Backtalker : an American memoir / Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

New York Times Bestseller

One of the most influential public intellectuals in the world and the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the American conversation about fairness offers the intimate story of how her life gave birth to these ideas.

It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory.

Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw's memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn't as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother's Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it.

In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America--at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

UCLA law professor Crenshaw (The Race Track), who coined the term intersectionality, details in her outstanding debut memoir the experiences that moved her to articulate why "the racial burden of Black girlness and Black womanhood mattered--and ought to matter--to anyone concerned with fairness, justice, and the fulfillment of the promise of America." She begins by describing how, as a six-year-old in mid-1960s Ohio, she yearned for her turn to play princess in a daily classroom activity, but was never chosen. Decades later, she recognized this as an example of the "thoughtless devaluation faced by little Black girls." Additional examples followed, including urban renewal projects that failed to compensate her mother and other Black property owners for their displacement, and the pressure from Crenshaw's Black peers to not pursue charges against a college boyfriend who abused her. Along the way, Crenshaw charts her rise as a legal scholar in the 1980s and '90s, and discusses assisting Anita Hill's legal team during Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Throughout, she writes in an accessible, unadorned style that vibrates with authority. The result is an entertaining and invaluable account of personal triumph and political awakening. Agents: Nate Muscato and David Kuhn, Aevitas Creative Management. (May)

Booklist Review

Crenshaw, civil rights scholar and Black feminist, founded the high-profile critical race theory movement and coined the term "intersectionality." Growing up in Canton, Ohio, Crenshaw personally experienced the turbulent civil rights era and the ongoing, erratic fight for racial and gender equality. Crenshaw describes how busing and prejudicial treatment in school launched her on the path toward becoming a fearless "backtalker," activist, and crusader. She also speaks about how her supportive family bolstered her self-confidence, despite external forces that tried to silence her. Fighting for curriculum changes and faculty diversification at Harvard Law School, Crenshaw learned that supposed bastions of liberal thought are not immune to entrenched racism. Her work also examines the combined effects of gender and race that produce challenges often ignored by activists from either camp. She warns that current efforts to discredit and erode civil rights, and "anti-woke" propaganda have made critical race theory and intersectionality prime targets for politicization and misinterpretation. Crenshaw's memoir is a personal, passionate reminder that sustained freedom to think, communicate, and protest is the best defense against the backslide of progress.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Crenshaw's work is in the crosshairs of today's culture wars, and her memoir will be a passionate antidote to the confusion and noise.

Kirkus Book Review

An intellectual examines the impact of racism and sexism on her life. Law scholar Crenshaw (#SayHerName, 2023), who developed the concepts of "intersectionality" and "critical race theory," here takes a nuanced and lively look at the roles that race and gender played in her experience as she grew up in Canton, Ohio, in the 1960s and then went on to attend Cornell and Harvard Law School. Crenshaw clearly came by her tendency to "backtalk" authorities honestly: She pays loving tribute to her parents, both of whom were public schoolteachers, for their refusal to allow their daughter to be stifled. But she is also clear-eyed enough to note their flaws, including a reliance on corporal punishment. "The only message that competed with the idea that we were a proud people was that we were respectable," she writes. "And that meant that absolutely no sexual misconduct would be tolerated." Crenshaw structures the book in brief chapters, each centered on a story or two, some of them directly tied to racism and misogyny, and others on turning points tangential to those subjects, including her discovery that her older brother actually had a different father, and the death of her father when Crenshaw was 11. Maybe inevitably, but to the book's detriment, she largely abandons memoir in the chapters covering her life after graduate school, instead paying attention to events largely in the public sphere, like the trial of O.J. Simpson and the hearings for Clarence Thomas before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. Occasionally, she indulges in score-settling: A long chapter is devoted to castigating Barack Obama for what Crenshaw views as his tendency to prioritize the problems of Black boys over those of Black girls. A provocative study of how the personal and the political collide. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.