Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born May 5, 1959) is an American civil rights advocate and a 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 the concept of intersectionality, also known as 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.
Early life and education 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 become the basis of her career choices later in life.
Crenshaw experienced traumatic incidents during her youth, including the sudden death of her father at the age of 34, the shooting death of her older brother Mantel, and physical abuse at the hands of a fellow college student.
Crenshaw attended Canton McKinley High School. In 1981, she received a bachelor's degree in government and Africana studies from Cornell University, where she was a member of the Quill and Dagger senior Honors Society. She received a JD from Harvard Law School in 1984. In 1985, she received an LLM 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.Ring, D. A. (2011). Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams 1959–. In M. Mazurkiewicz (Ed.), Contemporary Black Biography (Vol. 88, pp. 30-32). Gale.
Career After completing her LLM, Crenshaw joined the faculty of the UCLA 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 UCLA School of Law, as of 2017, she taught 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 1991, Crenshaw assisted the legal team representing Anita Hill at the US Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In both 1991 and 1994, she was elected professor of the year by matriculating students. In 1995, Crenshaw was appointed full professor at Columbia Law School, where she was the founder and director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, established in 2011. At Columbia Law School, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw's courses include an intersectionalities workshop and another focused specifically on 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. 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 for Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford.
In 2001, Crenshaw 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 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 2020, Crenshaw received an honorary doctorate from the KU Leuven. She has authored several books and articles and continues to publish. Crenshaw's book with Luke Charles Harris and George Lipsitz, The Race Track: How the Myth of Equal Opportunity Defeats Racial Justice, was published in hardback in 2023. Her autobiography Backtalker: An American Memoir came out on May 5, 2026.
Intersectionality
Origins of the concept 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. 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 intersectional ideas long before the term was coined. Frances M. Beal wrote an influential pamphlet in 1969 entitled "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female." 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 arguments Crenshaw's work on intersectionality focuses on how the law responds to issues that include gender and race discrimination. One particular challenge is that anti-discrimination laws consider gender and race separately. Consequently, African-American women and other women of color who experience overlapping forms of discrimination are left with no justice as well as immense ignorance. Anti-discrimination laws and the justice system's attempt to remedy discrimination are limited and operate on a single 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 intersectional 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. The courts weighed the allegations of race and gender discrimination separately, finding that the employment of African-American male factory workers disproved racial discrimination, and the employment of white female office workers disproved gender discrimination. Accordingly, the court declined to consider intersectional discrimination and dismissed the case.
Crenshaw has also discussed intersectionality in connection to her experience as part of the 1991 legal team for Anita Hill, the woman who accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. The case drew two groups with contrasting views: white feminists in support of Hill; opposing African-Americans who supported Clarence Thomas. One line of the argument focused on the rights of women and Hill's experience of being violated as a woman. The other focused on mitigating the conduct of Thomas to allow him to become the second African American to serve on the United States Supreme Court.
Crenshaw argued that with these two groups rising against one another during this case, Anita Hill lost her voice as a black woman. She had been unintentionally chosen to support the women's side, unintentionally silencing her racial identity in the process. "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." "Many women who talk about the Anita Hill thing," Crenshaw adds, "celebrate what's happened with women in general.... Sexual harassment is now recognized. What's not doing as well is the recognition of black women's unique experiences with discrimination."
Crenshaw also discussed the theory of intersectionality in a TED Talk in October 2016. Additionally, Crenshaw delivered a keynote speech at the Women of the World festival at the Southbank Centre in London, England, in 2016. She spoke on women of color's unique challenges in the struggle for gender equality, racial justice and well-being. In her 2016 TED Talk and keynote speech, she discussed a key challenge women of color face: police brutality. She highlighted the #SayHerName campaign aimed at uplifting the stories of black women killed by police. The focus on the victimization of black women in the SayHerName movement draws from the theory of intersectionality which Crenshaw describes thus: "It's like a lazy Susan – you can subject race, sexuality, transgender identity or class to a feminist critique through intersectionality."
Since the 2010s, Crenshaw has spoken out against misinterpretations of intersectionality, saying that some have wrongfully characterized it as a blanket term for "complicated" problems, "identity politics on steroids," or "a mechanism to turn white men into new pariahs." Instead, Crenshaw characterizes intersectionality as,
My Brother's Keeper
A nationwide initiative to open up a ladder of opportunities to youth males and males of color. Crenshaw and the other participants of the African American Forum have demonstrated through multiple means of the media to express that the initiative has good intentions but perpetrates for the uplifting of youth but excludes girls and youth girls of color. She wrote an op-ed article in The New York Times emphasizing the problems with the initiative. The AAPF has started a campaign #WHYWECANTWAIT to address the realignment of the "My Brothers Keeper" initiative to include all youth boys, girls, and those girls and boys of color. The movement has received much support from all over, letters signed by men of color, letters signed by women of color, and letters signed by allies that believe in the cause.
In an interview on the Laura Flanders Show, Crenshaw expressed that the program was introduced as response to the widespread grief from the African-American community after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the case of his shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenage boy. She describes the program as a "feel-good" and fatherly initiative but does not believe that it is a significant or structural program that will help fight the rollback of civil rights; the initiative will not provide the kinds of things that will really make a difference. She believes that because women and girls of color are a part of the same communities and disadvantages as the underprivileged males that are focused on the initiative, in order to make it an effective program for the communities, it needs to include all members of the community, girls and boys alike.
#Why we can't wait: Women of Color Urging Inclusion in "My Brother's Keeper" June 17, 2014 – a letter from more than 1000 girls and women of color