In Toni Morrison’s 1995 essay “The Site of Memory,” the Nobel Prize-winning novelist considered the literary legacy of slave narratives written by Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass and memoirs by feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir. To Morrison, these writings highlighted the political stakes of memory for those who “were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic.” That those derided for having what Saidiya Hartman calls a “too-long memory” of violence and dispossession turn to writing as an official medium of memory-keeping could be thought of, then, as a kind of self-defense. As literary scholar and feminist theorist Nancy K. Miller contends in her book on memoirs, this is how we have come to know the genre of “memoir as prosthesis — an aid to memory.” By pushing us to remember what might otherwise be forgotten, memoirs, at their best and most urgent, remind us that memory bears more than the traces of fact and imagination; it also bears the traces of power.
In 2025, the current administration made clear that America’s culture wars are memory wars. The president issued an executive order threatening federal funding for K-12 schools unless they complied with a ban on teaching critical race theory and what the administration calls gender ideology. As language scholar Martha Lungi Kabinde-Machate told NPR in a story about the executive order, altering memory by controlling language is a key strategy of political regimes. In a video for digital magazine The Emancipator, Black feminist legal scholar and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw explained that erasing memory “is probably the most fundamental tactic in the anti-woke book.” Crenshaw coined “critical race theory” and “intersectionality” to describe concepts for which she is now widely known. They have become ubiquitous in U.S. political discourse, and for this reason, her work has been fodder for the memory wars. Since this particular administration has done a drive-by on her life’s work, the law professor has set out to issue a rebuttal that can resonate. She decided to write a memoir.
Backtalker: An American Memoir narrates Crenshaw’s life in a series of vignettes that spans nearly 400 pages. The stories assembled in Backtalker reveal Crenshaw’s becoming — as a Black woman, legal scholar, and public figure — placing her work in the context of her experiences. Together, the vignettes illustrate how Crenshaw conceived of critical race theory and intersectionality. As the book shows, the seeds of these theories were planted long before they sprouted into what we know (or don’t know) of them today. Crenshaw developed her critical race theory framework to address a tension in thinking about race, power, and the law that became apparent to her during college as she observed conflicts between her Africana studies education and mainstream civil rights leadership. As Crenshaw learned, “Law was not merely incidental to the racial order we had inherited. It helped to structure it. Nothing about how we lived and who we were was untouched by it. Its role was extensive, enduring, and in many ways just beneath the surface of what lay people could readily see.” This critical attention to the law also produced Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality, which addressed the “mundane and extraordinary ways that … [she] encountered a milieu that did not yet anticipate thinking of the presence of someone who was neither white nor male.” With intersectionality, Crenshaw sought to describe the interlocking natures of race and sex discrimination.
“Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant. There are things that I cannot digest.”
“Before we get started, I have to make a confession: Being a backtalker is like being lactose intolerant. There are things that I cannot digest,” Crenshaw writes. The visceral image of digestive distress captures the essence of her refusal to bear the contradictions between the words and conduct of authority figures. Crenshaw asserts from the outset of the memoir that these career-defining legal frameworks emerged not from the academy or the law library but rather from a more intimate source — her essential nature as a “backtalker.” Casting her interventions as “backtalk,” Crenshaw invites readers to reconsider her scholarly work as sophisticated iterations of a form of resistance most often attributed to humans in the developmental stages of childhood when the inaugural event of verbal communication gives way to conflict. Paying homage to a period of life wherein the seemingly totalizing scope of adult authority serves as one’s first education in the relationship between power and language, Backtalker takes Crenshaw’s childhood instincts seriously. What unfolds throughout the book is an account of Crenshaw’s long-standing intolerance of the inconsistencies, incoherences, and injustices of American society, particularly as they concern race and gender in culture and the law.
