, of course, I could write and say, no, that's not true.
31. But the proof is in the pudding. If the idea is to say, look, stakeholders, critics alike, you might have criticisms of this or you might not understand what it is. I'm going to tell you the stories out of which my thinking was grounded.
32. I'm going to identify moments in the period of time in which I was born prior to even
33. formal equality across the land.
34. I'm going to talk about those moments.
35. And you can decide for yourself what you think of the idea.
36. But the one thing you will not be able to say is that these are foreign ideas or that
37. they're un-American.
38. These ideas are as American as apple pie.
39. And to that point, I want to say that the first half of the book is really dedicated to your childhood. And I would love to just talk to you a little bit or have you explain a little bit about your incredible parents, both of whom were educators, which I think is where you and your older brother Mantle kind of got a lot of your own sense of, I mean, I think all the time about how, how does someone know that they have value?
40. How does someone know that they're able to talk back to kind of riff on the phrase of the book?
41. Yeah. Oh, you know, so I so appreciate the opportunity to talk about my family. And in many ways, the book is a tribute to them and the way in which I was raised.
42. And so my parents were what you would call race men and women of the 20th century.
43. They were very committed to challenging the logics of our exclusion across society, but also were committed to making sure that their children were prepared for the eventual opening of opportunities in society.
44. So they were as forward-facing as anyone in identifying illegitimate barriers and making sure that we understood that these barriers had nothing to do with our internal value.
45. And also, they wanted to be clear that we prepared ourselves to engage in the world, not simply let the world engage us.
46. So as I mentioned in the book, dinner was an important time for us to be socialized, for us to come to the table with observations about the world, with something to say about that, and with the ability to defend what we observed or what we thought.
47. So I used to get teased in the neighborhood because I would have to stop playing a little
48. bit early so I could have a moment where I thought about, what am I going to say today
49. at the dinner table?
50. To the extent that I could say I learned that at the knee of my parents, I actually learned
51. it at the dinner table.
52. That's where it all happened.
53. So while the first half of the book, as we've been talking about, it kind of sets the stage
54. for your growing consciousness about the particular challenges of your position as a young Black
55. woman It really in your undergraduate education at Cornell but then more specifically in your experience at Harvard Law School where you kind of experience what I would call like a laboratory where these
56. kind of experiences, sensations, and questions will kind of concretize themselves into the
57. frameworks of critical race theory and intersectionality. And I want to start by
58. talking about the influence of Derek Bell's 1970 book, Race, Racism, and American Law.
59. Can you talk a little bit about what that book was and kind of why it was so pathbreaking,
60. not only for thinking about race and racism within the American legal system,
61. but for your kind of trajectory? Yeah. Let me start by reflecting on the moment just before
62. I was sort of stepping back from university life, from the campus social scene, sort of becoming much more bookish and reading in the library.
63. And I stumbled, actually, across Derrick Bell's book in the Africana Studies Library.
64. And I opened the first page and there is a lithograph of Tommy Smith and John Carlos, the two African-American sprinters who raised their hand in a Black liberation salute during the playing of the national anthem when they had won respectively their races at the Olympics.
65. And it was a huge controversy. I mean, they basically lost their careers for running the race, but refusing to unsay, to erase, to bend into the demand that you are not to represent any complaint, critique, or demand on the world stage because that's embarrassing to the United States.
66. So when Derrick Bell had that lithograph in a book about the law, I thought it was signaling something to me that he was a lawyer, a brilliant legal analyst.
67. He was going to narrate and demonstrate different aspects about the law that were reflective of the needs, the interests, the values of the African-American community.
68. So he was doing something that was specific in the same way that John Carlos and Tommy Smith were doing something specific on the world stage.
69. And I got it. I understood. Okay, this is disruptive. This is not the typical way that a law text is being written, but it is about law. He is as effective at running this race as Tommy Smith and John Collins were in running that race.
70. So like, okay, I'm in, I'm in this.
71. And so, you know, it took me a couple of weeks, but I read the book and then I'll say, okay,
72. I got it.
73. The law is not about this abracadabra that you just go in and figure out what the magic
74. words are.
75. And suddenly it's going to be a referee that's going to, you know, call the strikes and the
76. balls for you.
77. It actually constitutes the rules of the game.
78. It constitutes the players.
79. And it does so in an unbalanced and asymmetrical way.
80. So it shifted the way I thought about law It not this neutral thing It not this science It actually is another arena in which race racial interests and power are actually constituted and sometimes insulated
81. So that's a whole different orientation. I go to law school, not now an empty vessel to just kind
82. to be turned into a foot soldier. I go in with a little bit more. I won't say I had what I have
83. now, but I was more skeptical of the process of legal education. And that gave me a foot
84. somewhat outside, one inside, one outside, from which to begin asking these questions,
85. talking back to it, along with many other fellow students and some young law professors.
