The Idea That Reshaped Identity Politics Has a Complicated Backstory
In 1969, a British magazine called Nova published an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It was around the time the Beatles broke up, and also around the time Lennon and Ono got married, and the two seemed to delight in each other’s company and ideas. At one point, Lennon was musing about his belief in reincarnation, and enumerating some of his past lives and identities, when Ono made a blunt analogy. “Woman is the nigger of the world,” she said. The interviewer, Irma Kurtz, wasn’t impressed. “I had to wonder where that sweeping statement placed Negro women,” she wrote. But Ono’s phrase resonated: the magazine put it on the cover, and it eventually became the title of a would-be feminist anthem written by the couple and sung by Lennon. The song stalled at No. 57 on the pop chart, partly because radio stations refused to play it, but the incendiary formulation was hard to forget—especially as, in the decades that followed, the taboo against non-Black people using the N-word grew markedly stronger.
An unexpected new burst of infamy arrived in 2011, when the motto appeared at SlutWalk NYC, a feminist protest, on a sign held by a protester—a white woman, as far as anyone could tell. The march organizers apologized, calling the sign “racist,” and a writer named Flavia Dzodan responded with an essay that spawned a resonant phrase of its own: “My Feminism Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be Bullshit.” (Dzodan later wrote about her dismay at seeing the phrase emblazoned on T-shirts and coffee mugs, all of them unlicensed.) Like the old, unsayable phrase, the new one made a claim about the complicated relationship between race and sex. An “intersectional” feminist movement was one that didn’t merely see similarities between racial and sexual subordination but acknowledged the ways they overlapped—especially for Black women, who experienced both at once.
By 2011, “intersectionality” had nearly completed its journey from intellectual obscurity to cultural ubiquity. In an era of social-media politics, with everyone talking to (or shouting at) everyone else, arguments and identities tended to stack atop one another, and so “intersectionality” made intuitive sense: it explained why movements needed to be accountable to multiple constituencies at once. In conversations among progressives, the word often functioned as a way to commend the work of Black women. One story on National Public Radio praised the playwright Lorraine Hansberry for being “intersectional before it became a thing”; another observed that Beyoncé was working to “nudge her listeners toward the concept of intersectional feminism.”
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Unlike many intellectual concepts, this one has a clear origin story: “intersectionality” was born in 1989, in a law-review article titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” The author, a professor named Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, proved to have a knack not just for provocative legal essays but for coinages, too. Around the same time, she popularized another term that would reach the mainstream—“critical race theory,” a name for a branch of legal scholarship that eventually became a catchall for left-leaning ideas about racism. During a 2020 campaign rally, Donald Trump promised to ban C.R.T. training in the federal government, calling it a “hateful Marxist doctrine,” and in the years that followed C.R.T. became central to a debate over how—or whether—schools should teach students about race.
Plenty of scholars and journalists have written histories of these contentious terms, “intersectionality” and “critical race theory.” Now Crenshaw has written something different: a history of herself. In “Backtalker: A Memoir” (Simon & Schuster), she frames her life and her remarkably influential career as one long fight against various forms of exclusion and unfairness. Like many radical thinkers, she seems to harbor a certain ambivalence about radicalism itself. She tends to present her ideas as sensible and traditional—the reasonable conclusions of a clear-eyed intellectual who simply refused to shut up about what she witnessed and experienced. At times, she seems genuinely puzzled by the controversy her ideas have aroused, among both potential allies and dedicated opponents. Near the end of the book, she writes about what it was like to hear her coinages taken up by people who had doubtless never opened a law journal. “Fox TV jumped on the bandwagon, amplifying efforts by a few dedicated extremists to attack critical race theory as ‘divisive,’ ‘dangerous,’ and ‘un-American,’ ” she writes, and though it’s clear that the people on television didn’t consider these descriptions to be compliments, Crenshaw might have taken them as such. Neither of the movements she named was designed for mainstream acceptance. C.R.T. was born as an insurgent project, and intersectionality was once a critique of the civil-rights movement. What are they now?
