Kimberlé Crenshaw Says Juneteenth Reminds Us “Freedom Is Not a One and Done Situation”
I first heard the word “intersectionality” during an identity workshop I took in undergrad. Inside our student center, my classmates and I stood under colorful signs naming different aspects of identity—like race, gender, sexuality—as we were asked a series of questions that required us to stand underneath one and talk about how that part of our identity impacted our lives.
Finally, I had a word that could help broach conversations with classmates, colleagues and friends about the parts of my experience as a queer Black person from a low income household that were usually too hard to articulate to those who lived outside of it. From then on, intersectionality became a tool that helped me open up about myself and understand the work I wanted to do as a writer.
Before distinguished law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term in 1989, she also was searching for the language to name the intricacies of her experience; “the racial burden of Black girlness and Black womanhood.” For her, this search began at 6 years old in Canton, Ohio when her elementary school teacher refused to pick her to play Thorn Rosa, a fictional fairytale princess, for her class.The emotions of that day clung to her like a “familiar shadow,” emerging again in moments like her first year of Harvard Law School**,** when she was told she’d have to enter through the back door of a Harvard club because she was a woman.
In her new memoir, BackTalker, which came out earlier this year, Crenshaw explores the idea of raising, becoming, and being a “backtalker,” which she defines as a person who doesn’t digest or accept “anything close to second-class status at the price of belonging.” The memoir draws from diary entries she’s kept through the years to weave together her personal experiences as a Black woman in America with historical events she’s lived through, from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to President Barack Obama launching My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only.
While on a break from her book tour in Paris, Crenshaw and I spoke about her book, her parents’ lessons on race, the importance of intersectionality in the semiquincentennial, and her hopes for the future of other backtalkers. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You mentioned that you wrote some of the book in Paris, when did you know you wanted to write this memoir and what was the process like?
When I set off to do the memoir, it was at the height of the moment of racial reckoning in 2020. The tide had turned significantly in that short period of time, as the world started thinking much more critically about anti-Blackness, in particular, about the continuing shadow of our past, how it shapes institutions, how it shapes our actual experiences. So, the tools that I’ve been working with were in more demand at that moment. People were talking critically about race, they were talking about intersectionality, especially in light of the killings of both George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
And then there was this huge backlash against all of these ideas, and part of the backlash was to frame these ideas as dangerous, as divisive, as counterproductive, and as alien—foreign; this isn’t part of the American tradition. Which was shocking to me, because my understanding of my own life and the way that these life experiences led to the kinds of questions that I and many others were asking is 100% grounded in US soil, grounded in stories that many of us who’ve been racialized would recognize and remember and understand.
So, the memoir then took on a more targeted objective. There was a time that I thought, “Why am I fiddling while Rome burns? Shouldn’t I be writing a treatise, or shouldn’t I be writing corrections to the many distortions that were intentionally and unintentionally put out there about intersectionality?” And sometimes it was difficult to put down the newspaper and go back to, “Okay, well, when I was five years old…” It just seemed like maybe not the place to be spending time, but I kept at it, and it’s taken a while for it to finally conclude.
I really didn’t know where the conclusion was, because the problem that I was writing about and into just kept unfolding. But at the end of the day, it’s not a treatise, it’s not a defense of my life’s work, it’s not a brief. It is the stories that shaped my experience as a Black girl and a Black young woman, and out of those stories is the thinking that I take into the academic work that I do.
It was interesting how your book weaved history together. I think sometimes when we have conversations about history, we think about the past and don’t consider the present and how important both are to our future.
I have to credit my mother for that. She was a griot [a storyteller] and an archeologist at the same time. Showing me the sights and [telling]me the stories about how it was, and what happened to get it to be what it is now. It’s hard to think this stuff is ancient history when you’re looking at the same root beer stand, sometimes owned by the same people, and know what it took to get them to drop their discriminatory policies. So, history, as Faulkner says, it’s never fully behind us, and my mom was basically channeling that to make it clear that everything was still contention. You don’t take your foot off the pedal just because you’ve had some success. You’ve then got to protect that success, and you do that by telling the next generation this is what’s just underneath the surface of this, and this is why you have to keep tending to these victories, because nothing is guaranteed.
That’s what we learned after reconstruction, having eight years of moving in a particular direction, then being reversed and losing six, seven decades. That is the thing that should tell us how important learning our history and understanding the history is not just the past, it’s the way the past reflects itself in the present.
As we continue to have conversations about history, especially with the semiquincentennial on the horizon, I wondered how you felt about this current moment we’re in.
To go to one of the chapters in the book where I talk about visiting George Washington’s plantation and Thomas Jefferson’s plantation and being there and asking all the questions that those enslaved people could have had answers to if their experiences had been valued as important to record.
“Those who want to erase our history understand the value of it. That’s why they’re directing so many resources and so much coercive power to erase it.”
