Backtalker: An American Memoir

UCLA law professor Crenshaw (The Race Track), who coined the concept of 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)