Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s Influential Career

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a lawyer, writer, professor, legal scholar, and civil rights activist. Her interdisciplinary expertise ranges from legal theory, critical race theory, constitutional law, gender and sexuality, social justice, and human rights.

• Early life and education: Born and raised in Canton, Ohio, Kimberlé is the child of two teachers, both of whom participated in the desegregation movement. Kimberlé received her BA in Africana studies from Cornell University, her JD from Harvard University, and her LLM from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
• Academic career and honors: Kimberlé has worked at Columbia Law School and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a William H. Hastie Fellow, an Alphonse Fletcher Fellow, and won the Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation in 2016. In 2015, Ms. Magazine named her one of the most inspiring feminists, and Ebony Magazine featured her on its “Power 100” list. She is also the cofounder of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF).
• Influence: She helped coin the terms “critical race theory” and “intersectionality,” both of which are now pivotal fields in the study and discourse around human rights and identity politics in the United States and worldwide.

In her time at Harvard Law School, Kimberlé and other scholars established a community called “The Critical Race Theory Workshop,” which became an incubator for the field of critical race theory.

Critical race theory provides a framework for understanding how racism in US institutions—like the country’s healthcare, criminal justice, legal, and educational systems, among others—can lead to unequal treatment and outcomes across racial groups.

In 1989, the University of Chicago Legal Forum published her academic paper, titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In the text, Kimberlé coined the term “intersectionality” to explain the intersection between demographics like class, gender identity, sexual orientation, and race. Intersectionality explores how inequality and discrimination across these different social identities can overlap and exacerbate one another, creating unique sets of experiences and circumstances for different groups.

“Intersectionality” is an important term in academic and social discourse surrounding discussions of race and gender. Kimberlé’s work on the subject influenced the addition of the “equality” clause in the constitution of South Africa. She also established the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School, and she’s the president of the Center for Intersectional Justice in Berlin. She also hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters with the AAPF.

In 1996, Kimberlé founded the African American Policy Forum (AAPF)—a social justice think tank—with Luke Charles Harris, a leading critical race theory specialist. AAPF’s mission is to spread awareness, foster activism, and change public policy.

The AAPF has led a number of initiatives, including #BreakingTheSilence, a town hall series that gave Black girls and women a forum; #BlackGirlsMatter, a social media campaign based on challenges Black girls face in the educational system; and #sayhername, which brought awareness to victims of police brutality.

Over the course of her legal and academic career, Kimberlé has published a series of papers, essays and books, including:

• “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): Kimberlé introduced the concept of intersectionality in this influential essay. She argued that feminist movements viewed discrimination in a “single-axis framework” that erases the plight of people who fall into multiple marginalized intersecting identities.
• Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment (1993): Kimberlé authored this book alongside her fellow legal scholars Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, and Richard Delgado. The authors attempt to interpret how the First Amendment of the US Constitution could protect people from hate speech.
• Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1996): Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and fellow critical race theory scholars Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas edited this anthology of pivotal essays, case studies, and terms that define this field of study.
• Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected (2015): Using data, Kimberlé, Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda examine differences in how Black girls and their white or male peers face discipline and punishment.
• On Intersectionality: The Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw (2019): This anthology collects some of Kimberlé’s most influential studies and essays. The anthology covers a wide variety of topics including LGBTQ activism and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
• Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines (2019): Kimberlé worked alongside four other editors (Luke Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz) for this book. Together, they examine the impacts of colorblindess in academic, social, and scientific disciplines.
• #SayHerName: Black Women’s Stories of State Violence and Public Silence (2022): This book focuses on police brutality through several accounts from Black women.
• Under the Blacklight: The Intersectional Vulnerabilities that the Twin Pandemics Lay Bare (2022): Kimberlé curated a series of discussions with other scholars, thinkers, and activists from her Intersectionality Matters podcast to provide an intersectional analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic in this book.

There’s a lot of information that history textbooks don’t cover, including the ways in which systems of inequality continue to impact everyday life. With the MasterClass Annual Membership, get access to exclusive lessons from Angela Davis, Dr. Cornel West, Jelani Cobb, John McWhorter, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Sherrilyn Ifill to learn about the forces that have influenced race in the United States.