It's American to Talk Back
A racial justice advocate explains why she refuses to sit down
Kimberlé Crenshaw says it’s time for Americans to talk back, and in the process, take back their country.
Crenshaw, the famed law professor, legal scholar, and policy leader who helped create the concept of critical race theory (CRT), has been thrust into the spotlight more than ever during one of the most divisive times in the nation’s history. But she’s refusing to stay silent, no matter what attacks come her way.
While her intent in developing the legal and academic framework of CRT was to illuminate entrenched racial disparities, CRT has become a political flashpoint. The concept has been misrepresented and weaponized as the basis of right-wing and MAGA campaigns such as Ron DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act, and invoked in political races from the highest office in the land to school boards around the country.
But the backlash hasn’t silenced Crenshaw. Instead, she’s kept talking about racial inequality through her lectures, her teaching at UCLA and Columbia Law School, and her work as co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. But in her newest book, Backtalker: An American Memoir, she approaches the subject through a much more personal lens.
A native of Canton, OH, native born during the Civil Rights Movement, Crenshaw grew up in the heartland of America as the Vietnam War raged, as Black Americans fought against segregation and for voting rights, and as women of all races struggled for access to education and opportunity in the workforce.
The intersectionality of her experience (“intersectionality” being another term Crenshaw coined, to describe how identities overlap and intersect) carried her from her childhood as the daughter of teachers overcoming personal tragedy and loss, to the Ivy League and Harvard Law School, and eventually to a clerkship on the Wisconsin Supreme Court at a time when Black women were a rarity in all of these spaces.
Backtalker is Crenshaw’s ode to the fighter in her, the one who allowed her to pursue her version of the American Dream while never compromising on her determination to speak truth to power.
This is our conversation about what Crenshaw learned in writing Backtalker and touring the world talking about it, and what she hopes America will do in this critical moment.
Natasha S. Alford: Professor, since your book came out in May, you’ve been touring the world to share your ideas about democracy, race, and gender, and the intersectionality of your experiences growing up as a Black woman in America. What has that been like?
Kimberlé Crenshaw: It was really exciting. I was all over the United States, from New York to San Francisco, and then we did the European leg. London, Oxford, Birmingham, Northern Ireland, which was mind-blowing, then Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, a couple of places in Germany. Everywhere I went, I was lifted by how far these ideas have traveled and how much people want to talk about the things we might assume everyone is putting their head in the sand about, hoping it will pass.
People were drawn to the conversation. For a lot of them it was almost like a revival, reinforcing what kind of world they want to live in and what it takes to make it so. I could have flown home without the plane.
Alford: What were some of the most common questions you got? It sounds like people are trying to navigate the moment as we face growing authoritarianism across the globe.
Crenshaw: The most common question, honestly, was “What is a backtalker?” In my own cultural tradition, a backtalker is someone being transgressive, challenging authority, challenging the rules, challenging the decisions that get made. Usually it’s a child in a situation where the parents dictate the terms of how they exist. And we are in that position now, as adults in the world, with people telling us how to think, what to read, what we are allowed to expect.
So I told our European audiences we need to embrace that backtalking spirit everywhere, because we are facing a rise of authoritarian power almost everywhere. People were inspired by that. I have backtalker caps and backtalker T-shirts, and folks were swooping in and taking them all.
The other big question was, “What is going on in the United States, and what are you doing about it?” And there was actually a greater willingness abroad to talk about race and racism, and about the aftermath of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor movement. Remember, people around the world were activated by that. There were protests in Paris, in Amsterdam, in London. So everywhere there was this sense of, what happened? And what is being done now?
Alford: As you say “backtalker,” it strikes me that it has always been central to our American identity that we don’t let people tell us what to do — we are the rebels, the revolutionaries. But now, certain ideas are suddenly deemed dangerous and you are punished for expressing them. As a child growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, how did you cultivate the spirit of a backtalker? Especially knowing how, as African Americans, we are taught that “you don’t talk back to your parents.”
Crenshaw: One reason I wanted to write the book was to locate backtalking, and the ideas I’m associated with, right here in the United States, during that period of rising demands and rising expectations.
I was born into a state of unfreedom. I was born before the major Civil Rights acts were even passed. So my inheritance was twofold. On one hand, our status as African-Americans meant we were expected to want less than what other people were born to expect. That was the reality. But it was also the very thing my parents were determined to teach me to question, to challenge, to push back against.
My backtalking was learned at the feet of my parents, at the kitchen table, when they would ask, “What did you learn today? What do you think about what you learned? How did you feel in that moment?” They wanted me to understand that life is not just something done to us. Our role is to engage, to interact, to reshape the trajectory we are born into and create broader opportunities for the next generation.
My parents and their parents were what we called “race men” and “race women.” It meant you understood the structured dimension of racial power, and you understood it in order to change it, to transform it, and to pass down that legacy of backtalking. In many ways, the book is a story about my family, and about how they passed that legacy to me, and what I did with it, becoming a lawyer and a professional backtalker.
Alford: The story you tell about your teacher and the school play when you were six years old moved me. Share with us what happened.
Crenshaw: This is the beginning of my backtalking. I wanted to be the princess in our kindergarten play, Thorn Rosa. We had played it all year, and I was everything but the princess. I was the horse, the pig, the wicked witch. Never the princess.
