Backtalker: Kimberlé Crenshaw's new book launch

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This event was meant to be a marketing event for the MA Black Studies and Global Justice. We have now been told the course is closed and 5 Black members of staff are at risk of redundancy. So the event will now be a celebration of Black Studies and a reminder of what the university is putting at risk.

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The Black Studies team are hosting a conversation with US scholar activist Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the terms intersectionality and Critical Race Theory, to launch her new book Backtalker

Hear from staff and students on the course and then a Q and A between Professor Kehinde Andrews and Professor Crenshaw on themes of the book, which proves that the personal is political the book is a memoir that is also theory and a call to action.

Signed books will be available on the day

ABOUT BACKTALKER

One of most influential thinkers today offers a deeply engaging story of justice and power in America When Kimberlé Crenshaw was five years old in Ohio during the civil rights era, she was the only girl denied a lead role in her nursery play. Puzzled by her teacher's behaviour, she spoke up—and never stopped. That instinct to question power, to challenge what others accepted as fair, would shape not only her own life but the way we now understand race and gender. In Backtalker, Crenshaw traces her journey from a spirited girl in Canton, Ohio to one of the most influential legal thinkers today.

Through childhood lessons and painful reckonings—a boyfriend’s violence in college, a back door at Harvard Law, the silencing of women in the civil rights movement—Crenshaw learned to see the patterns others missed, refusing to stay behind the lines the world drew for her. Out of those experiences came two ideas that changed everything: intersectionality, the recognition that race, gender, and class overlap to create unique forms of discrimination; and critical race theory, the argument that racism is structural. Crenshaw’s voice has since echoed through some of the most charged moments in recent history—from Anita Hill’s testimony to the rise of Black Lives Matter—insisting that true justice means seeing the whole picture.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law. She was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory and is also known for introducing and developing the concept of intersectionality. She is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and is the co-founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum.

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