The memoir’s prologue opens with Crenshaw’s six-year-old devastation when confronted by her “tall, willowy European” kindergarten teacher’s refusal to let the young Kimberlé play Thorn Rosa, a princess in a school play whose prettiness inspired other characters to assemble for her protection and to burst into song. “Every girl in class wanted to play her, and we all expected that each of us would get her chance,” Crenshaw writes. The fairy tale was recast often, but Crenshaw’s teacher assigned Kimberlé the roles of mouse, horse, and evil witch, until there was no more next time. “The verdict was in: I was not like the others who Miss V chose to play Thorn Rosa. Somehow, my girlness was so deficient that I could not even play a make-believe princess — a girl fully loved, fully admired, and fully worthy.” Crenshaw’s parents “saw their little girl wounded because she had been denied something as a Black person,” and responded tenderly. “Their only question was how I would remember this day when my finger ran over the scar. Could they prevent the cut from lodging in my soul and debilitating me in some permanent way?”
The book develops its own gravity in moments like this, where Crenshaw considers how the material and psychic violence of anti-Blackness and misogyny make memory a site of concern for everyone. Crenshaw recalls intimate partner violence at the hands of a college ex-boyfriend, whom she refers to as “BFH” or “Boyfriend From Hell.” Crenshaw’s community of Black left-wing students urged her to forgive and forget an assault by him that nearly cost Crenshaw her life. “I did talk back,” writes Crenshaw. “My well-known propensity to do so, combined with our very public breakup, was enough to generate sympathy for BFH.” The radical protection principles of the students disintegrated when the party in need was a battered Black woman; community members claimed to remember events differently from Crenshaw, some remembering no abuse at all. Years after the inciting incident, Crenshaw attempted closure with a Black woman who had once requested that Crenshaw drop the charges against BFH to prevent a Black man’s potential incarceration. “I’ve always wanted to understand why I was left twisting in the wind like that,” Crenshaw told her. “Sorry, Kim,” the woman responded, “but that was a very long time ago. Memories fade.”
What could not fade in Crenshaw’s memory was how her community, the police, and the university reinforced racial patriarchy and limited her means of redress. Experiences like these, harrowing as they are to read, drive the memoir’s march toward the intellectual birth of intersectionality and critical race theory, as well as Crenshaw’s historic involvement in events like Anita Hill’s appearance during the 1991 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. “The journey to the front row seat from which I witnessed one of the most pivotal moments in the history of the Supreme Court,” Crenshaw writes, “began with my own experience with intimate partner violence at Cornell.” Having first met Hill at an Association of American Law Schools (AALS) workshop for new law teachers, Crenshaw decided to help her, knowing that Hill herself would be put on trial in the court of public opinion. Crenshaw acted as an adviser for Hill’s legal team, assembling supporters and commentators, and reminding the public that “there was nothing in her profile, research, or affiliations that suggested Anita was a radical or even a vocal feminist with a political axe to grind. She was simply a Black woman who had been called to testify about her on-the-job experience with the nominee.”
The difficulty of this effort came to a fever pitch when Thomas infamously likened the hearings to a “high-tech lynching.” Despite the Hill team’s efforts to explain to the public that no one had ever been lynched on a Black woman’s accusations, public response to the hearings was permanently transformed. “The negative lean in Black support for Thomas had evaporated once his confirmation became a referendum on Hill’s testimony,” Crenshaw recounts. Thomas was confirmed in the Senate, 52–48. For Crenshaw, the poisoned cherry on top was historian Orlando Patterson’s op-ed defending Thomas, which “turned on Black women’s tolerance for down-home courting.” The rhetorical use of historical violence and cultural customs as a cover for harassment crystallized for Crenshaw the political consequences of ignoring gendered violence against Black women. This moment solidified Crenshaw’s commitment to develop a political practice in which anti-racism and feminism were not siloed.
Crenshaw and Luke Charles Harris, a political science professor who had organized men in support of Anita Hill, went on to found the African American Policy Forum in 1996. Writing of her work in 2014 with the forum on #SayHerName — a movement, campaign, and hashtag dedicated to generating equal attention for Black women and girls killed by police — Crenshaw recounts a memory exercise she conducted before an audience of lawyers, professors, and students where she instructed them to stand up while she called out the names of Black people murdered by police and sit upon hearing a name they did not recognize. When she began with the names of Black men and boys, the majority of the crowd remained standing. Once she spoke the names of Black women and girls, however, people began to sit in droves, until only one person remained standing in a room of thousands.
