Backtalker by Kimberlé Crenshaw review – the courage of hope | Autobiography and memoir

KImberlé Crenshaw’s memoir describes a life overshadowed by Jim Crow and segregation, but illuminated by hope. That the nature of his childhood did not destroy his family, as it did with many others, is to be admired for their courage and determination. The journey that led Crenshaw to create a legal theory of “intersectionality” begins with “the well of unimaginable ignorance that young Black girls are facing”. And for all those who think those days are long gone, Backtalker is a must read.

“Backtalking” is how Crenshaw responds to anything that doesn’t make sense. Whether as a five-year-old student who was allowed to portray a witch but not a princess in a school play, or decades later, persuading a Harvard law professor to hire Black and being asked if he would prefer “a better white professor than an average black”, Crenshaw responded. For him, giving back is about courage in the midst of struggle, which sometimes involves talking back to those we love.

As a child in Canton, Ohio, he saw how white families moved into the area where he himself moved. This was a story his mother had already known. When Mariam Crenshaw was a little girl in the 1920s, she was taken to the same pool – in a very clean area – to swim. While he was rowing, the servant told the other children to get out and drain the pool. Marian’s mother encouraged the other Black families, and later that day they returned together to the pool that had once again filled up to swim. The employee called the police, but nothing was done because no rules had been broken. Racism returns, of course: in the end the pool was closed and filled with concrete, something that happens between the pools of people who were forced to divide.

Law was highly respected in the Crenshaw family, “abradcadabra pushing back (shadows)” of injustice. After a career as a teacher, his father enrolled in law school and became involved in housing policy. And when I saw him reading those heavy books with little things, I was sure that I could do it too.” However, Walter suddenly lost his daughter when she was still a child. The family was not left broke financially, as his mother “had a few cards that would help her earn a living”: she had property inherited from her parents who had two houses and a small house, each bought in the 1930s.

Crenshaw explains that the popular area is “a legal way to steal black property for ‘public use’. Not coincidentally, most of the black residents of Canton lived on that lot. Although his family earned “pennies on the dollar”, he later realized that “if my mother had been given the price of two houses and a warehouse in a non-racial market, she would have been as financially secure as her white friends whose families, like hers, had acquired property in the early 20th century”.

After high school, Crenshaw was accepted to Cornell University, and his time there would change. He read Derrick Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law and I came to realize that “the law was not only the inheritance of the nation we adopted, but it helped to fix it, and there was nothing about how we lived with those who were not affected by it.”

His joy at being accepted into Harvard Law was short-lived as, by 1981, there was only one member of the Black faculty, and Derrick Bell had left, along with his courses in Constitutional Law and Minority Issues. Crenshaw was part of the student protests to not only bring the curriculum to the curriculum, but to recruit more Black students. One case caught her eye: that of Emma DeGraffenreid, who sued General Motors in 1976 for workplace discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The trial judge overturned the case because the company hired both white women (usually slave labor) and black men (usually manual labor). Title VII protected from race or sex discrimination – but not intersection both of them. Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality was born.

Crenshaw had a front-row seat to many of the most famous events covered in the book: the Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation. to hear; and OJ Simpson a case; and election of Barack Obama. As we have explained in detail here, his life is not only life, but also worth learning.