KIMBERLÉ CRENSHAW IS tucked in her UCLA office with ceiling-high shelves. Behind her, two men enter the frame of our video call and bend and lift, packing stacks of books. “I’m moving offices,” she explains. “To one with a view of the lawn.” Crenshaw triaged her packed schedule to speak with me; she’s been in even higher demand than usual. She’s receiving, and declining, media hits left and right, mostly because she’s working on three books, all set to be released by May 2022. She’s a law professor at Columbia University and UCLA. She finds time to run the African American Policy Forum, the social justice think tank she cofounded 25 years ago, and to host a podcast on a term she coined in 1989: intersectionality. All this as Conservatives from Fox News’s Tucker Carlson to Texas senator Ted Cruz melt down over another academic framework she helped mint more than 30 years ago—critical race theory—landing her at the roiling center of the culture wars.

She’s felt “grumpy and annoyed” watching the right bastardize her decades of work, which includes a pivotal 2001 paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations, a foundational book on the mistreatment of Black girls by police, and articles in various law reviews and news outlets. But “dogs don’t bark at parked cars.” She’s traversing the moment with humility, watching misinformation steer the country astray. Friends reach out, up in arms about Republican efforts to bar her teachings from schools. She asks them, “Are you worried about how deep this disaffection with our democracy is when playing by the rules creates outcomes that many white people are unhappy with?” Because if the overblown bans are what’s drawing focus, then we’re all being recruited as actors in a misinformation campaign changing the rules we live by.

“I don’t think this is about a REAL DIFFERENCE in opinion.... This is about A WEAPON they’re using to hold on to POWER.”

This recent campaign began roughly last September, when Christopher Rufo, a right-wing think tank fellow, went on air with Carlson to warn viewers about critical race theory. Saying he’d spent months researching how the theory had infiltrated American systems, Rufo called on then president Donald Trump to take action. Trump, an avid Fox viewer, ordered federally funded agencies to stop teaching critical race theory and white privilege because the concepts lead people to believe—incorrectly, he said—that America is inherently racist. With months left in his presidency, Trump launched the 1776 commission—a rebuttal of “warped” and “distorted” social justice teaching concepts like the New York Times magazine’s 1619 Project, spearheaded by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, which aims to reexamine America’s history through the lens of slavery.

President Joe Biden rescinded both ban and commission on his first day. By that point, though, the issue had become a live wire. Following Biden’s reversals, many Republicans pushed bills to outlaw Crenshaw’s academic framework in schools. In April, Idaho became the first state to pass such a bill; Governor Brad Little said it would prevent teachers from indoctrinating students to hate America. A month later, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt followed suit. Since then, several more red states have introduced similar measures.

I ask Crenshaw what she’d say to her critics. “I don’t think this is about a real difference in opinion, nor is it a debate that is winnable,” she says. “This is about a weapon they’re using to hold on to power.”

Most frustrating for Crenshaw has been watching the GOP reduce critical race theory to a cudgel to attack progress in the guise of protecting democracy. “In the same way that anti-racism is framed as racism, anti-indoctrination is framed as indoctrination,” Crenshaw says. Conservatives have long embraced the idea that America is a color-blind, equitable society where hard work explains who succeeds. “What could be more indoctrinating than that?” As an example of the systemic nature of racism, she points to the history behind traditionally white and Black neighborhoods: how federal money went toward developing segregated suburbs while Black people were denied those opportunities. And how that denial extends to today’s economic disparities.

Crenshaw breaks it down. “Critical race theory is based on the premise that race is socially constructed, yet it is real through social constructions.” In other words, ask yourself, what is a “Black” neighborhood? Why do we call “the hood” the hood? Labels like these were strategically produced by American policy. Critical race theory says the idea of a Black person—who I am in this country—is a legal concept. “Our enslavability was a marker of our degradation,” Crenshaw explains. “And our degradation was a marker of the fact that we could never be part of this country. Our Supreme Court said this”—in the Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling of 1857—“and it wasn’t a close decision.”

Critical race theory pays attention to the ripple effects of such decisions. It asks us to scrutinize how and why society looks the way it does. “These are the kinds of questions the other side doesn’t want us to ask because it wants us to be happy with the contemporary distribution of opportunity,” Crenshaw says.

8687 View article pages

CRITICAL RACE THEORY grew from what Crenshaw calls the post–civil rights generation: those who watched the movement play out, learning from demonstrations that forced the government to pass laws intended to protect the rights of African Americans but that failed to address the root of the problem. In 1989, during her third year as a law professor, Crenshaw—alongside four thought leaders, two white allies, and three organizers—introduced the term at a workshop. The label was happenstance. “We were critically engaging law but with a focus on race,” she says, recalling a brainstorm session. “So we wanted critical to be in it, race to be in it. And we put theory in to signify that we weren’t just looking at civil rights practice. It was how to think, how to see, how to read, how to grapple with how law has created and sustained race—our particular kind of race and racism—in American society.”

What those on the right describe as a threat to democracy in fact promotes equity. It’s how we’ve become, historically, who we’ve been—how the fiction of race is made real. Crenshaw bets none of the Republicans fighting to maintain the status quo have taken the time to understand her work, because it was never about understanding. (When an Alabama lawmaker who filed a bill to outlaw critical race theory in schools was asked by a reporter to define the term, he couldn’t.) “You cannot fix a problem you cannot name,” Crenshaw says. “You cannot address a history that you’re unwilling to learn.”

Crenshaw’s days are never identical. Before our chat, she had three meetings, one discussing an ongoing book project. Afterward, she plans to write a chapter for her memoir-manifesto Backtalker, which chronicles the development of some of her ideas that have shaped the discourse around gender, race, and social justice. “I see my work as talking back against those who would normalize and neutralize intolerable conditions in our lives,” she says of the title, which she may change as the chapters build. “Social justice writing, scholarship, activism is not talking into a vacuum; it’s talking back against the systems of thought, against the assumptions, against the power that has lined up throughout history to tell us that some of us are not worthy of being full citizens, some of our dreams are not worthy of being realized, and some of our lives are not worthy of improvement through collective commitments to change the terms upon which we live.

“I say things and I think about things that make people have to confront stuff,” she says. “And that’s what back talkers do. We don’t obey those who command silence.”

We’ve been speaking for close to three hours, and every time we try to wrap up, we dive down another rabbit hole. At one point Crenshaw swings her head slightly out of frame, brandishing her trademark warm smile as she tells the movers she’s almost done. (We talk for another 40 minutes.) Later, we message back and forth, discussing our shared anxieties over the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election. We appreciate each other in so many words for a candid, cathartic conversation—for me a veritable master class.

In the wee hours of that early June morning, she sends a new video by Rufo, the right-wing think tank fellow, launching a fresh attack on critical race theory, telling viewers it’s a Marxist ideology and a threat to the country. “My great talk with you has been bookended with this,” she writes. “To say this is worrisome is an understatement.”