This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, is a legal scholar

responsible for naming two of the most contested ideas in American politics, intersectionality

and critical race theory. She has written a new memoir about how she came to those words

and what it has been like to watch the courts, legislators,

and the media weaponize and redefine them. The book is called Backtalker, an American memoir.

The first of those words came together one late night in 1988 at the University of Wisconsin.

Crenshaw was a young legal scholar, pulling apart one of the

most important court cases of her career. A black woman had sued General Motors for discrimination,

and a federal court told her she could sue either as a black person or as a woman, but not both at

once. Crenshaw took a legal pad and drew two roads crossing.

One road was race, the other was gender. She put an X at the intersection and wrote the woman's

name there. The law, she would later argue, could not see this woman because it could only look down

one road at a time. She named that X,

intersectionality. A few years later, with 30 other scholars of color, she helped name a second idea,

critical race theory, a body of legal scholarship that argues race is not incidental to American law,

but built into it. The scholars were responding

to a legal world that insisted it was neutral. More than 20 states now restrict how it can be taught.

Crenshaw's memoir argues that the language she named comes from everything she has seen,

heard, and felt, from her childhood in

Canton, Ohio, to the halls of Cornell, Harvard Law, and the University of Wisconsin.

Kimberly Williams-Krinshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School and the founder

of the African-American Policy Forum. And Kimberly Williams-Krinshaw, welcome to fresh air.

...