Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a professor at Columbia and UCLA law schools, the executive director of the African American Policy Forum, and the author of “Backtalker: An American Memoir,” from which this essay is adapted.
In 1981, as a first-year law student at Harvard, I stood precariously at the doorway of the Fly Club, the prestigious home of generations of elite Harvard men, including presidents, captains of industry, and scions of wealthy families.
Ben, who was the first Black member of this exclusive club and a study partner, had invited me and Reese, the third member of our all-Black study group, to join him to celebrate the end of our first semester. From what Reese and I had heard about the club’s safari-decorated interiors and exclusionary history, we agreed in advance that in the likely event something unwelcoming occurred, we were not going to take any grief from anyone who viewed us as less than worthy. Our dignity was a nonnegotiable condition of our presence in that space.
Duly bonded, we arrived at the venue and knocked at the door to announce ourselves. Ben opened the front door but stepped outside, blocking our entry into the club.
Assuming that this was the beginning of the indignities we were not going to tolerate, Reese and I immediately assumed the trigger position — arms crossed and brows furrowed. Our friend, sensing our readiness to rumble, sought to de-escalate the situation with what he thought was a minor detail, or perhaps worse, a comfort.
“Oh, it’s not what you think. I just forgot to mention that Kim needs to go around to the back door,” he explained. “Women aren’t permitted to enter through the front door.”
In my mind, whether my backdoor treatment was because I was a woman or because I was a Black person made no difference in my mutual defense pact with Reese. But it became clear that for him solidarity applied only to things that were going to affect the two of us in the same way. Racial exclusion of both of us fit the bill but the gender exclusion of me did not.
As a young law student, I was experiencing a phenomenon I had yet to articulate but would one day, as a legal scholar, be recognized for naming: intersectionality. I stood at the front door of this elite institution — one of Harvard’s famed “final clubs” — wanting to walk through, painfully aware that my friends could not or would not see that my status as both Black and a woman created a unique set of conditions and cultural peril that just belonging to just one group did not.
I stood momentarily frozen, both by the realization that they would not stand up for me to be treated as their equal and by my own fear that they would judge me harshly for insisting that they do. Their plea for me to behave reflected a familiar expectation of Black women: to pledge allegiance to a flag of solidarity that didn’t pledge the same to me.
A stronger me — the woman I am now — would have refused to dance to this unrelentingly asymmetrical tune. But at that point in life, my commitments to the “we,” to the cause of racial solidarity, ran deep. Perhaps because there were only so many battles anyone could wage and still feel she had a home. Perhaps because I was still learning how to elbow my way into spaces where others clearly felt I did not belong. For whatever reason, facing the choice of walking through the back door or walking away, I relented. I watched myself go around to the back door, consoled only partially by my insistence that they enter through the back door with me.
Here is where I should say that by the time I violated the apparent natural laws of Harvard by arriving at the Fly Club’s front stoop, it had existed as a men’s-only incubator of elite society for 143 years. More than a decade later, the Fly Club would be in open revolt about admitting women members, initially opting to become coed before dramatically reversing course. In 2016, two months before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to become the nation’s first woman president, the Fly Club retained legal counsel to fight proposed Harvard University sanctions against single-gender clubs. Its membership consists exclusively of men to this day.
The sexism of this elite space is accepted by many as if it is part of the atomic composition of oxygen in Cambridge. This much was clear to me back in the ’80s when my friends Reese and Ben plainly expected me not to make a scene about not being allowed to enter the building through the front door. They viewed the delayed acceptance of men of color into this space as a triumph — and of course in some ways, it was. But they could not see the asterisk my gender appended to me, and they expected me to ignore it, too.
Entering an exclusive club on terms that were not my own was a fateful decision. Whatever I drank there that night made me violently ill. My head was spinning all night, and my churning stomach urged me to leave a token of my indignity all over the understated interiors of the club’s game room. I managed to hold myself together long enough to stomp loudly down the stairs and out the front door, slamming it violently in hopes that it would break.
