Kimberlé Crenshaw

Black feminist trailblazers like Sojourner Truth in her 1851 Speech "Ain't I a Woman?" and Anna Julia Cooper in her 1892 essay "The Colored Woman's Office" exemplified the ideas of intersectionality before intersectionality came to be.

Crenshaw's inspiration for the theory started while she was still in college at Cornell University when she realized that the gender aspect of race was extremely underdeveloped.

Crenshaw's focus on intersectionality is how the law responds to issues that include gender and race discrimination.

The particular challenge in law is that anti-discrimination laws look at gender and race separately.

Consequently, African-American women and other women of color who experience overlapping forms of discrimination are left with no justice.

Anti-discrimination laws and the justice system's attempt to Remedy discrimination are limited and operate on a singular axis, only accounting for one identity at a time.

A complete and understandable definition has not been written in the law; therefore, when the issues of intersectionality are presented in a court of law, if one form of discrimination cannot be proved without the other, then there is no law broken.

The law defines discrimination as unfair treatment based on a certain identity.

When enforcing the law, justice goes by the definition, and if discrimination cannot be proven based on a single identity, such as sex, then no crime has been committed.

Crenshaw has referred to DeGraffenreid v. General Motors in writing, interviews, and lectures.

In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, a group of African-American women argued they received compound discrimination, excluding them from employment opportunities.

They contended that although women were eligible for office and secretarial jobs, such positions were only offered to white women, barring African-American women from seeking employment in the company.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born May 5, 1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.

Crenshaw is known for introducing and developing intersectional theory, the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.

Her work further expands to include intersectional feminism, which is a sub-category related to intersectional theory.

Intersectional feminism examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face due to their ethnicity, sexuality, and economic background.

Crenshaw was born in Canton, Ohio, on May 5, 1959, to parents Marian and Walter Clarence Crenshaw, Jr. From a young age, Crenshaw's parents encouraged her to discuss "interesting things" that she "observed in the world that day."

This early training would later become the basis of her career choices later in life.

She attended Canton McKinley High School.

She received a bachelor's degree in government and Africana studies from Cornell University in 1981, where she was a member of the Quill and Dagger senior Honors' Society.

She received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984.

In 1985, she received an LL.M. from the University of Wisconsin Law School, where she was a William H. Hastie Fellow and law clerk to Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Shirley Abrahamson.

After completing her LL.M., Crenshaw joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law in 1986.

She is a founder of the field of critical race theory and a lecturer on civil rights, critical race studies, and constitutional law.

At the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, she teaches four classes: Advanced Critical Race Theory, Civil Rights, Intersectional Perspectives on Race, Gender and the Criminalization of Women & Girls, and Race, Law and Representation.

In 1989, Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in her essay "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" as a way to help explain the oppression of African-American women.

The idea of intersectionality existed long before Crenshaw coined the term but was not widely recognized until Crenshaw's work.

In both 1991 and 1994, she was elected professor of the year by matriculating students.

In 1991, Crenshaw assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill at the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Crenshaw was a member of the Domestic Strategy Group at the Aspen Institute from 1992 to 1995, the Women's Media Initiative, and is a regular commentator on NPR's The Tavis Smiley Show.

In 1995, Crenshaw was appointed full professor at Columbia Law School, where she is the founder and director of the Center for Intersectionality & Social Policy Studies, established in 2011.

At Columbia Law School, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw's courses include an Intersectionalities Workshop and an Intersectionalities Workshop centered around Civil Rights.

In 1996, Crenshaw became the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), a think tank focused on "dismantling structural inequality" and "advancing and expanding racial justice, gender equality, and the indivisibility of all human rights, both in the U.S. and internationally."

Its mission is to build bridges between scholarly research and public discourse in addressing inequality and discrimination.

In 2001, she wrote the background paper on Race and Gender Discrimination for the United Nations World Conference on Racism, helped to facilitate the addition of gender in the WCAR Conference Declaration, served as a member of the National Science Foundation's Committee to Research Violence Against Women and the National Research Council panel on Research on Violence Against Women.

Crenshaw has been awarded the Fulbright Chair for Latin America in Brazil, and in 2008, she was awarded an in-residence fellowship at the Center of Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford.

In 2020 she received an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven.

Crenshaw has authored several books and articles and continues to publish.

Crenshaw's book with Luke Charles Harris & George Lipsitz, The Race Track: How the Myth of Equal Opportunity Defeats Racial Justice, is scheduled for publication December 2025.