What exactly does Crenshaw believe the soul of America to be?
The memoir goes to great lengths to demonstrate that “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.” What muddles this message, for me at least, are Crenshaw’s appeals throughout the book to this American promise, the memoir’s investments in “the realization of the dream of recovering the soul of America.” She describes how the recovery of America’s soul came to be “a dream represented for [her] parents by Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other giants of the twentieth century.” But what exactly does Crenshaw believe the soul of America to be? Her efforts to challenge national memory in Backtalker are woven with narrative threads of the violence she experiences, and which she describes as constitutive of Black womanhood in a nation founded upon settler colonialism, racial slavery, and patriarchy. The memoir’s vague gestures toward the nation’s soul and Crenshaw’s belief in a Black political imperative to recover it raises questions about how well the memoir withstands the tension inherent to Crenshaw’s “complex dance with the notion of ‘we’ — of race, of gender, of nation, of humanity.”
This dance is arguably at its most complex when Crenshaw is caught up in the political choreography of the Democratic Party. In 2008, Crenshaw wondered whether Barack Obama’s election would bring material change or prove merely symbolic. Within a few months of Obama’s presidency, Crenshaw’s dreams “washed ashore like bleached driftwood.” In 2014, Crenshaw criticized the gendered myopia of Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) Challenge, an initiative that, by pledging “more focused effort on boys and young men of color who are having a particularly tough time,” openly articulated the administration’s diagnosis of disenfranchisement not as a result of anti-Blackness, but as a result of a “lack of role models, mentors, emotional support, and love.” Crenshaw formed a network called Why We Can’t Wait that marshaled thousands of signatures for a letter sent to the president inquiring as to why Black girls were being ignored. These efforts led to a small White House campaign around the challenges faced by women and girls, which Crenshaw was forbidden from participating in.
Crenshaw’s willingness to criticize the political establishment, particularly when it was led by a Democratic Black politician, is commendable. Yet this willingness to resist conditioning toward the Democratic Party appears in ever-shorter supply as the memoir completes its arc toward current events. By the end of the memoir, the version of President Biden who rescinds Trump’s first-term executive orders targeting DEI is not juxtaposed with his earlier appearance in the memoir as Senator Joe Biden who chaired the Clarence Thomas hearings while exhibiting appalling disregard for Anita Hill. You could almost miss the dissonance. And Vice President Kamala Harris is pictured only as a survivor of “intersectional assaults” who “stood on the shoulders of our unsung heroines of the past — Black women such as Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Barbara Jordan, who believed there was room in our democracy for Black women leaders.” When she recalls the 2024 election as a “horror movie for millions of Harris voters,” her critical lens slips as her identification with Harris as a victim of misogynoir forestalls any deeper considerations of Harris’s actual, hawkish politics.
Despite citing “the acquiescence of decision-makers in civil society, administrators, elected representatives, and even the Democratic White House” as responsible for the state of the current political landscape, Crenshaw is attached to a particular memory of the party’s civil rights agenda — an agenda that she, born in 1959, credits with changing her life. What takes shape in the memoir, then, is Crenshaw’s vision of America’s soul recovery, which is hard to distinguish from the revitalization and restoration of a political party that has not lived up to its civil rights commitments as she remembers them. Perhaps this commitment to the party explains her assertion that, where the current Republican administration is concerned, “the horror in this moment is that the call is coming from inside the house.” Fascism is emanating from within the nation instead of attacking from the outside. But, of course, fascism is always an inside job, and not a new one in America. Even when it was Democratic, the house to which Crenshaw refers has always been haunted.
Key moments where the author might grapple with the nature of her attachment to America’s soul are left open-ended. The memoir briefly describes a time in her adolescence when Crenshaw was “recruited into a particular performance of American patriotism” as a student participant in an American Legion Girls/Boys Nation contest, but does not delve into the problems with such nationalist performances. Years later, when she becomes involved in protests against wars sponsored by the U.S. in Central America, the memoir does not fill in the gaps to account for her education on U.S. imperialism, or how she came to connect her understanding of anti-Blackness in America with the militaristic occupation and oppression of people throughout the Global South. It is difficult to determine whether these absences reflect the limits of memoir to describe the richness of one’s political becoming or whether the author’s belief in the redemption of America delimits what she is willing to charge the nation with.
