About Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law.

She is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, a Distinguished Professor of Law and the Promise Institute Chair on Human Rights at UCLA School of Law, and the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF).

Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in critical race theory and in intersectionality, a term she coined to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice. Through her leadership at AAPF, she is credited for creating the #SayHerName movement, a nationwide campaign to recognize Black women and girls in the national discourse on police violence. 

Her writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review. She is a founding coordinator of the Critical Race Theory workshop and co-editor of Critical Race Theory: Key Documents That Shaped the Movement. Crenshaw writes regularly for The New Republic, The Nation, and Ms., provides commentary for media outlets, including MSNBC and NPR, and hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters!

Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work on intersectionality was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution. She authored the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism in 2001, served as the rapporteur for the conference’s expert group on gender and race discrimination, and coordinated NGO efforts to ensure the inclusion of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration. In 1991, she assisted on the legal team of Anita Hill during her testimony at the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.