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It was October 1991 and Anita Hill was testifying against Clarence Thomas. At the judges US supreme court confirmation hearing, Hill, his former aide, claimed he had sexually harassed her. Kimberl Crenshaw was assisting Hills legal team and felt dejected and exhausted. As she left the capitol building in Washington DC that day, she saw a group of African Americans, mostly women, gathered at the bottom of the steps in a prayer circle. She let out a sigh of relief and walked towards them.

I thought: Oh, thank God, a place we can go and embrace each other, because this is a struggle, Crenshaw says. It was the day before Thomas confirmation, and she felt the future of the civil rights movement was on the line. But when she reached the group, she saw they were wearing T-shirts proclaiming their support for Thomas. She watched with dread as they sang songs of praise and called Hill a jezebel. It was like a horror film, she says. You think youre safe, but it turns out that the people youre running to are actually infected with whatever youre running from.

As she walked away from them, she thought about how the case exposed the theoretical gap in the legal profession when it came to black womens lived experience. During the explosive hearing, televised and watched across the country, Hill, then a teacher at the University of Oklahomas law school, spoke in great detail of her allegation that Thomas harassed her when he was her supervisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yet he retained tremendous support and, in his infamous defence, called the hearings a hi-tech lynching.

What Crenshaw saw was that, with feminists supporting Hill and anti-racist activists defending Thomas, twin calls for equality were being put in opposition to each other. The groups were weakening each others movements instead of supporting each others cause and it was black women who paid a significant price.

For Crenshaw, who is now one of the most influential black feminist legal theorists in the US, Hills case cemented her idea of intersectionality, set out in a paper two years before the hearing. The idea suggests that different forms of discrimination such as sexism and racism can overlap and compound each other in just this way. At the time of Hills case, Crenshaw was writing another paper, Mapping the Margins, on the erasure of black womens history of being sexually harassed and abused. The Hill case showed the result of the fact that sexual harassment had largely only been discussed in relation to white women.

So many people were corralled by the idea that sexual harassment isnt a black womans issue, she says. So many people didnt understand that slavery was about institutionalised sexual harassment and abuse. There were 700,000 slaves in 1790; by the eve of the civil war, there were nearly 4 million. How did that happen? Its right in front of us and there are no words for it.

Her paper set out how feminism had failed to analyse that race was playing a role in making some women vulnerable to heightened patterns of sexual abuse. And it was also the case that anti-racism wasnt very good at dealing with that issue either.

Hills case, Crenshaw believes, was also a painful example of the failure of representation for representations sake. Thomas, the supreme courts only black justice, played a decisive role in gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013. The ruling struck down the system that blocked discriminatory voting policies before they harmed voters.

Crenshaws early academic work, meanwhile, was also an important building block in the development of critical race theory, which revolutionised the understanding of race in the USs legal system and is taught in law schools across the country. The heads of the University of Californias law schools explained in September how useful it was in unpicking how race has operated in our history and our present and understanding the structural racism through which racial inequality is reproduced in economic, political and educational systems even without individual racist intent. (Crenshaw is a professor at one of the schools, UCLA Law, and at Columbia Law School.)

In the 30 years since Crenshaw first wrote about intersectionality, the term has swept to the forefront of conversations about feminism and racial justice. It is used by activists, in HR training in some of the worlds largest corporations and is at the heart of the rightwing backlash against identity politics. At the end of October, the term critical race theory was spoken in the UK parliament for the first time, when Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, announced the government was unequivocally against fundamental parts of the concept.

My mom was more confrontational and my father was more Martin Luther King ... there are strains of both in my work

In some ways, Crenshaw is excited by the high profile her theories have gained, even if they are being condemned: It is far better that is circulating and being used than if only 25 law professors have read it. In September, Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop racial sensitivity training, labelling it divisive, anti-American propaganda. Crenshaw is happy to have the fight and point out how absurd this argument is. So, what are you saying American is having structural racism? If contesting it [racism] is un-American, then you are basically a witness to my side, she says. You are confirming why this work is so important.

Unsurprisingly, Crenshaw backed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the election: You dont have to describe Biden and Harris as being heaven in America to oppose the hell of a Trump administration. In a statement, she described their win as a historic night, thanks to Harris becoming the highest-ranking woman in US history, as well as the first black person and the first Indian American to become vice-president. Crenshaw noted that Bidens victory speech thanked the African American community, writing: We must hold him to that promise And we must move forward intersectionally, and with an eye towards our past.

Crenshaw knew from a young age that she wanted to be a lawyer. When she was six, she was sent to church with her 14-year-old brother. It was summer and her dad told them to stay together. But her brother wanted to leave early and use their collection money to buy sweets. They took their time walking home, enjoying the goodies, not realising their parents would go to the church to pick them up. When Crenshaw got home and saw her parents were not there, it was clear there would be trouble.

But, she says, it never occurred to me in a million years that I would get in trouble, because I was following his orders. She argued to her dad that this was in a lose-lose situation for her: she was in trouble for following her brothers rules, but she would also have been in trouble if she had not gone with him. In the end, her father told everyone: Dont let her get a word in edgewise. When she starts to talk, you will not know what you were trying to say. And thats when they started calling me a lawyer.

