Backtalker by Kimberlé Crenshaw review – the audacity of hope
The inspiring life of the Black American activist and legal scholar who changed the way the world things about race
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s memoir describes a life shadowed by Jim Crow segregation and racism, but lit up by hope. That the social conditions of her early life did not destroy her family, as they had so many others, must be credited to their extraordinary grit and determination. The journey that led Crenshaw to create the influential legal theory of “intersectionality” begins with the “well of thoughtless devaluation faced by little Black girls”. And for all who think those days have long gone, Backtalker is a must read.
“Backtalking” is how Crenshaw responds to anything that does not make sense. Whether as a five-year-old kindergarten student who was allowed to portray a witch but not a princess in a school play, or decades later, lobbying Harvard’s dean of law to hire Black faculty and being asked whether she wouldn’t prefer “an excellent white professor over a mediocre Black one”, Crenshaw talked back. For her, backtalking is about resilience in the midst of struggle, which sometimes painfully includes talking back to the ones we love.
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