Introduction
The legal scholar and activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a professor of law at both the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) and Columbia University, has been an influential thinker in matters of minority and women’s rights for nearly three decades. Starting in the early 1980s, Crenshaw was one of the early advocates of Critical Race Theory, a scholarly approach to civil rights that focuses on the real-world implications of laws. Unlike approaches that emphasize the championing of individual rights as the best means of achieving liberty for all, Critical Race Theory seeks to examine and expose the oppression of minorities (particularly African-Americans) by systematic forces, such as the free market and the court system, and to advocate solutions that focus on the needs of groups. Crenshaw also developed the concept of “intersectionality,” according to which minority women are discriminated against on the basis of both race and gender, in ways that are not addressed sufficiently—if at all—by either feminist or antiracist groups. In 1996 Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) to highlight the importance of gender in racial-justice discourse. Crenshaw is a co-author of the book Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (1993) and a co-editor of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1995), which includes one of her essays. Her articles have appeared in legal journals including Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and Southern California Law Review as well as in such mainstream publications as Essence, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She has lent her opinions and expertise to programs on National Public Radio (NPR), PBS, NBC, C-Span, ABC, and other stations. In addition, for about a decade, Crenshaw has been a regular commentator on NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show.
Crenshaw is known primarily for the creation and development of intersectional theory, which tackles how overlapping (intersecting) social identities—minority identities in particular—are affected by oppression, domination, or discrimination. She is also known for being a leading scholar of critical race theory.
Early Life
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw was born on May 5, 1959 and grew up in Canton, Ohio. From a young age she followed the course of the civil rights movement, watching some of its key events unfold on television. On April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, parents and leaders in Crenshaw’s community gathered local black children to talk about the slain civil rights leader. “What they weren’t anticipating,” Crenshaw told Denise B. Hawkins for Black Issues in Higher Education (August 10, 1995), “was that a lot of kids didn’t know who Martin Luther King was. They kept trying to get somebody to say something.” So Crenshaw spoke out. “By the time I had gotten home from the King assembly, neighbors had already called my mother saying, ‘Your daughter was talking up a storm today.’” Crenshaw added: “My mother likes to say that’s where it really began for me, but it was really with my parents and their parents who shaped our family’s tradition of thinking politically about being African American.”
Crenshaw attended Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, earning a B.A. degree in 1981, and then enrolled as a law student at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she received a J.D. degree in 1984. In the following year she was awarded an LL.M. degree from the University of Wisconsin. In college and law school, Crenshaw’s studies and activism were influenced by her sense of what was lacking in the schools’ curricula. “In the Africana studies program at Cornell, the gender aspect of race was woefully underdeveloped,” Crenshaw told Sheila Thomas in an interview for Perspectives magazine that appears on the American Bar Association Web site. “When women were discussed, it was not in political or economic contexts but rather those of literature and poetry. The serious political discourses were framed by men, and women came in at the periphery.” As a student she was also influenced by the work of the legal scholar and fiction writer Derrick Bell and the U.S. Court of Appeals judge A. Leon Higginbotham. Speaking to Hawkins about Bell and Higginbotham, Crenshaw said, “They are people who represented some of the earliest attempts to think about the relationship between law and race as an ongoing phenomenon, not something that was limited to some historical period in the past. And to think about how the law affects the lives of Black people, real people, rather than just talking about race in abstract terms or talking about civil rights laws in terms of balancing civil rights laws with other values in society like privacy, federalism or any other number of interests that traditional (by traditional I mean white) civil rights scholars used to think about.”
Although the presence of Bell, who had begun teaching law at Harvard in 1971, was one of the factors leading Crenshaw to apply to Harvard Law School, she was unable to study with him: by the time she entered the program, he had resigned from the university to protest what he alleged to be Harvard’s racially unjust hiring practices. Bell had taught a class on the relationship between race and law—the only such class offered at the university. With Bell gone from the faculty, Crenshaw, along with several other African-American students, actively campaigned for such a class. They encountered resistance. “The administration’s response to us,” Crenshaw told Hawkins, “was the lightning rod and in some ways the focal point for the actual genesis of critical race theory.” Crenshaw and her fellow black law students succeeded in getting a dozen law scholars to come to campus to teach an “alternative course” that used Bell’s book Race, Racism and American Law as a basis for discussion. The Critical Race Theory movement was underway.
