CANTON, OHIO — Law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw discussed the origins of intersectionality and critical race theory during a promotional event for her new memoir, Backtalker, in Canton, Ohio. Crenshaw, a professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School and the founder of the African American Policy Forum, was responsible for naming both terms. The memoir explains how she arrived at the concepts of intersectionality and critical race theory and how courts, legislators and the media have redefined them.

The idea of intersectionality came to Crenshaw in the late 1980s while she was studying the 1976 Supreme Court case DeGraffenreid v. General Motors. In that case, a Black woman sued General Motors for discrimination, and a federal court told her she could sue either as a Black person or as a woman, but not both at once.

"I thought, 'How can these very smart people not get that if you're protected against race discrimination, you're protected against all of it?' In the same way that traffic going north and south sometimes overlaps with traffic going east to west, discrimination on the basis of race sometimes overlaps with discrimination on the bases of gender. That's where intersectionality came from." Crenshaw said.

Crenshaw and 30 other scholars of color helped coin the term critical race theory, which argues that race is not incidental to American law, but built into it. Describing the framework at the Canton event, she offered examples of what the theory encompasses: "If you are learning about the way that the Constitution embedded enslavement in it, despite the fact that slavery as a word never appears — that's critical race theory. If you talk about the Montgomery bus boycott and you talk about segregation as an anti-Black policy and practice, that is critical race theory," Crenshaw said.

In 2020, President Trump called critical race theory "toxic propaganda." More than 20 states now restrict how critical race theory can be taught.