The scholar and writer explains how the concept has been distorted, why Black women are still left out of policy conversations and what it will take to build a more equitable safety net

I’ve long been interested in the relationship between power and policy, and few scholars have shaped that conversation more than Kimberle Crenshaw, who coined the terms intersectionality and Critical Race Theory. In her new memoir, Backtalker , Crenshaw reflects on the origins of those ideas, how they’ve been distorted in public debate and why Black women remain central to any honest conversation about economic justice. In this conversation, she talks about the limits of race neutral approaches, the ways Black women are left out of policymaking and why she decided to tell this story now.

Nyandoro: Your new book, Backtalker , reflects on the evolution of intersectionality from a legal framework to a global movement. What feels most urgent for people to understand about intersectionality and this current political and economic moment?

Crenshaw: The most urgent thing is that for most people who are not academics or policymakers or activists, what they’ve probably heard about intersectionality is not accurate. Intersectionality has been around as a framework and as a word since 1989. If you think it’s a new idea, you’re probably getting the information from sources that are dedicated to distorting intersectionality or gentrifying it for their own purposes. What intersectionality is really about is discrimination and patterns of exclusion that are not always separate and mutually exclusive but often overlap and reinforce exclusion and marginality. The most important thing the book is trying to do is reveal that intersectionality is not a foreign import. It is homegrown from real lives led by real people.

Nyandoro: So you’re saying that Backtalker , your memoir, is really your way of setting the record straight and controlling your narrative and your legacy about what intersectionality and critical race theory is?

Crenshaw: Absolutely. When I say gentrify, I really mean when people value what you have created, where you live, where you exist; but they don’t value you. They try to move you out and move them in. That’s what’s been happening with our history, with our concepts and with our ideas and we have to resist.

Nyandoro: How do we make sure that messaging and framing resonates in the town square? How should we be talking about this work in a way that the language can no longer be co-opted for ill?

Crenshaw: Let me start with why I went with memoir. Most memoir writing is about coming of age, coming to awareness, coming to consciousness. There’s Black memoir writing too, from Angela Davis to James Baldwin to George Jackson, and this is a subgenre of that because I am talking about the role law has played and the role institutions play in shaping our life experiences. This is translation work. Don’t let people tell you that what we’ve translated our experience into is somehow foreign to us. We need to recognize that this is what we do in this arena to bring the “we” into spaces that have the power to dictate and determine better conditions for our lives.

Nyandoro: What do you think are some of the biggest blind spots as it relates to economic policymaking, particularly when it comes to Black women and families?

Crenshaw: One of the biggest blind spots is the belief that formal equality, race and gender neutrality are the guarantors of fair access, equity and inclusion. Policies that appear to be neutral or equitable on their face and do not take into account the context or how people are differently situated can create as many inequalities as policies that simply say, you don’t get to participate because of who you are. That extends to employment, education and everything else. With respect to the Black community in particular, it is the failure to acknowledge that Black women’s incomes and therefore their career trajectories are vital to the well-being of their families and their communities. Our children are disproportionately reliant on Black women’s incomes and Black women are disproportionately heads of household.

Nyandoro: Why do you think we still have that failure to acknowledge?

Crenshaw: We live in a society that is patriarchal and sexist. The default is often to think of men and boys first and that’s across the board. Partly as a consequence of that, the way we understand anti-Blackness is disproportionately through the way it impacts Black men and boys. That means we are not as conversant or aware of the specific ways that anti-Blackness impacts Black women and therefore impacts our entire community. Black women have been subject to sexual abuse at work since we arrived here. It is the thing that created enslavement and made enslavement profitable through sexual abuse of Black women. Those stereotypes have never been substantially interrupted. On top of that is a layer of stereotype that identifies our resilience, our responsibility, our leadership and our strength as a problem.

Nyandoro: If we were really designing policies and a social safety net that work for all of us using the critical race theory lens, what would that look like?

Crenshaw: Number one, you ensure that there is a baseline under which no one should fall. Your commitment is to examining policies and conditions that create distributional harms that predictably result in some people being pushed out, pushed down or pushed to the margins because of artificial constraints. You look for those artificial constraints and those ways that we do things that aren’t required and that have concrete, predictable harms associated with them. We should be skeptical of arguments that say we’re going to continue to base access on opportunities that have never been fairly distributed to people. We should be outraged at arguments against diversity, equity and inclusion that are based solely on the fact that Black women and other non-traditional people have been able to succeed.

Nyandoro: Why now? Why the content of Backtalker now?

Crenshaw: Honestly, I am trying to arm stakeholders in our democracy. I’m writing for those who are the rightful heirs of the blood, the sweat, the tears and frankly the lives lost that took us from a pre-democratic republic to one in which one could reasonably believe there was a consensus that the tyranny, exclusions and tragedies of the past should not be replicated in the future. I’m writing for those who are doubtful about what humans can do to change the trajectory of our future. I’m writing for those who don’t yet understand that what they’re trying to take away from us is the most valuable thing we have: our story, our legacy and our struggle. So I’m like, you don’t get to write me out of my own story. The story is mine.

Nyandoro: You talk about a lot of this in relation to Black women being left out of policy conversations. What does that omission look like in practice?

Crenshaw: It looks like treating Black women as an afterthought when it comes to advocacy, resources and addressing the conditions of our lives. It looks like talking about uplifting families, children and community while failing to put Black women squarely in the analysis. If you say you care about the well-being of children, then you have to care about the incomes and career trajectories of the women they rely on. That is not optional. If we don’t attend to that, then the policies we build will continue to miss the people they claim to serve.

Nyandoro: What would you say to people who think this kind of framing is too racialized or too divisive?

Crenshaw: I would say the idea that the problem is talking too much about racial dimensions is exactly backwards. We do not talk about it enough. When people oppose policies that would help low-income people or Black women, it is often because in their mind that is who they have in mind as the undeserving. If we really want to talk about how to reverse the upward distribution of resources and bring the absolute bottom up to some minimal level of subsistence, we have to talk about the racialized reasons why people do not support even that. Punching down feels right to them. Punching up is almost incomprehensible.

Nyandoro: What gives you optimism about the next generation of scholars, advocates and movement leaders carrying intersectionality into conversations about economic justice?

Crenshaw: What I would say is that we have to figure out how we are going to pull our resources together in order to prevent a tragedy. This is about what we decide to do with the moment that we are in. I think of the people who came before us and created possibilities that I have inherited. So the question is whether we are going to live up to that inheritance and create conditions for the next generation to do even better. We do not want to be the generation that fumbles the baton.