On a quiet street on the north side of Canton, Ohio, there is a sign marking Kimberle Gardens, a small public-housing complex. It was named for Kimberlé Crenshaw by her father, Walter, Jr., who worked for the city’s public-housing authority. Crenshaw’s mother, Marian, was a teacher, and when she was pregnant she agreed to let Crenshaw’s big brother, Mantel, name his baby sister. He chose “Kim,” for his favorite actress, Kim Novak, and the family transformed “Kim” into “Kimberlé,” a name that few would guess had any connection to a blond movie star. Walter was an accomplished singer and Marian played the piano, but Crenshaw evidently did not inherit a talent for music. Her mother offered her a consolation that proved accurate: “Don’t worry baby, you can talk!” Crenshaw delivered her first speech at the age of eight, in church, in 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr., had just been assassinated, and the pastor asked for comment. “Before I thought better of it, I was on my feet,” she writes, and she remembers “exhorting everyone not to let Dr. King’s death be the end of our freedom struggle.” At least in retrospect, Crenshaw’s childhood unspools like an extended freedom struggle. When she was six, she writes, a white teacher stubbornly declined to cast her in the role of princess in a classroom game, so her parents had the teacher come to the house to make amends. (It was, she writes, a “profound recognition,” and a way of counteracting the “thoughtless devaluation faced by little Black girls.”) In seventh grade, a racist classmate tormented her, enabled by the careful neutrality of many so-called friends, whom she likens to Swiss bankers hoarding Nazi gold. As an adolescent, Crenshaw clashed with her aunt’s new husband and, she says, found herself on the receiving end of a “rage-filled verbal assault,” while her aunt declined to intervene. (“This was male supremacy at work,” she writes.) And, after some unhappy years at an almost all-white Christian school, she transferred to a more diverse public school, writing, “I went running from that dreadful place like Harriet Tubman.”
Not all of Crenshaw’s struggles held obvious political lessons. Her father died young, when she was ten—and so, shockingly, did her brother, who was shot to death at Wilberforce, the historically Black college he attended, during a student brawl. Crenshaw went to Cornell, where her life was almost derailed, even ended, by an ex-boyfriend she describes as obsessive and abusive. Inspired by her father, who had been studying for a law degree when he died, she made her way to Harvard Law School, where she fell in with a politically engaged group of students who were pushing the school to hire more Black professors and to offer a course specifically about race and the law. (They also agitated, unsuccessfully, for what was known as a “no-hassle pass,” which would have given students the right not to be catechized by professors.) Their activism was a tribute to Derrick Bell, an influential legal theorist who had become Harvard’s first tenured Black law professor, in 1982, and had recently left, precisely because he felt the administration was moving too slowly in diversifying the senior faculty. (In 1998, Lani Guinier became the first Black woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law.) In Crenshaw’s view, the school offered courses full of “cold artifacts” rather than warm-blooded evocations of the Black people and neighborhoods she wanted to help. In some ways, her life at Harvard was the logical continuation of her life in Ohio, and of her precocious determination to find a way to continue the struggles of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The difference, though, was that she arrived at Harvard just as a group of legal theorists was pushing back against the assumption—held by civil-rights leaders and other activists—that a focus on rights and integration was the best way to help people in disempowered communities. This movement, known as critical legal studies, was associated with the political left, and its exponents, known as crits, loved to disparage liberal theorists’ devotion to the Constitution as naïve and counterproductive. In 1984, a prominent crit named Mark Tushnet published “An Essay on Rights,” in which he argued that the First Amendment had become “the primary guarantor of the privileged,” because it frustrated “progressive legislative efforts” by protecting the political and commercial “speech” of the rich and powerful. “Things are on the whole terrible,” Tushnet wrote, and he suggested that people who wanted change might do better to scrap quaint ideas about “rights,” rather than cling to them.