On the last day of school I’m still saying, “Please, please, I want to play her.” The teacher waits until the last minute, gathers the students to sing the song for the grand entrance, and then the bell rings. My heart just broke, because there was something in me that suspected there was a reason I could never be the princess, and I did not want to sit with that possibility.
When the bell rang and the kids left, I cried all the way home and threw myself on the bed. My parents were both schoolteachers, and this was not how they expected the year to end. My brother couldn’t figure out who had beaten me up or what family had wronged me. So my parents called my teacher, and within a half hour she was at my house. She came into my bedroom, and by then I already knew the princess business was not for me. She made some vague promises I knew would never be realized.
But what I remember most, and what I think is most pivotal, is that my parents did not deny that I had been injured. They did not say, “Stop crying about things you can’t change.” They did not say, “That’s nothing compared to what we have to deal with.” They did not minimize or dismiss my feelings or make me doubt them. They reinforced the idea that if you feel something is amiss, let’s look into it. If you sense there is no legitimate explanation for why you were denied an opportunity, let’s examine it.
There was not a name yet for the way a little Black girl experiences anti-Blackness. But there was a willingness to open up to the possibility that an injury had occurred. And even though the teacher couldn’t put me in the position I should have had, accountability required her to sit with what happened.
That changed everything for me. It made me pay attention the next time I felt that same way. Is this like the time I didn’t get to play Thorn Rosa? Is this the kind of injury little Black girls are supposed to just swallow and sit down somewhere about? My parents made it clear I had a right to fair treatment, a right to be seen.
So I started looking for the patterns, in institutions, in education, in the law. And once you know there is a there there, the question becomes how do we name it, so that all of us who experience it have a common language to identify it and change the context.
Alford: I have to go back to the book, because you tell a powerful story about being at Harvard Law School and going to a final club (an exclusive and then all-male social club with property and history on Harvard’s campus). I went to Harvard for undergrad, so you reminded me of some of the subjugation we swallowed. Women were not allowed in the clubs, and there was no real equivalent for us until much later.
I remember when Black guys would get into the final clubs, we were kind of happy for them, like, well, at least they can get in, it is a win for all of us.
You write about having to go around to the back door, and about a friend, who I believe was Black, and how we so often compromise...
So you compromise, you go in, and you get so sick you are praying to God. Why was that experience formative enough to put at the very top of the book?
Crenshaw: So formative. It was my encounter with what I go on to call asymmetric solidarity. The other Black guy and I had a pact: if we go up in that club and they try to treat us some kind of way, we are not taking it. That was the agreement. So we get there, and our friend comes out, shuts the door behind him, and I’m ready to say, “This is precisely the stuff we said we wouldn’t take.” And he says, “No, no, don’t go there. I forgot to tell you, Kim can’t come in the front door. Women have to go around to the back.”
And for me, that was exactly the kind of thing we said we were not going to take. It does not matter why we can’t get in. If we are not being treated on an equitable basis, we stand with each other. I had to realize in that moment that there was small print. The small print said: I will stand with you as long as you face the same discrimination I face.
But the moment our reasons differ, the moment we don’t all have access to the same opportunity, I am no longer in solidarity with you. And I thought, “Because the reason is different, you won’t stand for me to be treated as an equal? That is how thin our connection is?” A lot of Black women have that moment, where the look you get is, now don’t act out, don’t embarrass me.
I was so deeply committed to the idea of the “we,” to the idea that our interests are common, that I could not imagine being outside of it. So yes, I went around to the back door. And I got gravely ill from whatever I ingested in that club. And as I lay there negotiating with the universe, “Please take this sickness off me, I swear I will never do what I did to get here again,” I meant the food and the drink, but I also meant accepting those intolerable terms of solidarity. If they are not going to ride or die for me to be treated as an equal, I am not accepting those unequal terms of inclusion.
To this day, when those demands get put on me, I start to feel physically ill. I literally cannot do it. So I wanted to open the book with the very thing I was challenging. How do we think about community? How do we think about solidarity? What is the “we”? Does the “we” include me, or is it just about you? That has been the theme of intersectionality.
Alford: What was it like to become a memoirist at this stage? You are known for your scholarship, your organizing, your teaching. What did it do for you, personally, to see your story on the page, and to see how people have received it?
Crenshaw: In some ways it is the antidote to what the last ten years have been like, watching a caricature of our work, and of me in particular, get created for purposes that were, even at the time, openly admitted. They said, “We don’t care what the work is really about, we don’t care what has actually been written, we don’t care who this person is that we are trying to defame. What we care about is what we can use these ideas and these words to advance.” And it was not to advance greater democratic inclusion. It was to reverse it.
So after watching my work get framed as un-American or divisive, being able to say, “This is as American as apple pie and a lynch rope, and I am going to tell you my story. You do not have to go to Europe or anywhere else to find this life experience, because it happened right here. I know, because it is my life.”
Being able to tell that, and to see it resonate, to see people say, “I recognize that story, I have experienced that, I know what urban renewal is, I know what it is like to be the only Black person in the room, to make a great point that everyone ignores until a white man says the same thing and suddenly it is the smartest thing anyone has ever heard.” Everyone has had those experiences.
So when I lay out how experiences like that give rise to ideas like intersectionality — and people now have a story, one they heard or lived, that helps them understand what that idea is — that means everything. It is reinvigorating. It reminds me that people do still read, that they are interested in ideas that come in longer beats than 20 seconds.
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Thank you for sharing Kimberlé’s work and influence. She is a beacon of hope and strength for us.