BACKTALKER

An intellectual examines the impact of racism and sexism on her life.

Law scholar Crenshaw (#SayHerName, 2023), who developed the concepts of “intersectionality” and “critical race theory,” here takes a nuanced and lively look at the roles that race and gender played in her experience as she grew up in Canton, Ohio, in the 1960s and then went on to attend Cornell and Harvard Law School. Crenshaw clearly came by her tendency to “backtalk” authorities honestly: She pays loving tribute to her parents, both of whom were public schoolteachers, for their refusal to allow their daughter to be stifled. But she is also clear-eyed enough to note their flaws, including a reliance on corporal punishment. “The only message that competed with the idea that we were a proud people was that we were respectable,” she writes. “And that meant that absolutely no sexual misconduct would be tolerated.” Crenshaw structures the book in brief chapters, each centered on a story or two, some of them directly tied to racism and misogyny, and others on turning points tangential to those subjects, including her discovery that her older brother actually had a different father, and the death of her father when Crenshaw was 11. Maybe inevitably, but to the book’s detriment, she largely abandons memoir in the chapters covering her life after graduate school, instead paying attention to events largely in the public sphere, like the trial of O.J. Simpson and the hearings for Clarence Thomas before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. Occasionally, she indulges in score-settling: A long chapter is devoted to castigating Barack Obama for what Crenshaw views as his tendency to prioritize the problems of Black boys over those of Black girls.

A provocative study of how the personal and the political collide.