Crenshaw was born on 5 May 1959 in Canton, Ohio, a small industrial town in the midwest. Her mothers side of the family were heavily involved with the desegregation movement (her mother helped desegregate a paddling pool at the age of three), while her fathers side had a more spiritual advocacy for racial justice. My mom was a little bit more radical and confrontational and my father was a little bit more Martin Luther King and find common ground. Which is probably why there are strains of both of those in my work.

She remembers watching the civil rights movement explode across the country on her TV as she was growing up. Seeing a big, collective effort to change black peoples trajectory in the country shaped her identity. Her parents, who were both teachers, kept her on her toes. I remember being teased by my friends because, when we got called in for dinner, we had to come to the table with something to say about what another day on the planet was, what did we learn and what happened, Crenshaw says. Inevitably, she liked to turn the tables and question her parents on their day.

If contesting racism is un-American, then you are basically a witness to my side

At one point, she was sent to a Christian fundamentalist school that had smaller classes and better grades. It was a horrible experience. One teacher told her that civil rights activists were not God-fearing and were, in fact, the people the Bible warned about in Revelation. It was like now, when people say Black Lives Matter protesters are thugs, Crenshaw says. But it also sharpened her skills in challenging authority and, to the discomfort of some teachers, the exceptionally bright Crenshaw represented the school in debating and spelling competitions.

She could handle being in conflict with her teachers, but struggled when another pupil called her the N-word and isolated her from her friends. It was the first time I had seen abject racism from a kid my age, Crenshaw says. That hurt more than any of the crazy stuff the teachers were doing. She begged her mum to pull her out; she transferred to the local school at which her mum taught.

She went on to study at Cornell University in 1981, then got a law degree at Harvard law school in 1984 and a masters in law at the University of Wisconsin the following year. It was within the critical legal studies a movement of legal scholars founded in the late 70s that dissected the idea that the law was just and neutral that Crenshaw developed her ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality.

Those ideas which she felt were obvious to everyone who had experienced racism and sexism were controversial among some leftwing legal academics. There were some folks who felt that the loose network could not survive centring a race project inside of it, she says. Crenshaws work asked people to think of the privileges they brought into a space and how, through their actions or silences, they contributed to the problem of racism.

Because of this, it is often criticised as somehow undermining the building of a multiracial working-class movement. In response, Crenshaw argues that the US will never be able to respond to the problem of class until it interrogates what she describes as the politically stabilising role of white supremacy in propping up American hierarchies. That has been the case since slavery. Why did so many white farmers who were impoverished by this economic system make themselves available, amenable, even champions of an economic system that didnt benefit them?

She points to a documentary about a white Klansman who said that, although he did not have much, he thanked God every day for being white. Why is that more important than the fact that he cant put food on the table? Crenshaw asks. When people tell me that intersectionality marginalises class, I say no, intersectionality is what we need to understand why its been so difficult to mount a fully class-centric movement.

Away from the classroom and courts, Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum, now one of the countrys leading social justice thinktanks. In 2015, it created the hashtag #SayHerName to highlight how black women were being overlooked as victims of police violence. As a longtime campaigner against police brutality against black women, Crenshaw was initially disappointed with the response to the killing of Breonna Taylor by police in March in a botched narcotics raid, which has since received nationwide attention. Her name didnt really get lifted up until after George Floyd was killed, she says. Had Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd not been killed, would we be saying the name of Breonna Taylor?

Nonetheless, Taylors death could be a turning point for the civil rights movement in the US, Crenshaw says. It could become the door through which people can see all of the other sisters whove come before her. That would be a shift in consciousness and awareness about how black women can be thought of and seen as the subject of anti-black violence, Crenshaw says.

She compares the killing of Taylor to the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Taylors death, and the deaths of black women in general, has not mobilised an entire movement, an entire way of thinking about anti-black racism, in the way they say that Emmett Tills killing did. But, she says, what draws them together is that, as far as the legal system is concerned, its rendered judgment was that no one would be held accountable for either of these deaths.

Crenshaw sees her work as an important recalibration of how the black struggle is understood. Rosa Parks came into politics not when she sat down on a bus, but when she took up the case of Recy Taylor, a black woman who was gang-raped, and the white men who did it were not brought to justice. These are the stories that a male-centric view of anti-black racism does not consistently remember, rehearse and retell, Crenshaw says. This results in a failure to challenge the myth that black women dont face sexual and state violence, leaving women like Recy and Breonna Taylor vulnerable and isolated. For Crenshaw, this rewriting of history that centres the violence black women experience is crucial for taking the black freedom struggle forward.

With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, Crenshaw says people are finally beginning to see how intimately the issues they care about are connected to the courts. In many ways, her career started at the USs highest court. Would she accept a nomination to be on the court? She laughs. I would do it, after I take my ice skates off, having skated across hell.

Read the rest here:
Kimberl Crenshaw: the woman who revolutionised feminism and landed at the heart of the culture wars - The Guardian