It was in this context that C.R.T. emerged, led by a cohort of mostly nonwhite scholars who shared the crits’ skepticism about the American legal system but wanted to outflank them—seizing the term “critical” for themselves—by insisting on the practical importance of civil rights for those who had historically been consigned to rightlessness. One of those scholars was Bell, the professor whose departure the students were lamenting. In 1976, Bell had published “Serving Two Masters,” a sharp and unsentimental essay about the legal strategy of school desegregation. Bell argued that, in pushing for desegregation, groups like the N.A.A.C.P. had their own agendas, which didn’t always align with those of Black parents who cared most about securing a good education for their children. Often, Bell wrote, desegregation turned out not to be the fastest or surest method to improve these children’s school experience. A movement less concerned with rights, and more attentive to the wants and needs of Black parents, might have chosen different strategies—and, in some cases, might not have opposed all-Black schools. In 1986, Crenshaw was hired as a professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, and two years later she published her first major essay, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment,” in which she argued against both the old liberalism of the civil-rights movement and the more recent heresies of C.L.S. thinkers like Tushnet. She suggested that the civil-rights movement was a victim of its own success: by successfully agitating to outlaw segregation, the movement had the “deleterious effect” of making it seem as though America had achieved racial equality, which weakened the political case for further change. Still, she insisted on the ways in which the idea of gaining rights had been “a radical and liberating activity for Blacks,” and she ended not with a call for revolution but with a rather mild demand for a program “that focuses on the needs of the African-American community.”
Crenshaw was one of the organizers of a 1989 conference of like-minded legal scholars, billed as New Developments in Critical Race Theory, though the “new” was redundant, since the term itself was new. The movement that emerged had little in the way of dogma, beyond a belief that racism was central to American law, rather than a perversion of it, and that scholars had a responsibility to take race seriously. In their writing, “color-blind” became an insult, a way to disparage old-fashioned thinkers who imagined that racism could be fought by acting as if race didn’t exist. During his battle with Harvard Law, Bell insisted that race itself could be an academic credential, as when students demanded “a teacher whose credentials include experiences in and with American racism similar to those the students have already suffered”—in other words, a Black professor. Mari Matsuda, another C.R.T. scholar, expanded this idea into a broad principle, arguing that “those who have experienced discrimination speak with a special voice to which we should listen.” This sounded like not merely a demand for inclusion but a demand for deference, with each speaker’s identity determining whether her voice was “special.”
In 1993, Crenshaw and Matsuda were part of a group of C.R.T. scholars who published “Words That Wound,” a collection of essays on free speech. The introductory essay, attributed to all of them, decried “first amendment fundamentalists” and argued that “ ‘freedom’ does not implicate a right to degrade and humiliate another human being.” But Crenshaw’s own essay, on the hip-hop group 2 Live Crew, stopped short of calling for censorship. The group’s 1989 album, “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” had been ruled obscene by a judge, and three members had been arrested for performing tracks from it at a night club in Hollywood, Florida. (They were later acquitted.) Crenshaw arrived at a split decision, calling the album “misogynist” and criticizing its “frightening explosion of violent imagery directed to women like me,” while also arguing that the prosecution had been unfair, and quite possibly racist, given that similarly offensive white performers, such as the comedian Andrew Dice Clay, had not been targeted. Compared with her C.R.T. allies, Crenshaw could sound like a liberal—which is to say, a moderate.
In retrospect, C.R.T. looks less like a coherent ideology and more like a tendency, and one that may wax and wane with changing ideas about political power in America. The language of civil rights will always be most appealing to political minorities in search of procedural arguments to temper or frustrate the will of the majority. In times and places where sympathy for Black Americans runs high, there will often be a temptation to move beyond demands for formal equality and press instead for more targeted forms of redress. Possibly this was the case at élite law schools in the nineteen-nineties, where even the most obdurate deans could not afford to ignore their militant students indefinitely. And possibly it was the case again, two decades later, during the Obama years, when C.R.T. enjoyed a resurgence, as many left-leaning institutions were transformed by the demand to be more proactive in fighting racism and supporting Black employees. The mood is different now, especially in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling, in 2023, that many race-conscious college-admissions programs were unconstitutional. If America is truly as racist as the C.R.T. pioneers claimed, ambitious moments of reform will prove illusory and will give way to periods—like this one, perhaps—when advocates, in a more defensive frame of mind, are less eager to disparage the benefits of mere “formal equality,” and when even a race theorist as critical as Crenshaw may find herself extolling, as she does in the introduction to her memoir, “the promise of America.”