86. And eventually that conversation became critical race theory.
87. You're listening to the LARP Radio Hour on KPFK 90.7 FM.
88. We've been speaking with Kimberly Crenshaw, author of Backtalker, an American memoir.
89. okay so if we jump forward to 1989 when you publish uh what is probably your most famous
90. article uh demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex and i believe this is when
91. intersectionality first kind of enters the lexicon right that's right if you could just
92. talk a little bit about what that moment was like. Was there a sense then or maybe since
93. where you felt like the framework that you very carefully establish in the language of that
94. article was kind of slipping beyond your vision or beyond the parameters and pushed and pulled
95. into different forms that may have been, in fact, antithetical to the overlapping system of prejudice
96. that you were trying to point people's attention to?
97. Yeah.
98. You know, this might come as a surprise,
99. but I was not aware of how, when, and how,
100. and by whom intersectionality was being carried into other spaces for years.
101. I guess it's pre-social media.
102. So maybe that's possibly why.
103. It's definitely, look, it's pre-cell phone.
104. We're talking about the late 80s.
105. So my experience of it was I wrote these two articles.
106. One was demarginalizing and the other was mapping the margin.
107. My experience of it was like if you're in a cave and you go, hello, and all you hear is hello, hello.
108. You just hear the echoes because there wasn't much of an uptake in the law itself.
109. And at that point, I was just basically reading legal literature.
110. I had no idea that it was being taken up outside in other literature.
111. So my experience was it sat on the shelf for quite some time before it started, you know, kind of traveling, you know, in sort of a warp speed kind of way.
112. So when I finally did start to note its uptake, it was more towards the middle and the end of the 90s that it came back to me.
113. Sometimes I used to say,
114. to have this PowerPoint where I had this slide of E.T.
115. And it was sort of like E.T. phones home.
116. Intersectionality sort of came back to me almost like alien.
117. Like that's intersectionality.
118. I didn't always recognize what it was that people were reading back.
119. And that was a process of discovery that, you know, ideas are sometimes articulated out of a specific context.
120. I was applying Black feminism to law.
121. Sure.
122. And the Black feminist inspiration was to essentially say that the law, to the extent that it replicates the mutual exclusion between anti-racist discourses and feminist ones, was a problem that needed a framework to be able to see more clearly and to interrupt.
123. interrupt. So intersectionality was an expression of Black feminism in the language of legal
124. discourse so that it would have an uptake. That's how I consider it.
125. Yeah, I mean, and we'll jump forward to kind of 2014. There is a bittersweet moment in the memoir
126. when you talk about the Obama campaign and his back-to-back presidential terms, because on the
127. one hand, this is a moment of jubilation in the Black community that a Black man had, I mean,
128. and also in the community at large, that a Black man had won the highest office in the country.
129. And I think in many ways that was, and this is where we enter into kind of the age of the image,
130. I think that was something that we saw and saw as a corrective to images that we had collected
131. from the past that stood for injustice. We wanted to believe that what this represented
132. was the righting of all the wrongs and something that I think is foundational to American political
133. psychology, which is also to feel like, well, he's there. We don't need to do any more work.
134. We've done it. It's done. But despite this kind of jubilation, this is also the beginning of a
135. long series of disappointments regarding the apparent abandonment of first an institutional
136. critique of racism, also the fantasy of a post-racial America, which as I was just saying,
137. is something we so desperately wanted to believe that we almost just said that it was happening,
138. even if we know that it wasn't. And then also, which you pick up on, the exclusion of Black girls
139. and women from conversations about racialized violence. So for example, in 2014, you were
140. involved with the Say Her Name movement, which on its face, and I'm not saying this in a diminutive
141. way, but wanted to achieve nothing more than the recognition that in the wake of the global
142. attention and media coverage rightfully given to the murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown,
143. that in fact, there were also Black women who were victims of police violence
144. whose names had never been said or never got the same kind of coverage. Yet this seemed to be
145. these lessons seem to be ones that many didn't want to learn if I'm being generous, but if I'm
146. not being generous, that I think were being taken as lessons that would be distractive
147. or divisive at a moment that demanded, all in scare quotes, national unity.
148. Yeah And I think that to understand the moment that you talking about we have to marry a couple of things We have to marry what at least from my earlier analysis the fact that racist violence and its gender dimensions were foregrounded in the conversation about anti as primarily a male experience of violence
149. Primarily a question of how the state and prior to that extrajudicial violence was the particular way in which Black men were presented as sexualized threats to the social order and consequently received that kind of, you know, that kind of erasure,
150. erasure, that kind of social death that sometimes became bodily death. That's front and center.
151. When we think about what are the images of white supremacy, the first thing that comes to mind is
152. the lynch victim, right? That's very central to how we understand that history, right?
153. Which is also why Clarence Thomas could use that phrasing and framing so effectively.
154. Yes. And it becomes a rallying cry. It becomes a, I don't have to read you the line and verse on this. You know what this is? You know, this is part of our history and it's happening again.