You have the pillars of labor who made this republic possible, and they are silenced and erased. So the question it raises for me is, how do we commemorate the part of our history that made America possible without contributing to that very extraction, without signing on to that erasure.
When we’re asked to step away from that history, tonot remember that history, tonot do any work to excavate that history, because to do so is to present the American Republic as deeply flawed and damaged, and not something to be celebrated, I see in that demand the same kind of demand that was operative [back then]: “don’t speak, don’t resist, don’t write yourself into the story, stay in the margins.”
So I look at this moment as an opportunity to reclaim the importance of history, all of it. I look at it as a moment for people to connect the dots between the tyranny under which African people and Indigenous people were made to live under, and how the extension of that tyranny undermines the well-being of America. And I look at it as an opportunity to make it apparent that those who want to erase our history understand the value of it. That’s why they’re directing so many resources and so much coercive power to erase it.
If they understand how important it is, then those of us who are the stakeholders also need to understand how important it is, especially in a moment like this.
And how do you think holidays like Juneteenth factor into that?
Juneteenth was a gift that came, frankly, from some of the tragedies in 2020. It was not something that I knew much about, and I don’t think a lot of folks outside of the region in which Juneteenth was commemorated really knew much about it. Which does show again the degree to which aspects of our history, particularly the history of enslavement and the complicated process of freedom, is understood.
So it is a commemoration that does important work in making it clear that freedom is not a one and done situation. Having won the Civil War wasn’t an immediate moment in which the experience of Black people suddenly turned into what it would have been had there never been enslavement. It becomes obvious that freedom-making is an ongoing process. It’s never fully done in a history like ours. For some people, just the fact that formally we are free doesn’t [mean freedom] arrives at the moment that it’s declared.
I go into Juneteenth with an appreciation of the fact that it shows us that equality making is like an onion, you peel off different layers of the preexisting condition, and that in and of itself can be an interrupted process.
In Backtalker, you emphasize the importance of the youth as the next generation of backtalkers. It was interesting to hear about your experience of learning to use your voice and to read about what you remembered about Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination; specifically, the speech you gave in Jerusalem Baptist Church during the memorial service organized by young Black activists the day after the news broke.
I am 100 percent sure that the speaking that I did and the ways that I tried to run with that baton were shaped by my parents at the dinner table, what I heard from elders. Having that influence, and this is important, because I do know that some parents struggle with how much they want to expose their children to the histories into which they were born, and I know they often make choices about not wanting to burden. I appreciate my parents, and my parents’ parents.
I was born before the major Civil Rights acts were passed, so it was important for them to not whitewash the situation, but also make it clear that we are not expected to accept the contours of our lives as is. We are not expected to give up. What we are expected to do is both move against these artificial constraints and prepare ourselves for the doors that we are trying to blow open.
I appreciate them for that, because I did have a sense of when it was important to speak up and speak back. I did have a sense that it wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t just my family, but it was a broader sense of “we” that was striving at that moment. So, when I stand up in the church, you know how they say it takes a village? It took a, “we,” it took a whole cultural moment for us to speak into it.
You once said that “If there is a mother of this country, it’s Black women, because it’s through our bodies that the wealth of the nation was able to launch the United States as the global power it actually became.” How do you keep moving forward carrying that weight and what keeps you steadfast in that?
I think the thing that keeps me moving is I’ve seen firsthand the consequences of the erasure of Black women’s specific experience and specific history. The chapter about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas really speaks to the consequences of what I call the intersectional failure. The fact that the histories we remember and the visions of resistance that we celebrate don’t often include the specific kinds of conditions that Black women were fighting against.
I wanted never to see that deeply damaging disconnect in our story happen again because it was so consequential. We got a Supreme Court justice who went on to undermine the very claims of anti-racism that he wrapped his appeal around by calling it a high-tech lynching, so under his watch and through his fifth vote, we lost some central features of the Civil Rights infrastructure that people shed blood to create. That is a tragedy, and so the thing that keeps me moving forward is recognizing how important intersectionality is in understanding the connection between our movements that Black women sit on and represent, if there is an ability to fully incorporate our experiences into our histories and our analysis.
And I think the thing that keeps me moving is the fact that I wouldn’t have been here if my elders hadn’t said, “The time to rest is when we’re done,” or if they had said, “This is a very difficult climb for us, and we really don’t have a clear guarantee that the work that we do is going to create a better life for our children.” But they were committed to creating a better life for the future generations. They were dedicated to trying and pushing all of the buttons to find a way forward.
So, as a recipient of that, I feel it would be irresponsible not to play it forward. It would be taking their sacrifices for granted, not to speak in this moment, in which much of what they sacrificed to create for us stands, on the precipice of collapse. So I don’t want to be that generation that let it go. I don’t want to be the ones that didn’t try to put our shoulder to the wheel in every way possible to push back into this effort to make America look like America did before we had the rights, and the ability to fight that we have now.
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