A legal scholar and 'Backtalker' defends critical race theory -- a term she helped coin

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School and the founder of the African American Policy Forum. Carl Timpone hide caption toggle caption Carl Timpone Growing up in Canton, Ohio, legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw was encouraged to call out conditions that were unfair or inexplicable. It was a form of "talking back" that continued into her career, she says. "We're not living in a world in which we are all standing on equal footing," Crenshaw says. "And we have to muster the courage ... [and] the righteous indignation to talk back against these expectations." Crenshaw is responsible for naming two of the most contested ideas in American politics: intersectionality and critical race theory . The idea of intersectionality came to Crenshaw in the late 1980s when she was studying the 1976 Supreme Court case DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. A Black woman had sued the car maker 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. "I thought, 'How can these very smart people not get that if you're protected against race discrimination, you're protected against all of it?'" Crenshaw says. "In the same way that traffic going north and south sometimes overlaps with traffic going east to west, discrimination on the basis of race sometimes overlaps with discrimination on on the bases of gender. ... …