Backtalker

Proof of registration, via a QR code on your phone or on paper, will be required to enter Reid Hall. Entry will be refused to those who are not registered.

Please note that access will not be permitted 15 minutes after the start of each event conforming the program.

This event will be held in English (Workshops and Readings) and French (Les Éditions La Chaise performance).

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It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory. She will be in conversation with Keithley Woolward, associate director of the Columbia M.A. in History and Literature.

Attendees are invited to join us for a reception after the event.

Backtalker (Simon and Schuster, 2026) is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life.

It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University. She is also a Distinguished Professor of Law and the Promise Institute Chair in Human Rights at the University of California, Los Angeles and the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. She was a 2022-2023 Reid Hall Faculty Visitor.

This event will take place in Reid Hall’s Grande Salle Ginsberg-LeClerc, built in 1912 and extensively renovated in 2023 thanks to the generous support of Judith Ginsberg and Paul LeClerc.

Organized by the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Columbia M.A. in History and Literature. With support from the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.