"Backtalker": Kimberlé Crenshaw on New Memoir, Voting Rights, Critical Race Theory & Clarence Thomas

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]This is Democracy Now. I'm Amy Goodman.

[00:00:03]We end today's show with the acclaimed legal scholar Kimberly Krenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, executive director of the African-American Policy Forum. She coined the term intersectionality in 1989, which she's described as a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. Kimberly Krenshaw went on to write, "It's not simply that there's a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LGBTQ problem here. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things."

[00:00:41]Kimberly Krenshaw is also a leading scholar in the field of critical race theory. For years, President Trump has led a campaign against CRT as part of a broader attack on how history is taught and told in the country.

[00:00:57]Well, Kimberly Williams Krenshaw has just published a new book. It's titled Backtalker, an American memoir. In the book, she writes, quote, "When the federal government silences the past, it destroys the foundation upon which civil rights and equality are grounded."

[00:01:15]Professor Krenshaw, it's such an honor to have you here. Backtalker, what does that mean?

[00:01:22]>> Um, backtalker is a frame that I use to encourage people to talk back against claims that the world as we have experienced it is the way it can only be. That there uh is no reason to uh continue to advocate for change. that uh what we have is pretty much all uh we deserve. I am thinking about backtalking as the kind of resistance that we need to the logics that tell us uh that the the world is is pretty much okay the way it is and we know it isn't. So put that back talk um against the voting rights act and what has happened with it and uh for people who don't understand what exactly has happened and if you can also talk about the Supreme Court finding that Louisiana's current congressional map is unconstitutional um which followed Governor Landry suspending the state's primaries for the US House of Representatives. Well, um, the Voting Rights Act was the crown jewel of the civil rights movement in part because it said, "Look, it doesn't matter the specific thing that you're doing to undermine the voting strength uh of traditionally excluded uh populations. The Voting Rights Act protects against intentional or effective uh disenfranchisement of uh protected groups." Well, what this Supreme Court has now said is that if you take race into account in trying to address racism in the uh voting rights system that you are the one that is guilty of creating uh a racialized system. So, what they're effectively saying is that if you draw a district in order to protect an incumbent, um that's okay. If you draw a district in order to maximize minority voting strength, that's not okay. Now, let's be clear about one thing. Um, incumbency is often the product of racial power. Uh, incumbency, particularly in Louisiana, is is is uh made and reinforced by packing, cracking, stacking uh African-American voters. What they're basically saying is you you have to take the baseline as is. uh even though that's a product of race discrimination.

[00:03:43]If you try to if you try to remedy the racial discrimination that's built into incumbency, that's when you're being racist. That's the problem. So, it's turning reality completely on its head and destroying the Voting Rights Act while they're doing so.

[00:03:58]>> So, you are known around the world for your work on intersectionality, on critical race theory. Um, but let's hear for a moment the personal story behind the public intellectual. Talk about how you came to be Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, your background.

[00:04:18]>> Well, I I wrote this book as a tribute to my parents, uh, who were, as we called them, race men and women of the 20th century. What that meant is that they were vigilant in pushing back against the barriers, the illegitimate ways in which black people uh were told that they didn't belong in this country.

[00:04:38]Um my my mother integrated her local swimming pool when she was 3 years old.

[00:04:43]Um, so they were keen to make it clear that we understood the history upon which we stood, um, the places and spaces of racial discrimination, but also that we were prepared to walk into um, institutions that were being opened at that very time. You know, a lot of people think that this period of discrimination, segregation was ancient history a long time ago. It was during my lifetime. I was born into a society in which I was not free. I was born before uh the the the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 64 and ' 65. So when my parents uh raised us, they raised us to be aware that the context that we were in might often be shaped by illegitimate racial barriers, but also raised us to be prepared to talk back to them. That's what we had to do at the dinner table. That's how they shaped me.

[00:05:40]So much of the book is uh trying to uh trace the arc of the civil rights movement and locate my parents uh nurturing to allow me to um be able to understand and and and talk back against racial power when I saw it. Did you grow up?

[00:05:56]>> I grew up in Canton, Ohio, an industrial town uh in the Midwest on its way uh from uh the South to Chicago and Detroit. a lot of black folks uh escaping the south ended up uh staying in Canton, Ohio and being part of the uh industrial core there.

[00:06:15]>> Talk about what exactly intersectionality is um and critical race theory and what it means today under President Trump, the >> vicious attack and how that was really the underpinning of DEI.

[00:06:34]>> Yeah. Well, intersectionalist refers to the idea uh that disadvantage, discrimination, marginalization uh often is based on more than one axis of inequality. Those often um overlap. They reinforce each other. So I began to write in this arena when I was trying to understand how black women who sometimes sued employers because they were subject to gender discrimination and race discrimination. Uh many times black jobs were for men and women's jobs were for white women which meant that there was precious little space for African-American women. But courts couldn't really understand that. They were saying, you know, uh, how can you claim race discrimination because we hire black people? They just happen to be men. How can you claim gender discrimination? We hire women. They just happen to be white. And I couldn't understand what the courts couldn't understand. So I I was looking for a metaphor, a way that would allow judges to understand that discrimination isn't just u along one axis or another, but just like intersections, they might crisscross each other. So intersectionality was really a remedial framework for judges that are supposed to be very smart, but they weren't that smart at all when it came to understanding what black women were experiencing. H can you talk about Clarence Thomas and the tensions around his confirmation as justice of the Supreme Court? You write a lot about this.

