In her mildly overheated office, the professor was affable and friendly as she answered questions while law students entered her office intermittently as they prepared for a panel discussion coincidentally titled “ Mythbusting Intersectionality” scheduled for that evening. Crenshaw, who is a professor at both Columbia and the University of California Los Angeles, had just returned from an overseas trip to speak at the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.Ĭrenshaw is a 60-year-old Ohio native who has spent more than 30 years studying civil rights, race, and racism. I met Kimberlé Crenshaw in her office at Columbia Law School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on a rainy day in January. Through her work, she’s attempting to demolish racial hierarchies altogether. They object to its implications, uses, and, most importantly, its consequences, what some conservatives view as the upending of racial and cultural hierarchies to create a new one.īut Crenshaw isn’t seeking to build a racial hierarchy with black women at the top. The lived experiences - and experiences of discrimination - of a black woman will be different from those of a white woman, or a black man, for example. Indeed, they largely agree that it accurately describes the way people from different backgrounds encounter the world. In my conversations with right-wing critics of intersectionality, I’ve found that what upsets them isn’t the theory itself. “Intersectionality” has, in a sense, gone viral over the past half-decade, resulting in a backlash from the right. It was coined in 1989 by professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. This is a highly unusual level of disdain for a word that until several years ago was a legal term in relative obscurity outside academic circles. It tells you what you’re allowed to say, what you’re allowed to think.” Intersectionality is thus “ really dangerous” or a “ conspiracy theory of victimization.” To many conservatives, intersectionality means “because you’re a minority, you get special standards, special treatment in the eyes of some.” It “ promotes solipsism at the personal level and division at the social level.” It represents a form of feminism that “puts a label on you. There may not be a word in American conservatism more hated right now than “intersectionality.” On the right, intersectionality is seen as “ the new caste system” placing nonwhite, non-heterosexual people on top.

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