155. Um, there is no parallel recognition about how anti-Blackness has played out across gender.
156. So we don't have a discourse about what happened to Black women that is as front and center to us,
157. as legible to us as, oh, I know that story. We've seen that before, partly because what
158. happens to women is almost never seen as a matter of public significance. We don't see it playing
159. out in that way. It's mostly things that happen in private spaces, particularly when it has to
160. do with sexual abuse. So when we started Say Her Name, for example, and marched in the Eric Garner
161. March here in New York City, we went to that march and we had a banner that had 10 or 12 Black women
162. who'd been killed by the police. As we were marching, we were basically chanting all the
163. chants and slogans to draw attention to Eric Garner, to Mike Brown, but we also were chanting
164. slogans around many of the women who were killed. And the response was mixed, but for some people,
165. there was a sense that we were interlopers, that we were bringing a foreign concept into the
166. framework of anti-Black police violence. Why would that be the case? Why is it hard to make Black
167. female victims of police violence legible? One of the arguments is, well, because Black men get
168. killed much, much more than Black women, which is true. But that's not what makes it a racial
169. problem. What makes it a racial problem is you look at how many Black women are killed relative
170. to white women. Or you look at the quotidian violence that Black women experience relative,
171. not just to white women, but actually even with respect to white men. So some of the research
172. that we doing now suggests that the level of violence that Black women experience sometimes reaches the level of all other men except Black men That is a racial problem but it hard for people to wrap their head around it if the only
173. thing that counts as a racial problem is the number as opposed to the racial disparity,
174. particularly for in-group comparisons. So we're constantly struggling to say, look, the ways that
175. Black women experience racism have to be measured against the lack of racism that other women
176. have to deal with.
177. As we wrap up, I do want to talk a little bit about the assault on critical race theory
178. and intersectionality in recent years by the federal government, specifically under the
179. Trump regime, but also more generally in culture.
180. And I wonder if you think that this is just the latest pendulum swing, let's say, in the
181. mark of progress, or if you think that it represents something outside the rhythms of,
182. let's say, a teleology of racial, sexual, and gender justice.
183. So there are debates about whether you can think about the Obama White House as really
184. significantly advancing racial justice, but at least symbolically, it represented a moment in
185. which people were willing to say, there's the end of racial history now, and it's just American
186. history. That was followed by Trumpism. And then you have the summer of 2020, followed by this
187. all-out effort to completely decimate the rhetorics around social justice, particularly
188. racial justice, the frameworks that have come out of the last six decades of racial
189. justice, including the civil rights infrastructure, including the knowledge projects,
190. whether it's considered critical race theory, whether it's considered Africana studies,
191. now even broadened to entire fields of study like sociology. All of this is being attacked
192. as a condition of, I think, activist possibility.
193. I think what we saw in 2020 was the power of finding ways
194. of mobilizing horror and racial abuse into a mass movement.
195. And the 2020 activation was the largest political activation in terms of protest in American history.
196. 50 states, marches, sit-ins everywhere.
197. And it wasn't just Black people.
198. In fact, it wasn't even predominantly Black people.
199. This was a multiracial, cross-generational activation.
200. And in that activation, these concepts, these frames suddenly became activated. We talked about structural racism, not just a bad apple, but the relationship between the state through the police and marginalized populations.
201. populations. We talked about intersectionality. So these frameworks became available for censure
202. by those who were deeply disturbed by the possibilities that they were seeing activated all around them So it not surprising that the retrenchment focused on the intellectual orientation
203. the intellectual foundations of this new way of conceptualizing racial power.
204. What I think is, it's not new, I would just say what now I think is more legible
205. is that when the far right is able to defame certain concepts and people,
206. and our mainstream institutions are not prepared to interrogate that,
207. but instead simply report it as, well, this group over here says the sun rises in the west,
208. and this group says the sun rises in the east and that's all there is there's there's no critical
209. engagement um so i think that this is a moment not just of the rise of the right but the collapse
210. of the center and the co-signing of that uh by liberal and some radical uh formations that
211. in some ways wanted to back away from a robust commitment to racial justice. And as a consequence
212. of that, the connections between the assault on our democracy and the unraveling of commitments
213. to racial justice have been torn apart. So people don't see the attack on racial justice as
214. robustly as they should as an attack on democracy. That to me is what the crisis is right now.
215. Thank you so much for speaking with me. My guest today has been Kimberly Crenshaw,
216. author most recently of her very first debut memoir, Author of Backtalker.
217. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.
218. Thanks for listening to the LARP Radio Hour.
219. The producers of the LARP Radio Hour are Medea Ocher, Kate Wolfe, Eric Newman, and Mary Knopf and Jonathan Shiflett, who also mixed and edited our show.
220. Our founding executive producer is Alan Minsky.
221. Our intro music was written and performed by Imogen Beasley-Vlade.
222. Thank you.
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