Kimberlé Crenshaw

Her parents in Canton, Ohio asked her at the end of each day to name something interesting she had observed in the world, and she has said the habit set the direction of everything after. What else formed her was loss. Her father died suddenly, her older brother Mantel was shot and killed, and a fellow college student assaulted her. She went from Canton McKinley High School to Cornell, where she took a degree in government and Africana studies in 1981 and was tapped for Quill and Dagger, then to Harvard for a law degree in 1984, then to Wisconsin for a master of laws in 1985, where she held a Hastie Fellowship and clerked for Shirley Abrahamson of the state supreme court.

The case was DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. Black women argued the company had shut them out of work, and the court took the claim apart: General Motors employed Black men on the factory floor, so there was no race discrimination, and it employed white women in the offices, so there was no sex discrimination. The suit failed because it was two suits and neither one existed alone. In 1989 Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex and gave the problem a name, intersectionality, and in 1991 Mapping the Margins carried it into domestic violence and rape. She helped assemble critical race theory as a field and edited its founding anthology in 1995. She co-founded the African American Policy Forum in 1996 and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia in 2011.

In 1991 she worked on Anita Hill's legal team at the Clarence Thomas hearings and watched the country divide into a side for the woman and a side for the Black nominee, with nowhere to stand for a Black woman alleging harassment. She has described the experience as being thrown out of her own community for trying to talk about how Black women in particular encounter it. Sexual harassment got recognized, she says. The other half did not. The word she made has had the reverse problem. Since the 2010s she has spent much of her time objecting to what people do with it — identity politics on steroids, a device for turning white men into pariahs — and restating that it is a lens for seeing how forms of inequality compound, not a ranking of victims.

The argument left the law reviews and became a political object. Her work fed the equality clause of South Africa's constitution and the race and gender paper for the United Nations conference on racism in 2001, and since 2020 American lawmakers have moved to restrict the teaching of critical race theory in public schools and to bar related training inside federal agencies. Crenshaw's reading of that is short: wherever there is race reform, retrenchment follows. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021, still holds chairs at UCLA and Columbia Law School, and published a memoir, Backtalker, on her 67th birthday in May 2026. None of it is settled.

Kimberlé Crenshaw's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex article
  Where the word intersectionality first appears 1989
• Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color article
  Structural, political and representational intersectionality, applied to rape and domestic violence 1991
• Words That Wound book
  Critical race theory, assaultive speech and the First Amendment 1993
• Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement book
  The anthology that defined the field she helped build 1995
• African American Policy Forum company
  The think tank behind SayHerName and WhyWeCantWait 1996
• Backtalker: An American Memoir book
  Published on her 67th birthday 2026

• 1981 aged ~22 Takes a Cornell degree in government and Africana studies The gap she later named had already struck her as an undergraduate.
• 1985 aged ~26 Clerks for Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court She was a William H. Hastie Fellow at Wisconsin that year.
• 1986 aged ~27 Joins the UCLA law faculty Students voted her professor of the year in 1991 and again in 1994.
• 1989 aged ~30 Names intersectionality in Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex The argument runs through DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, which the courts had split in two.
• 1991 aged ~32 Works on Anita Hill's legal team at the Clarence Thomas hearings She has called it a defining and isolating moment.
• 1995 aged ~36 Made a full professor at Columbia Law School
• 2001 aged ~42 Writes the race and gender paper for the UN World Conference on Racism She pushed to get gender into the conference declaration.
• 2015 aged ~56 Launches SayHerName with the African American Policy Forum On Black women killed by police.
• May 5, 2026 aged 67 Publishes Backtalker: An American Memoir On her 67th birthday.

• Clarence Thomas b. 1948
  Long-serving justice whose originalist opinions have strongly influenced modern conservative jurisprudence. opposed his confirmation
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. held the seat before Thomas
• Sojourner Truth 1797–1883
  Abolitionist and women's rights activist whose Ain't I a Woman? speech became a rallying cry for equality. made the argument in 1851 without a word for it
• Pauli Murray 1910–1985
  Lawyer and activist whose legal arguments laid groundwork for Brown v. Board and LGBTQ rights. argued the same doubled bind a generation earlier
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. pressed him to include girls in My Brother's Keeper
• Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
  Journalist and anti-lynching crusader whose investigative reporting exposed racial terror in the South. counted the dead before anyone else would