Life’s Work
Although Crenshaw often worked with fellow black students toward a common cause, she, as a black woman, found herself at what she called an intersection. As part of her concept of intersectionality, Crenshaw argued that women of color—a designation she uses to include black, Asian, and Latino women—face discrimination both for their race and their sex, sometimes (in the case of sex) on the part of members of their own race. While Crenshaw was at Harvard, for example, she and a black male friend went to visit a member of their study group, a black man who had recently joined a club that was formerly reserved for whites. When the man opened the club’s door, he stepped out rather than letting them in, saying that he had forgotten to tell them something. Upon hearing that, Crenshaw’s friend protested, saying that if he and Crenshaw—because they were black—were expected to enter through the back door, he would leave instead. The club member then informed Crenshaw’s friend that he could enter through the front door, but that women had to go in through the back. To Crenshaw’s surprise, the man who had accompanied her to the club did not object to that arrangement. Speaking to Thomas, Crenshaw elaborated on what she learned from the incident: “I understood that we can all stand together as long as we think that we are all equally affected by a particular discrimination, but the moment where a different barrier affects a subset of us, our solidarity often falls apart. I began to look at all the other ways that not only the race and civil rights agenda but the gender agenda are sometimes uninformed by and inattentive to the ways that subgroups experience discrimination. There are institutional elisions as well. For example, at Harvard, when we were struggling to get the law school to interview and perhaps hire women and people of color, the school responded with two committees. One was a gender committee that studied women candidates; the other was a committee that studied candidates of color. Not too surprisingly, women of color seemed to fall through the cracks.”
After receiving her LL.M. degree, Crenshaw served from 1985 to 1986 as a law clerk for a judge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In the latter year she joined the faculty at UCLA, where, after serving as an acting professor for five years, she earned the title of professor of law. In 1995 she also became a professor of law at Columbia University, in New York City. In 1991 Crenshaw had served on the legal team for Anita Hill, a black law professor who had served as an assistant to Clarence Thomas when Thomas worked at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Now a federal judge, Thomas, an African-American, had been nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Crenshaw was among those who represented Hill—who alleged that as her supervisor Thomas had sexually harassed her—during U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. Despite the allegations and the resulting controversy, which dominated the news media for a time, Thomas was (narrowly) confirmed by the Senate in October of that year.
Discussing and writing about the concept of intersectionality proved to be a motif in Crenshaw’s career. The year 1993 saw the publication of Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (1993), to which Crenshaw and other Critical Race Theory scholars contributed previously published essays about the intersection of free speech and so-called hate speech; two years later Crenshaw contributed to Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (1995), a collection of previously published essays by Bell, Crenshaw, and others. Speaking to Hawkins, Crenshaw elaborated on why she thought such a book was necessary: “Cultural studies people, historians, economists, sociologists . . . all of them are starting to look increasingly to legal scholarship to get some sense of how race has traditionally been debated and critiqued. Unfortunately most of these materials are contained in law review articles, and a lot of scholars who aren’t in the law don’t have access to these publications.” Crenshaw is listed as the book’s co-editor and contributed a previously published essay from 1994, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” which examines the relationship between intersectionality and domestic violence. (The essay is posted on the website of the Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs.)
The Introduction to the essay states that it will explore “the various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural and political aspects of violence against women of color.” Crenshaw acknowledged that she would barely, if at all, address other intersections for women of color, such as class and sexuality. In the paper’s first section, “Structural Intersectionality,” Crenshaw explored how the experiences of women of color with domestic violence, sexual assault, and related legal reform differ from those of white women. She argued that although class—along with correlated factors such as lack of education, job skills, and employment—is an important factor in the disempowerment of many women of color, it is not deeply intertwined with race and gender. Furthermore, immigrant women, especially women of color, can face further challenges: if a woman who needs to be married for at least two years before applying for permanent U.S. resident status is married to someone who is physically abusive, she might not go to the authorities for fear of eventual deportation. Although some legal protections exist that would offer the woman a waiver, she might still choose not to file charges if she feels she cannot get proper legal representation or conclusive evidence of abuse. Adding to those challenges is the potential language barrier: the already difficult process is made that much more difficult for non-English-speaking women. In the paper’s second section, “Political Intersectionality,” Crenshaw elaborated on the “conflicting political agendas” frequently pursued by anti-racist activists, who focus mainly on discrimination against men, and women’s-rights activists, who concentrate chiefly on discrimination against white women. Crenshaw wrote, “The problem is not simply that both discourses fail women of color by not acknowledging the ‘additional’ burden of patriarchy or of racism, but that the discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism. Because women of color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by men of color, and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white women, dominant conceptions of anti-racism and feminism are limited, even on their own terms.”