Back in my dorm, I made a deal with the universe that if the room would stop spinning, I would never again come close to imbibing what I’d consumed that night — physically, mentally, and emotionally. Perhaps because my humiliation that night was punctuated by physical illness, my resistance to a politics that won’t accept me in full is now fully reflexive. I cannot bring myself to ride and die for a politics that won’t ride and die for me.
That night I recognized in myself what I only can compare to lactose intolerance — an injustice intolerance. Simply put: There are things that I cannot digest. To accept anything close to second-class status as the price of belonging sickens me.
Anita Hill on trial
I carried that feeling from the stoop of the Fly Club to the steps of the United States Capitol a decade later in 1991, when Anita Hill — a fellow Black female lawyer I had met a year prior at an Association of American Law Schools workshop for new law teachers — prepared to testify in response to a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary hearings on Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. After a brief phone call with Anita and her legal team, I rushed to catch a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, to Washington, D.C. The experience there would change my life and career in countless ways, but more important, it would be a pivotal moment in the history of our country and the trajectory of civil rights.
At the time, not only were most people unfamiliar with the concept of sexual harassment, but even fewer had any idea that Black women had played a foundational role in alleging that sexual abuse was an entirely illegitimate condition of employment. Many of the landmark cases that established sexual harassment law were brought by Black women. In the same way that such discriminatory workplace conditions existed long before there was a concept that recognized and prohibited them, Black women’s role in challenging sexual harassment existed long before one Black woman’s testimony seemingly stopped the world from spinning on its axis.
Into this sexualized and racialized maw stepped Anita Hill.
To this day, I have no way of understanding how Anita maintained such composure under the blinding glare of those lights, the din of the clicking cameras, and the hostility and downright dismissiveness that she had to bear from the all-white, all-male committee — and I had no way even as I could be seen on the C-SPAN cameras sitting right behind her. I didn’t have to walk 10 feet in her shoes to understand just how hard it was to speak her truth to a nation that neither wanted to hear it nor knew how to listen. I’d absorbed the tiniest fraction of that negativity from a healthy distance, and that was enough hostility to last a lifetime.
Like the rest of the nation, I heard Anita’s story for the first time the morning of her testimony — and I struggled to steady my gaze so as not to reveal my rage. I suspected that millions of women did the same thing that day, hearing a familiar and hurtful story that we knew we could not share beyond our closest confidants. In broad strokes, Hill revealed that during their employment together at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the early 1980s, Thomas, who was Anita’s superior, made several advances on her, including asking her on dates. When she declined, Thomas continued to press her, broadening the scope of his harassing behavior by discussing pornography involving rape and bestiality, describing his own sexual prowess, and sharing anatomical details about his genitalia. Infamously, Hill testified that at one point, he declared that someone had put “pubic hair on my Coke.”
Her testimony alleged a pattern of harassment that was both revolting and pedestrian. Although many of the senators responded with incredulity, most of the professional women I knew could tell similar stories of being subjected to harassing behavior, and I was no different. What was shocking about our stories was the fact that the harassers were often people we looked up to and relied upon for guidance and support. And on the occasion that our harassers were Black, our shared racial background — that sense of the “we” that shaped our bullish sense that we were all invested in our collective advancement — yet again provided no safe harbor against out-of-the-blue behavior that would jeopardize our advancement.
Most infuriating to me was the fact that the disregard for Hill and for the millions who recognized something familiar in her testimony stretched across gender, racial, and political boundaries. Republicans on the committee essentially prosecuted her, attacking her veracity, her character, and even her mental stability, while Democrats did virtually nothing to defend her. Likewise, there were no limits on the media’s regurgitation of timeless stereotypes that painted Hill along the all-too-familiar lines of an angry and sexually deviant Black woman. For many of Thomas’s Black supporters, the racist dimensions of this framing were illegible or inconsequential. Not so when Thomas returned to the committee room, just in time to feed the evening news cycle with his shocking claim that the hearings were a “high-tech lynching” for “uppity Negroes who deigned to think for themselves.”
