Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American scholar in the field of critical race theory, and a professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. She is a leading authority in the areas of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law and a co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum.
Crenshaw was born in 1959 in Canton, Ohio. In 1981, she received a B.A from Cornell University. During her time at Cornell, she was a member of the Quill & Dagger senior honour society. She continued her education, gaining a J.D (Professional Doctorate degree in Law) at Harvard Law in 1984 and an LL.M (Masters in Law) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 where she was a William H. Hastie Fellow. Crenshaw then clerked for Justice Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Crenshaw then took a position as part of the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, teaching Civil Rights and courses in critical race studies and constitutional law. She is the founding co-ordinator of the intellectual movement called the Critical Race Theory, a framework in social science which focuses on the application of critical theory. It focuses on the critical examination of society and culture and the intersection of race, law and power.
In 1986 Crenshaw began writing about Intersectionality, a term coined officially in 1989. Her writing, inspired by the fact that, while in college, Crenshaw had realised that the gender aspect of race was underdeveloped, lead to the theory being formally recognised. Her theory was developed to detail the applicability of black feminism to anti-discrimination law. Crenshaw often uses a case of Degraffenreid vs General Motors, in which five black women were experiencing both race and gender discrimination as an example of the need for intersectionality. The case was challenging as anti-discrimination law treated race and gender separately, and so when African American women or any other women of colour experienced overlapping discrimination on the basis of both gender and race, the law was unaware of how to combine the two and would ask for proof of each instance of discrimination separately. The case dealt with the fact that General Motors would only employ black men in the factory, and white women in office jobs, leaving black women discriminated against for both their gender and race. Treated separately, the fact that black men were being employed seemed to disprove the racial discrimination accusation and as white women were employed in secretarial roles, this seemed to disprove the gender discrimination accusation and the case was dismissed.
In 1991, Crenshaw was part of the legal team for Anita Hill, who had accused the then-Supreme Court Nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. White feminists were keen to support Hill’s claim of sexual harassment, whereas the African American community – largely women went out in support of Clarence Thomas. Crenshaw stated that in one instance, she came out of the Capitol to the sight of these women holding hands and singing in support of Thomas and “ It was like one of these moments where you literally feel that you have been kicked out of your community, all because you are trying to introduce and talk about the way that African American women have experienced sexual harassment and violence. It was a defining moment.” After mainstream white feminists had taken up the cause, the issue was made primarily about gender instead of race, erasing the fact that Hill was a woman of colour and pitching gender and race against each other in the fight against discrimination. African American feminists then had to fight to be a part of the conversation, and their contribution has now largely been forgotten. The Hill case changed the course of history in bringing recognition to the fact of sexual harassment in the workplace, but black women’s experience of discrimination was sidelined.
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking work on intersectionality attempts to detail how feminism, anti-racist activism, and anti-discrimination law should be used to highlight the multiple avenues through which racial and gender oppression were experienced so that the problems would be easier to discuss and understand. In 1996, Critical Race theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, a compilation of the most important writings of the Critical Race Theory movement was published. The book included articles by authors including Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda and Crenshaw herself. That same year, Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) with Professor Luke Harris. AAPF is dedicated to advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of all human rights, in the U.S. and internationally. Crenshaw and the AAPF have been involved in the #WHYWECANTWAIT campaign, which is working to addressing the fact that the My Brother’s Keeper initiative is only working to address persistent opportunity gaps faced by boys and young men of color, and is excluding girls and youth women of colour. The campaign has received support by men and women of colour and allies to the cause who believe that in order to truly support those denied opportunities, campaigns to do so should be intersectional. Crenshaw is still the executive director of AAPF and has facilitated workshops on racial equity for hundreds of community leaders and organisations throughout the country.
In 2001, Crenshaw wrote the paper Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nations World Conference on Racism and served as the Rapporteur for the conference’s Expert Group on Gender and Race Discrimination. She also coordinated NGO efforts to facilitate the addition of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration. Her work on race and gender was influential in the drafting of the equality clause in the South African Constitution and she has served as a member of the National Science Foundation’s Committee to Research Violence Against Women. Crenshaw has published a number of works on civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law including On Intersectionality: Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw (2012), which serves an an introduction to her work, The Race Track: Understanding and Challenging Structural Racism (2013), Reaffirming Racism: The faulty logic of Colorblindness, Remedy and Diversity (2013) and is currently working on a publication entitled “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Over Policed and Under Protected.“
Crenshaw was awarded Professor of the Year at UCLA Law School in both 1991 and 1994. She has received a number of honours including: the Lucy Terry Prince Unsung Heroine Award; the ACLU Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellowship from 2005-07; the Fulbright Distinguished Chair for Latin America; the Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University in 2009 and a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2010. She is currently the Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) at Columbia Law School, which she founded in 2011. In addition to this, she is a founding member of the Women’s Media Initiative and writes for Ms. Magazine, the Nation and other print media. She has also appeared as a regular commentator on “The Tavis Smiley Show,” NPR, and MSNBC.