In Crenshaw’s book, C.R.T. comes across as a group project, while intersectionality is more of a personal quest. She has been thinking about the relationship between race and class ever since she was a girl, but she writes that she found new inspiration soon after arriving at Harvard, when she and a companion visited a friend who was the first Black member of the Fly Club, a venerable campus fraternity. She worried that they might be turned away from the club on account of race, but they were invited in, with a caveat: she had to use the back door, not because she was Black but because she was a woman. That, apparently, was a club rule. A moment earlier, she and her companion, a Black man, had braced to contend with a race-based insult together; now she was left to contend with a sex-based insult alone. “The Fly Club episode has become my lodestar,” she writes—even though, technically speaking, it was not an instance of intersectional oppression. (As she tells the story, it involves no racial discrimination.)
The idea of intersectionality is deceptively and seductively simple—too simple, doubters sometimes think, to require an academic theory. Yet the legal arguments around it are fairly subtle. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as race, though, as a historical matter, it’s not quite clear why. (Senator Howard W. Smith, a Democrat from Virginia, added sex to the bill’s list of protected characteristics; he was known to be both skeptical of civil rights and supportive of women’s rights, so people aren’t sure whether he was hoping to sabotage the bill or to improve it.) Emma DeGraffenreid, a Black woman who had worked at a General Motors plant in St. Louis, might have seemed doubly protected by the Civil Rights Act. After she was laid off, in 1974, she became the lead plaintiff in a suit against G.M., arguing that her firing was unjust. Seniority rules, negotiated with the union, obliged the company to lay off workers in reverse chronological order, beginning with the most recent hires; DeGraffenreid argued that she would not have been laid off if she had been hired earlier, and that she would have been hired earlier if she were not Black and female. A district court was open to her claim of race discrimination, skeptical of her claim of sex discrimination, and hostile to the idea of fusing the two. The judge wrote that the Civil Rights Act did not entitle a plaintiff to join the two categories into “a new special sub-category, namely, a combination of racial and sex-based discrimination.”
Crenshaw used DeGraffenreid as one of the case studies in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” the essay in which she coined the term “intersectionality.” Elsewhere in the paper, she considered a different case, in which a Black woman plaintiff was not allowed to stand for similarly situated white women in a class-action suit because a judge ruled that she had failed to show how white women faced discrimination. In each case, Crenshaw argued, a Black woman was facing additional discrimination because of her particular bundle of identities. The fine points of class-action law were, of course, less influential than Crenshaw’s insistence on paying close attention to the way Black women were treated by the courts, and the essay’s most memorable lines were broader categorical claims. “Not only are women of color in fact overlooked, but their exclusion is reinforced when white women speak for and as women,” she wrote. Near the end, she concluded that anyone wishing to fight racism or sexism should begin by “addressing the needs and problems of those who are most disadvantaged.”
A few years later, Crenshaw published “Mapping the Margins,” which explored how these overlapping identities affected women contending with violence. The essay appeared in the Stanford Law Review, but these were not purely legal arguments: Crenshaw wrote about how non-English-speaking women struggled to navigate domestic-violence shelters in Los Angeles, and about how some Black leaders voiced support for Mike Tyson during his prosecution, in Indianapolis, for the rape of Desiree Washington, an eighteen-year-old Black woman. (He was convicted and served three years in prison.)