She becomes the essential and eternal backtalker. But can she talk back to herself?
In Backtalk, Crenshaw asks: “What are the challenges of backtalking when our institutions ask us to maintain the peace and comfort of those who have taken such conditions as their birthright, no matter its impact on us? When should we refuse these expectations?” These are good questions. And as the memoir reveals, Crenshaw is more than qualified to ask them. She has paid her fair share of the costs of backtalking. This is why the memoir’s limited self-interrogation produces a rhetorical ambivalence around the memoir’s central premise — its insistence upon the “backtalker” label as an essential characteristic with inherently radical content.
In the author’s note that opens the memoir, Crenshaw lays the foundation for privileging this backtalker self over the other versions of herself that could’ve or may have been. She recalls a time during her first year at Harvard Law when she was directed to enter through the back door instead of the front door of the Fly Club, “the prestigious home of elite Harvard men, including former presidents, captains of industry, and scions of wealthy families,” on account of being the only woman in the group. Though this indignity was untenable for Crenshaw, who rightfully notes that whether she was treated this way for being a woman or being a Black person made no difference, she accepted the terms, “consoled only by [her] insistence that [the Black male friends who accompanied her would] enter through the back door with [her].” When she fell ill from the drinks she consumed in the club, Crenshaw reads this as a physiological manifestation of her “resistance to asymmetric solidarities.” And as the illness passed, so too did the version of her that once conceded to indignity to preserve unity. “A stronger me might have refused to dance to this unrelentingly asymmetrical tune. But at that point in life, my commitments to the ‘we’ ran deep, perhaps because there were only so many battles anyone could wage and still feel she had a home. For whatever reason, I relented,” she writes. A symbolic referent for the exclusive gatherings of power, the Fly Club scene reverberates for Crenshaw as a check against her “wannabe alter ego, the one who never regretted going through that back door and has had many a great time being toasted by those who offered only conditional inclusion.” Cordoned off to the memoir’s alternate reality, this alter ego appears during brief moments of indecision that are always swiftly grounded. “I sometimes wonder whether the costs of backtalking are worth remaining on the outside looking in. And then my stomach churns and I remember that the drinks in there suck anyway.”
Bad drinks aside, the intestinal distress metaphor for refusal also expels the complex traces of complicity that give backtalking its psychological stakes. By limiting the engagement between the relenting alter ego and the relentless backtalker, Crenshaw skirts past potential opportunities for reflection about moments when she does not talk back, and moments when concession is conjoined with reward rather than repulsion. Bifurcating these parts of herself, she becomes the essential and eternal backtalker. But can she talk back to herself? If the right-wing rhetoric of the memory wars asks that we return to the great past of America and remember only what makes us feel good, then the left might do well to resist these conventions in its literary responses. In other words, a memoir for these times must account for our shared vulnerability to propaganda and social messaging. A memoir of these times must resist binary choices between resistance and complicity; it must talk back to itself and to society.
The version of Crenshaw that wanted to play the lead part in fairy tales is largely confined to the prologue. But this version of self, the young Kimberlé who wanted to be Thorn Rosa, is perhaps the memoir’s most valuable and timely figure. I hoped to find traces of her as I kept reading. But, as is so often the case, the adult silences the child, sometimes without even being conscious of doing so. Who knows what analysis might have emerged had we been invited to think more with the child, the Black girl child, who was not yet or at least not only a backtalker. She embodied the shamelessness of pure wanting, and she learned, through time and experience, that everything we want may not be good for us, that some things we want are not what they seem, and that some things we want will someday become too difficult to admit.
Jordan Taliha McDonald is a cultural critic and Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University with a secondary field in History of Science. Her public writing, cultural criticism, and journalism have appeared in New York Magazine, The Believer, Artsy, Boston Art Review, Vulture, Africa is a Country, The Offing, The Harvard Review, Lux, Complex, and more.
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