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.
