Backtalker

BACKTALKER

An American Memoir

One of the world’s most influential intellectuals offers an intimate look at how her personal life informed her public, political journey to becoming the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the global discourse on race, gender and democracy.

It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day, race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory.

Backtalker is the powerful story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club at Harvard Law School. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it—not just bearing witness but also guiding us through how to reconceptualize equality, justice and the fight for freedom.

In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America—at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.

But Crenshaw’s ascension has not come without pushback. 2026 presents a direct challenge to an intersectional backtalker, as Crenshaw’s work and that of so many other scholars, activists and artists faces erasure at the hands of the administration. Backtalker, however, is not a story of lost hope. It is a testimony to a lived experience that can serve as an inspiration to backtalkers everywhere, offering lessons in how we must understand the past to chart a course for our future.