In gathering information for the essay, Crenshaw could not get statistics on domestic-violence intervention in Los Angeles by district; the reason, she was told by the Los Angeles Police Department, had to do with concerns that the statistics would be “misused” to argue that domestic violence is a problem mainly in minority communities—which, some activists feared, could reinforce negative stereotypes about black and Latino men. Furthermore, Crenshaw noted, various anti-racist and community activists “fail” women of color by making an effort to prevent or discourage the politicization of domestic violence by arguing that “gender issues are internally divisive, and that raising such issues within non-white communities represents the migration of white women’s concerns into a context in which they are not only irrelevant but also harmful. At their most extreme, critics who seek to defend their communities against this feminist assault deny that gender violence is a problem in their community, and characterize any effort to politicize gender subordination as itself a community problem.” Further cultural factors, such as the reluctance of many minority communities to subject their private lives to the scrutiny of the police, contribute to a lack of reporting and intervention. “In this sense,” Crenshaw added, “the home is not simply a man’s castle in patriarchal terms, but it is also a safe haven from the indignities of life in a racist society. In many cases, the desire to protect the home as a safe haven against assaults outside the home may make it more difficult for women of color to seek protection against assaults from within the home.”
Throughout her career Crenshaw has also been an active proponent of affirmative action. In 1996 voters in California passed Proposition 209, a measure that banned public institutions from considering race, gender, or ethnicity in hiring or admissions, which effectively ended the practice of affirmative action in state universities and other public institutions. In an essay for Essence magazine (July 1998), Crenshaw argued that opponents of affirmative action misrepresent Martin Luther King’s vision of an America where people are judged not, in his famous phrase, “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King, she averred, would not have opposed affirmative action, an argument she defended by quoting from his book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community (1967): “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” King, Crenshaw argued, found “a significant moral distinction between using race as a welcome mat and using it as a No Trespass sign.” California’s Proposition 209, she concluded, is an example of the latter. Crenshaw noted that the number of black students admitted to UCLA dropped 80 percent after the passage of the measure. “Affirmative action,” she wrote, “is not a preference; it is a modest effort to recognize the ways that standardized tests don’t measure the potential of entire groups of people, particularly those who were not represented when these tests were developed.” She went on to argue that in admitting undergraduates, colleges over-rely on standardized testing—particularly the SAT—and that those tests are not very reliable in predicting academic and professional potential. She stressed the latter point with regard to the LSAT, the standardized test required to enter law school.
In the following decade, when a similar debate about affirmative action was taking place in Michigan, Crenshaw, in an essay for the Michigan Law Review (2007), again attacked what she regarded as the misleading notion of colorblindness in admittance policies. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson, in his famous commencement address at Howard University, said: “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.” Opponents of affirmative action would later use the starting-line-of-a-race analogy to make the point that those who stand to benefit from affirmative action actually get a head start. It is precisely that “idea of preference,” Crenshaw argued, that supporters of affirmative action must fight. In an approach consistent with Critical Race Theory’s emphasis on systematic discrimination, Crenshaw reformulated the race-track analogy: “There is an alternative narrative that can be presented, one that actually throws light on the conditions that affirmative action is designed to address. This alternative frame suggests that the problem affirmative action seeks to address is not damaged runners, but damaged lanes that make the race more difficult for some competitors to run in than others. Rethinking affirmative action so as to account for the unequal conditions of the lanes on the track—the debris that some runners must avoid, the craters over which some must climb, the crevices that some must jump and the detours that some must maneuver—suggests that affirmative action is not about providing preferences at all. Rather it is about removing and neutralizing the obstacles and conditions that compromise the fair running of the race.”
Crenshaw’s concerns with regard to civil rights extend beyond American borders. According to the website of the African American Policy Forum, Crenshaw has “facilitated workshops for human rights activists in Brazil and in India, and for constitutional court judges in South Africa. Her groundbreaking work on ‘Intersectionality’ has traveled globally and was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. Crenshaw authored the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism, served as the Rapporteur for the conference’s Expert Group on Gender and Race Discrimination, and coordinated NGO [nongovernmental organization] efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR [World Conference Against Racism] Conference Declaration.” In the United States she has served as a member of the National Science Foundation’s committee to research violence against women and “has consulted with leading foundations, social justice organizations and corporations to advance their race and gender equity initiatives.”
Crenshaw has received the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award, presented by the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law, and was an Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellow of the American Civil Liberties Union from 2005 to 2007. She has also served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair for Latin America and received the Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship as well as fellowships to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2008-09) and to the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2010). Crenshaw was the No.1 Most Inspiring Feminist in Ms. magazine and in the “Power 100” of Ebony magazine in 2015. In 2016 she received the Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. She is currently a full professor and the faculty director of the Critical Race Studies program at the UCLA Law School, and also a full professor at Columbia Law School. When he appointed Crenshaw as a professor of Columbia Law School, law school dean Lance Liebman described his new employee as a “leading law scholar” who “has shed important light on central issues of civil rights law.”