How Critical Race Theory Mastermind Kimberl Crenshaw Is Weathering the Culture Wars – Vanity Fair
Kimberl Crenshaw is tucked in her UCLA office with ceiling-high shelves. Behind her, two men enter the frame of our video call and bend and lift, packing stacks of books. Im moving offices, she explains. To one with a view of the lawn. Crenshaw triaged her packed schedule to speak with me; shes been in even higher demand than usual. Shes receiving, and declining, media hits left and right, mostly because shes working on three books, all set to be released by May 2022. Shes a law professor at Columbia University and UCLA. She finds time to run the African American Policy Forum, the social justice think tank she cofounded 25 years ago, and to host a podcast on a term she coined in 1989: intersectionality. All this as Conservatives from Fox Newss Tucker Carlson to Texas senator Ted Cruz melt down over another academic framework she helped mint more than 30 years agocritical race theorylanding her at the roiling center of the culture wars.
Shes felt grumpy and annoyed watching the right bastardize her decades of work, which includes a pivotal 2001 paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations, a foundational book on the mistreatment of Black girls by police, and articles in various law reviews and news outlets. But dogs dont bark at parked cars. Shes traversing the moment with humility, watching misinformation steer the country astray. Friends reach out, up in arms about Republican efforts to bar her teachings from schools. She asks them, Are you worried about how deep this disaffection with our democracy is when playing by the rules creates outcomes that many white people are unhappy with? Because if the overblown bans are whats drawing focus, then were all being recruited as actors in a misinformation campaign changing the rules we live by.
This recent campaign began roughly last September, when Christopher Rufo, a right-wing think tank fellow, went on air with Carlson to warn viewers about critical race theory. Saying hed spent months researching how the theory had infiltrated American systems, Rufo called on then president Donald Trump to take action. Trump, an avid Fox viewer, ordered federally funded agencies to stop teaching critical race theory and white privilege because the concepts lead people to believeincorrectly, he saidthat America is inherently racist. With months left in his presidency, Trump launched the 1776 commissiona rebuttal of warped and distorted social justice teaching concepts like the New York Times magazines 1619 Project, spearheaded by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, which aims to reexamine Americas history through the lens of slavery.
President Joe Biden rescinded both ban and commission on his first day. By that point, though, the issue had become a live wire. Following Bidens reversals, many Republicans pushed bills to outlaw Crenshaws academic framework in schools. In April, Idaho became the first state to pass such a bill; Governor Brad Little said it would prevent teachers from indoctrinating students to hate America. A month later, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt followed suit. Since then, several more red states have introduced similar measures.
I ask Crenshaw what shed say to her critics. I dont think this is about a real difference in opinion, nor is it a debate that is winnable, she says. This is about a weapon theyre using to hold on to power.
Most frustrating for Crenshaw has been watching the GOP reduce critical race theory to a cudgel to attack progress in the guise of protecting democracy. In the same way that anti-racism is framed as racism, anti-indoctrination is framed as indoctrination, Crenshaw says. Conservatives have long embraced the idea that America is a color-blind, equitable society where hard work explains who succeeds. What could be more indoctrinating than that? As an example of the systemic nature of racism, she points to the history behind traditionally white and Black neighborhoods: how federal money went toward developing segregated suburbs while Black people were denied those opportunities. And how that denial extends to todays economic disparities.
I dont think this is about a REAL DIFFERENCE in opinion.... This is about A WEAPON theyre using to hold on to POWER.
Crenshaw breaks it down. Critical race theory is based on the premise that race is socially constructed, yet it is real through social constructions. In other words, ask yourself, what is a Black neighborhood? Why do we call the hood the hood? Labels like these were strategically produced by American policy. Critical race theory says the idea of a Black personwho I am in this countryis a legal concept. Our enslavability was a marker of our degradation, Crenshaw explains. And our degradation was a marker of the fact that we could never be part of this country. Our Supreme Court said thisin the Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling of 1857and it wasnt a close decision.