I was so completely aghast at this logic that I thought Thomas’s desperate move signaled that the game was over and he was set to withdraw. But I was 100 percent wrong. His specious claim of racism brought new support from Black Americans and others who’d not yet paid attention to his defense, while the treatment she received that dripped of misogyny and racism engendered far less sympathy.
Thomas’s claim of “high-tech lynching” kicked our team’s media and lobbying blitz into full gear. And what was revealed in these frantic days was such a pervasive lack of understanding of the unique, intersectional status of Anita’s place in the world relative to Black men and white women that it paved the way for Thomas’s confirmation and the very DNA of the Supreme Court was reshaped forever.
A chance run-in I had with Jesse Jackson led to an invitation to accompany him on office visits to a few of the Democratic senators whose votes were in play. Jackson’s cordial relations with them gave us an opportunity to lobby against Thomas’s confirmation, but a shift in Black opinion after Hill’s testimony had now turned the tide in his favor. “I wasn’t inclined to confirm him,” one of them shared. “But the calls from my Black constituents are coming in six or seven to one for confirmation.” He didn’t have to spell out the rest.
In fact, the negative skew in Black support for Thomas had evaporated once his confirmation became a referendum on Hill’s testimony. His approval rating shot upwards of 70 percent in the aftermath, a testament to the disdain that many Black people expressed against airing dirty laundry.
There was clearly a deeply unbalanced gendered dimension to the claim that Hill had acted treacherously in offering her testimony. “She should be shot,” a child was reported to have said in a piece published by Nathan and Julia Hale in The Black Scholar, a leading journal of Black studies. “Sexual harassment is a white woman’s issue,” many observers absurdly declared.
Too much remains unknown about Black women’s lives even within our own families and communities, and I was beginning to see that this ignorance was politically lethal. At the same time, even those mainstream feminists who stood behind Anita’s testimony were unable to address the intersectional dimensions of the drama. It was absolutely true that the same timeworn tactics used to disparage women who made sexual assault allegations in civil and criminal cases were being deployed against Anita during the confirmation hearings. Yet there were racial dimensions to the assault on Hill’s credibility that a colorblind feminism could not comprehend.
The backlash
As I look back on the past 45 years and my legal career, I see how I have built my working life around my feeling of intolerance toward injustice. I also can see how others, it seems, developed such an intolerance, in part because antiracist ideas became mainstream and helped them clearly identify the causes and symptoms of the disquiet they feel about the world. As I reflect on the political ignorance that anointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, I also think about the recent uptick in censorship, how ideas like intersectionality are being intentionally erased from curricula. Those in power who oppose justice and democracy are more than happy to keep people in the dark about the systemic forces that define our society, because preventing others from attaining that knowledge is key to rolling back civil rights and to democratic backsliding.
I’ve been called a public intellectual because I have fashioned words and ideas designed to confront that misunderstanding, like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory” — a framework through which we can understand how racism is embedded in our laws and society.
In recent years, you have likely heard these two terms because they’ve been weaponized by those who oppose racial justice and democracy. The far right has stripped “intersectionality” and “CRT” of their context, positioning these vital frameworks as radical ideas that only exist in the privilege of elite colleges and universities and leveraging the fear they’ve created around them to roll back civil rights and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
But the reason these ideas are so powerful, why they will outlive this political distortion and continue to find relevance, is that I did not conceive of them in a vacuum. They were born of the sickness I felt on that stoop at Harvard, the heartburn I felt in 1991 as I helped support Anita in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, the familiar stomach churn when I helped launch the #SayHerName movement a decade ago to ensure that the names and lives of Black women who died as a result of police brutality and other state violence were not forgotten as the names of Black men were being uplifted and etched into our collective memory.
The power of revolutionary thinking is that it is not separate from our lived experiences but fully shaped by it.
My thinking starts from the bottom up, from interactions with people and experiences across my entire life that have made me feel some type of way. It’s a feeling that tells me to pay attention, to ask some questions, and to struggle to put into words something that needs to be said.
I cannot separate myself from my place as a public backtalker because somewhere there is a young Black woman standing at the front door, wanting to knock but being pressured to slip in through the back, being told she is less than because those with entrenched power fear she is so much more.