Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

• Born: 1959
• Birthplace: Canton, Ohio

Educator, lawyer, and scholar

Crenshaw is a founding theorist of an academic movement called critical race theory. She has done substantial research into issues related to race, class, and gender. Because of her expertise in law, Crenshaw also is considered a leading authority in the realm of civil rights.

Early Life

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1959. She began her career as an academic at Columbia University, where she began to grapple with the marginalizing effects of race and gender. As she completed courses in Africana studies, she began to notice that areas of inquiry concerning women of color were severely underinvestigated. She earned her undergraduate degree from Columbia in 1981 and went on to earn her juris doctorate from Harvard Law School in 1984 and her master of laws degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. At Wisconsin, she also earned the William H. Hastie Fellowship. Crenshaw was a law clerk for Shirley Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1985-1986.

Life’s Work

Crenshaw’s work has focused on illuminating the varying ways in which racism, sexism, and classism marginalize groups and individuals. She has established herself as an authority on constitutional and civil rights law and has done work related to immigration, international law, education, and criminal law. Crenshaw assisted the legal team that represented Anita Hill in the confirmation hearings for then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, and in 2001, she wrote a paper for the United Nations Conference on Racism. In 1996, Crenshaw cofounded the African American Policy Forum, a think tank whose goal was to deconstruct and challenge public discourse on discrimination and injustice.

In 1986, Crenshaw began teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law. Her position at UCLA allowed her the flexibility to lecture nationally and internationally and continue to pursue scholarship on issues related to race, politics, civil rights, and legal theory. Crenshaw became a full professor of law in 1991, and was selected as UCLA’s professor of the year in 1991 and 1994. In 2017 she was named a distinguished professor of law and the Promise Institute Chair in Human Rights at UCLA.

Concurrently, in 1992 and 1995 Crenshaw was the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor at Columbia University, where she has served as a professor of law from the fall of 1995 through the end of the 2018–19 academic year. In 2011, she founded Columbia University’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, and serves as its director. By 2020 she was appointed as the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law.

While teaching at UCLA and Columbia, in 2007, Crenshaw was nominated to the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil, and in 2008, she was named an Alphonse Fletcher Fellow. The same year, she was granted an in-residence fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She was the London School of Economics Gender Institute’s Centennial Professor for 2015 through 2019.

Crenshaw has written, edited, or contributed to books such as Critical Race Theory: Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1995) and Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (1993). She also has published several journal articles in publications such as Harvard Law Review, National Black Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and Southern California Law Review. She also writes for Ms Magazine and The Nation, and is a commentator for the Tavis Smiley Show and MSNBC. In 2019 she started hosting the podcast series Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Crenshaw has earned numerous honors and accolades for her work. In the 2010s these have included being named at the top of Ms. Magazine’s Feminist Heroes of 2015 list; being featured in the 2015 Ebony Power 100; being named the 2016 Fellows Outstanding Scholar by the American Bar Foundation; receiving the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize in 2017; and being inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2019. In 2021, she received the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Women in Legal Education, for her "pathbreaking work in critical race theory and intersectionality, two fields of study she has pioneered," according to the award citation.

Crenshaw is credited with spearheading critical race theory as an academic discipline and theoretical movement. Her sociological construct of intersectionality, a term she coined in 1989, became a conceptual tool useful in analyzing patterns of inequality and oppression that affect women of color, who simultaneously experience racism and sexism, in American society and the international community. Intersectionality analyzes overlapping structural systems of oppression and discrimination in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, economic status, and other categories.

Significance

Crenshaw’s scholarship examines and exposes racism, classism, and sexism. Giving voice to the Black female perspective, her work has provided critical insight into American society’s treatment of underrepresented groups.

Bibliography

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Law.” In Philosophical Problems in the Law, edited by David M. Adams. 4th ed. Florence, Ky.: Wadsworth, 2005. Crenshaw outlines her theory that the combination of race and sex creates a form of discrimination against Black women that was not previously recognized or examined, legally or academically.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “A Preference for Deception: A Legal Scholar Shows How the Language of Civil Rights Is Stolen by Those Trying to Halt Affirmative Action.” Ms. 18, no. 1 (Winter, 2008): 34. Crenshaw examines the rhetoric used by affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly—emphasizing terms such as “discrimination” and “racial preference”—in his efforts to get voters to outlaw the social program in several states.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, et al., eds. Critical Race Theory: Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: New Press, 1995. A compilation of essays by leading critical race theorists that challenge dominant assumptions related to issues of race, class, and gender.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The Urgency of Intersectionality.” TEDWomen 2016, Oct. 2016, www.ted.com/talks/kimberle‗crenshaw‗the‗urgency‗of‗intersectionality/up-next. Accessed 30 Nov. 2017.

Matsuda, Mari J., et al. Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993. Four influential critical race theorists comment on ways in which speech can injure various populations and provide an interpretation of the First Amendment as it relates to these injuries.

“Two Columbia Law School Professors Win Lifetime Achievement Awards From AALS.” Columbia Law School, The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 7 Jan. 2021, https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/two-columbia-law-school-professors-win-lifetime-achievement-awards-aals. Accessed 22 July 2021.