Critical race theory pays attention to the ripple effects of such decisions. It asks us to scrutinize how and why society looks the way it does. These are the kinds of questions the other side doesnt want us to ask because it wants us to be happy with the contemporary distribution of opportunity, Crenshaw says.
Critical race theory grew from what Crenshaw calls the post-civil rights generation: those who watched the movement play out, learning from demonstrations that forced the government to pass laws intended to protect the rights of African Americans but that failed to address the root of the problem. In 1989, during her third year as a law professor, Crenshawalongside four thought leaders, two white allies, and three organizersintroduced the term at a workshop. The label was happenstance. We were critically engaging law but with a focus on race, she says, recalling a brainstorm session. So we wanted critical to be in it, race to be in it. And we put theory in to signify that we werent just looking at civil rights practice. It was how to think, how to see, how to read, how to grapple with how law has created and sustained raceour particular kind of race and racismin American society.
What those on the right describe as a threat to democracy in fact promotes equity. Its how weve become, historically, who weve beenhow the fiction of race is made real. Crenshaw bets none of the Republicans fighting to maintain the status quo have taken the time to understand her work, because it was never about understanding. (When an Alabama lawmaker who filed a bill to outlaw critical race theory in schools was asked by a reporter to define the term, he couldnt.) You cannot fix a problem you cannot name, Crenshaw says. You cannot address a history that youre unwilling to learn.
Crenshaw, who grew up in the industrial town of Canton, Ohio, was eight when her father started calling her a lawyer, warning people not to let her get a word in edgewise. I would argue my way out of punishment by presenting the contradiction in the rules, she says. But it was when her older brother, who died when she was 12, discovered the dashikia West African shirt made popular in America during the Black Power Movement of the 60s and 70sthat she got her first glimpse into how assertions of Black pride and culture did not always go over well in white America. A week after donning the shirt, her brother came home with it torn up, Crenshaw says. He said he had gotten into a fight with some white people who called him the N-word and tried to take it off, she recalls. This was in the 70s. I remember seeing that and asking, how could it be such a problem that my brother wore this dashiki? What is it about this that seems to be in such an affront to the sensibilities of those who had to encounter my brother in that outfit? When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, her dad was a first-year law student, but he died before he could finish school. We couldnt bring Martin Luther King back to life, but we could speak about his legacy, Crenshaw says. I couldnt bring my dad back to life, but I could go on and be a lawyer like he was trying to be.
So, it was no accident she wound up practicing law. Her big break came when she clerked for Justice Shirley Abrahamson, the first female chief justice of Wisconsins Supreme Court. Abrahamson was also on a shortlist for the U.S. Supreme Courta seat that went to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That woman gave me my career, Crenshaw says. She took a chance on me. I was a Black graduate from Harvard Law School. Hadnt been on Law Review, was writing stuff that was kind of, What is this intersectionality stuff? And she saw my potential. That led to her meeting Joel F. Handler, then a professor at the University of Wisconsin, which led to her faculty position at UCLA. That kind of network, that kind of credential is what gets you looked at, she says.
Crenshaws days are never identical. Before our chat, she had three meetings, one discussing an ongoing book project. Afterward, she plans to write a chapter for her memoir-manifesto Backtalker, which chronicles the development of some of her ideas that have shaped the discourse around gender, race, and social justice. I see my work as talking back against those who would normalize and neutralize intolerable conditions in our lives, she says of the title, which she may change as the chapters build. Social justice writing, scholarship, activism is not talking into a vacuum; its talking back against the systems of thought, against the assumptions, against the power that has lined up throughout history to tell us that some of us are not worthy of being full citizens, some of our dreams are not worthy of being realized, and some of our lives are not worthy of improvement through collective commitments to change the terms upon which we live.
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How Critical Race Theory Mastermind Kimberl Crenshaw Is Weathering the Culture Wars - Vanity Fair