Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw (born 1959) is a legal scholar at Columbia Law School and UCLA School of Law whose work founded critical race theory as a scholarly movement and introduced the concept of intersectionality — one of the most widely adopted frameworks in the contemporary humanities and social sciences.

Core ideas

• Intersectionality: developed in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991), the concept names how anti-discrimination law could address race or sex discrimination but could not recognize the particular harm experienced by Black women, for whom race and gender co-constitute one another. Crenshaw showed that the legal framework’s insistence on single-axis analysis rendered Black women’s experience invisible — too female for race discrimination claims, too Black for sex discrimination claims.
• Structural intersectionality: Crenshaw distinguished between structural intersectionality (how overlapping structures of subordination produce particular vulnerabilities — such as the intersection of domestic violence, poverty, and immigration status for women of color) and political intersectionality (how the political agendas of different movements — feminism and anti-racism — may conflict or fail to address overlapping constituencies).
• Critical race theory: Crenshaw was a founding organizer of the critical race theory workshop (1989) and has been central to its development as a field that analyzes how law and legal institutions produce and maintain racial hierarchy.

Notable works

• “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989)
• “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991)
• Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (co-editor, 1995)

Related

• Intersectionality — the concept she develops
• Queer-of-color critique — extends the intersectional insight to sexuality
• Racial capitalism — the co-constitution of race and capital
• Cathy Cohen — applies intersectional analysis to queer politics