[00:08:08]>> Yeah. So when uh when Clarence Thomas was uh nominated for uh to take over the the the seat that uh Thood Marshall had occupied, the great civil rights giant.

[00:08:22]My initial thought was this isn't going to work. Everybody knows there's a difference between Clarence Thomas and Thood Marshall. Um, and to my surprise and disillusionment, a lot of people didn't understand the difference between the two. Uh, eventually there became uh a moment when it was known that there was someone a former employee who uh had told someone that she'd been sexually harassed by him. That person turned out to be Anita Hill. Turned out I knew Anita. there weren't a whole a whole lot of black women law professors. Uh so I contacted her. I offered support. Before I knew it, I was on my way to Washington DC to support her. Um but the shocking thing that happened was when Clarence Thomas denounced the entire uh inquiry as a high-tech lynching. And what that did was it provided a metaphor for him to speak to the history of antilackness to place himself in the middle of that narrative and to draw a support of large numbers of African-Americans to his side and she had nothing equivalent that she could say.

[00:09:31]>> I wanted to turn to then Senator Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden.

[00:09:37]>> Joe Biden. Yes.

[00:09:38]>> Questioning Anita Hill back in 1991.

[00:09:42]Can you tell the committee what was the most embarrassing of all the incidences that you have alleged?

[00:09:53]I think the one that was the most embarrassing was his discussion of of pornography involving these women with large breasts and and engaged in variety of sex with different people or animals.

[00:10:14]That was the thing that embarrassed me the most and made me feel the most humiliated.

[00:10:21]law professor Anita Hill testifying at the confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas. Um, Professor Krenshaw, the lessons you draw from what happened there and what it means for today.

[00:10:35]>> You know, Amy, I want to take you to the moment that Clarence Thomas was finally confirmed. My uh co-founder of AAPF, Luke Harris, and I were sitting on the stairs of the Supreme Court. Um, at that moment I said, "This is going to change the rest of our lives." Luke said, "All because they refused to believe a black woman." Um, I call this a massive intersectional failure. Uh, a coalition of uh, civil rights groups, feminist groups. They successfully blocked Bourke. Clarence Thomas was basically an acolyte of Bourke. There wasn't really much daylight between them. What was different was Clarence Thomas was able to wrap himself in a sympathetic uh framework as someone who is being unfairly treated by the testimony and Anita Hill partly because the history of black women, the experiences that they've had with sexual harassment of uh really since we arrived here and the fact that black women were some of the first plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases that just wasn't part of the common knowledge. So, she was framed as someone who was complaining about something that black women uh don't complain about. There was an op-ed in the New York Times that said that what Clarence Thomas had done to Anita was just basically downhome courting. So, there was a cultural defense that was being made uh to block the significance of her testimony. So, what we often say now is when we look at some of the consequences of that failure, some of the uh long-term uh results of that, we've lost uh campaign finance reform on a 54 vote. We lost uh uh section five of the voting rights act, 54 votes. We look at all the five4 votes that were made possible by that failure to believe Anita Hill. And we have to recognize that this intersectional failure not only impacts black women, not only impacts communities of color, it undermined the security and the democracy of the entire nation.

[00:12:44]>> Um before we go, if you could define CRT, critical race theory, um also talk about what gives you hope today. Well, critical race theory is basically the study of the way that racial disempowerment and other forms of exclusion are not principally the product of individual people making decisions to exclude people because they hate them for the color of their skin.

[00:13:11]Critical race theory looks at the ways that institutions once they've been structured uh in contexts where people of color had not been part of it that exclusion can continue even if there isn't explicit uh policies and practices that say black people, brown people, Asian people can't come in. It's embedded in our systems. I often uh liken it to asbesus. We used to build institutions with asbestous, right? And we know it's toxic. It would be crazy to say that we can protect ourselves from asbestous related diseases by stop talking about asbestous, stop looking at it, uh stop teaching people how to find it. That would make no sense whatsoever.

[00:13:57]Critical race theory says the same thing about race and racial exclusion.

[00:14:03]>> And what gives you hope? What gives me hope is the fact that when uh when I was born, Amy, there was no reason to really have faith that this American republic would actually reform itself, would create opportunities. Yet, there was the recognition that the one thing that was clear is if we didn't fight it, if we didn't prepare ourselves for the these opportunities, they would never come.

[00:14:27]I'm hopeful because that same energy, that same recognition, I think is growing all over the United States today. We have to be willing to speak against power, to back talk against all those who tell us it's impossible because we know it's not impossible.

[00:14:44]It's happened before. It can happen again.

[00:14:47]>> So you say backtalking is the answer to backsliding.

[00:14:51]>> Backtalking is the answer to authoritarian backsliding. Kimberly Williams Krenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. Her new book, Backtalker, an American memoir.

[00:15:06]She's also the co-founder and executive director of the African-American Policy Forum, the AAPF.

[00:15:13]That does it for today's show. I'll be in Minneapolis on Thursday night and Friday morning for screenings of the new documentary about Democracy Now. Steal this story, please. I'll be at the Maine in Minneapolis. Then in Chicago on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening at the Music Box movie theater, joined by Juan Gonzalez and the film's directors Tia Lesson and Carl Deal. Then on to Milwaukee at noon on Sunday at the Oriental, a massive theater in Milwaukee. You can check our website at democracynow.org or for all details. That does it for our show. I'm Amy Goodman. This is another edition of Democracy Now.

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