In all these instances, Crenshaw seemed to be taking her own advice and paying heed to the perspectives of the “most disadvantaged.” But, as the intersecting identities become more complicated, “most” can be hard to define. In many American contexts, women who don’t speak English face extra hurdles, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that they are generally the “most disadvantaged” women. And, in the case of Tyson, it’s not clear that Black women and Black men actually disagreed about the verdict; in a local poll conducted by the Indianapolis Star, in 1993, sixty-six per cent of Black men “questioned the fairness” of his conviction for rape, but so did sixty-eight per cent of Black women. These views might well be wrong, of course, but Crenshaw’s intersectional approach doesn’t explain when outsiders ought to defer to the judgments of Black women and when they ought not to.
As Crenshaw’s reputation grew, she became a public intellectual, less focussed on the intricacies of anti-discrimination law and more focussed on the news. During the confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas, she travelled to Washington to support Anita Hill, the law professor who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, and she was disappointed by the fact that many Black people still seemed to support Thomas. (In one darkly comic moment, she spotted a group of Black protesters outside the Capitol, and thought she had found some allies—until she heard the leader praying, “Lord, we beseech you to protect him, to render this Jezebel powerless against him.”) Crenshaw’s feelings about the trial of O. J. Simpson were mixed, because she felt that America was mourning his alleged victim, his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, in a way it might not have mourned a Black woman. She is uncharacteristically circumspect about Simpson’s acquittal. “To this day,” she writes, “the Simpson case stands in our cultural memory as an outrageous illustration of Black jury nullification rather than the everyday ways in which women are snuffed out.” This is a curious conclusion, not least because Simpson almost certainly murdered two people, his ex-wife and her boyfriend, Ronald Goldman.
Does it matter? Women are, of course, snuffed out far too often, and sometimes in ways that underscore their particular vulnerabilities—but the homicide victimization rate is much higher for men. As any good intersectionalist would tell you, both race and sex matter a lot: Black women are nearly twice as likely as white men to be the victims of homicide, but Black men are nearly six times as likely as Black women to be victims. Grim statistics like these inspired President Obama, in 2014, to create My Brother’s Keeper, a government-led initiative aimed at improving the lives and prospects of young men of color. With its clear focus on race and sex, it was a distinctly intersectional initiative, but Crenshaw emerged as one of its most persistent critics, chastising the program, both publicly and privately, for ignoring Black girls and women. (During one contentious White House meeting, Crenshaw recalls, Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, told her that she did not understand intersectionality.) Reasonable people can disagree about which metrics matter most, but by many measures Black men in America do seem to face particular challenges: a 2019 study by the economist Raj Chetty found a huge income gap between Black and white men who had grown up in households with similar incomes, but none between Black and white women.
In Crenshaw’s original formulation of intersectionality, she took it for granted that the burden of being a Black woman in America was necessarily “greater than the sum of racism and sexism,” but human identities interact in complicated and sometimes unpredictable ways. This becomes even more apparent if we expand our idea of intersectionality, as Crenshaw once recommended, to encompass “class, sexual orientation, age, and color,” among other characteristics. (Crenshaw notes in passing that she has widened her focus to include not only Black girls but “gender-expansive youth,” too.) Intersectionality is, by design, a divisive creed, and, once we start dividing, there is no telling where we will stop.
Usually, the task of forming a political coalition, or of redressing an injustice, requires that we ignore most of what makes us different—we must pretend, in other words, that an identity like “Black” is more coherent, and more stable, than it really is, and that someone else can be enough like you to speak meaningfully on your behalf. During the long aftermath of the civil-rights movement, many authors and advocates imagined that King’s struggle could be continued by expanding its reach. Critical race theorists helped popularize the phrase “people of color,” to suggest a grand coalition of all the world’s nonwhite people. At the same time, latter-day intersectionalists have been working to complicate our simple identity categories further still, until the resulting map of human difference becomes so fine-grained that it can be hard to say who, exactly, is allowed to speak for whom. Especially among activists and academics, this explosion of identities has muddled Crenshaw’s neat system of greater and lesser disadvantage. What it hasn’t done is erase the gap between Black America and the rest of the country, or our hunger for theories that promise to help close it. ♦