Backtalker Quotes

“Over the years, as Mom added more details about the hospital experience in Baltimore, I couldn’t help but imagine how she would have been a formidable physician fighting institutional unfairness as the backtalking Black woman she was raised to be. But my grandfather’s inability to see how gender was as illegitimate an obstacle to his daughter’s aspirations as race had been to his meant that these possibilities for her would never be known. The gesture that he offered on her wedding day was too little and too late. By the time she returned home to Canton, she was a mother with a six-week-old son. And my grandfather died just three months after that, at the young age of fifty-eight. Although his death and my brother’s birth put an end to my mother’s dreams of medical school, they did not put an end to her reign as a backtalker to racism. And in the cautionary tale that she quietly passed on to me about how the men she loved positioned their needs as barriers to her own, she seeded in me another object of my backtalking: the profound costs of sexism and patriarchy in our families and communities.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“My mother’s painful recollections of giving birth while Black reflects one of the most enduring ways that Black women have suffered at the intersection of racism and sexism. Although hospitals are no longer formally segregated, Black women still face daunting risks of death and complications in childbirth, a vulnerability that some advocates have equated to that of Black men at traffic stops. Seventy-five years after my mother suffered painfully humiliating child birthing in Baltimore, the maternal mortality rate for Black women is four times that of white women, and that racial disparity is even greater between middle-class women.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“In my life, that night cemented the great demarcation between the technicolor magic of the world I thought I lived in and the grainy gray of lost possibility that descended afterward. It is the line by which I measure the before and after. After that, nothing was the same—the gap between what the world was turning into and what I wanted to believe was growing wider. Clouds of disbelief, of impatient, impertinent, sacrilegious, blasphemous questions encircled me. How could God be so cruel as to allow such an awful thing to happen? How could someone, in the prime of their life, doing what he was meant to do in the world, be cut down by something and someone so wrong? The haunting song of the slain cardinal filled my ears. I could not find the off switch in my brain that night. And I could not call out to Daddy to help me. Not that night. The next morning, it seemed I could hear the entire neighborhood crying. Grief erupted across the country. Black people who had placed so much hope in Dr. King’s message of inclusion, of nonviolence in pursuit of our rightful place in the nation and in the world, were suddenly ripped out of space and time and transported to a special purgatory. Our brightest hope had been snuffed out.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“Dad was one who had hoped. I saw how much he had hoped that day. I’d never seen him cry, or heard his voice break, or watch his shoulders fold forward with grief like they did that day. As his tears fell, he just shook his head in wounded disbelief. Mom’s tears flowed too, but somehow differently from Dad’s. Against all she knew, she dared to believe the man that J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, had called the most dangerous man in America might actually be able to live. She had dared to believe that the beauty of his oratory, his ability to capture the strivings of more than twenty million African Americans, and his calm, respectable demeanor might have been enough to spare him. But Mom’s epitaph to MLK, repeated many times since, revealed her epiphany—or perhaps, rediscovery. “A people rising up are dangerous, no matter how peaceful or spiritual they are, so long as their remaining underfoot is the primary directive of the society they live in.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“Mom always told us the story about the Reconstruction Congressmen, and about how her father had received the lithograph with genuine pride from his father, a barber and landowner in Columbia, South Carolina. The photo was proof that our state of anomie—the condition of being without political power to protect ourselves and to promote our well-being—was not natural. It was orchestrated, imposed from without, and should never have been accepted as the way things ought to be. Changing those conditions was the entire point of learning to be a lawyer for my dad, and later, for me.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“Apparently, Mr. Manson, one of Mantel’s white male teachers, took offense at my brother’s flippant classroom attitude. Every night at the dinner table, we’d hear more about the battles unfolding between Mr. Manson and Mantel in eighth grade social studies. By then, my brother was fully immersed in the discourse of the Civil Rights Movement. The Freedom Riders, the sit-in demonstrations, and the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had brought the critique of white supremacy to young Black people across the country. “Colored on TV!”—the call that rang out when entertainers appeared on the set-top box—was now “Black on TV!” It was just as likely to ring out when Dr. King, Malcolm X, or Stokely Carmichael appeared as it was when Nichelle Nichols, Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte, or Cicely Tyson showed up in the TV room.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“There were larger lessons in this drama that would last a lifetime. This was the first of many bitter lessons that established for me that love and rage are not mutually exclusive: the family, the partner, the community, the country that you love, can be the same family, partner, community, or country that abuses you, fails to protect you, or that overlooks your suffering. Neither affection nor appeals to mutuality can always protect you against inequitable patterns of power. Resistance often entails changing the bottom-line—heightening the costs for those who oppress us, even when they do so within the bounds of love and solidarity—and sometimes even within the confines of the law. Of course, I could not have realized that, decades later, the experience within my family would shape my thinking about intragroup conflict, power, or authority. My focus as a child was on standing up for myself, whether it was sparring with parents who might not have always attended to the unfair consequences of their rules, or calculating ways to live with a sibling who couldn’t understand or manage his growing anger. I didn’t always win with my parents, and all too often, I couldn’t control the trajectory of my brother’s bullying. But, finding opportunities to flex back—whether through intentionally misdelivering messages to one of his many girlfriends or recruiting younger kids into delivering whacks on his head while he was sleeping—I grew into a formidable opponent that he could never underestimate. I still loved my brother while remaining keenly aware that I could never be completely defenseless or silent. Yes, we were family. And I never felt anything but lucky to have been born into the Crenshaw clan. But family—whether blood, community, or nation—can fail and can hurt. To love ourselves and the bonds that tie us together, we have to be willing to do what it takes to stand up for ourselves. And sometimes that means talking back to the ones we love.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“Of course, I could not have realized that, decades later, the experience within my family would shape my thinking about intragroup conflict, power, or authority. My focus as a child was on standing up for myself, whether it was sparring with parents who might not have always attended to the unfair consequences of their rules, or calculating ways to live with a sibling who couldn’t understand or manage his growing anger. I didn’t always win with my parents, and all too often, I couldn’t control the trajectory of my brother’s bullying. But, finding opportunities to flex back—whether through intentionally misdelivering messages to one of his many girlfriends or recruiting younger kids into delivering whacks on his head while he was sleeping—I grew into a formidable opponent that he could never underestimate. I still loved my brother while remaining keenly aware that I could never be completely defenseless or silent. Yes, we were family. And I never felt anything but lucky to have been born into the Crenshaw clan. But family—whether blood, community, or nation—can fail and can hurt. To love ourselves and the bonds that tie us together, we have to be willing to do what it takes to stand up for ourselves. And sometimes that means talking back to the ones we love.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“The epilogue, though, established another pattern, one that I would also hear again and again. That pool was eventually filled with concrete and closed—a phenomenon that occurred at public pools across the country when they were forced to integrate. The Supreme Court would have something to say about the shuttering of public pools. In 1971, a majority of justices ruled in Palmer v. Thompson that so long as the public pools were closed and neither Black kids nor white kids could swim in them, it didn’t matter that the reason for their closure was to avoid integration. Nor did it matter that white kids might have other places to swim that Black kids didn’t, such as pools in private developments or in suburban backyards. As desegregation stretched across the land, prompting dozens of cities to close public facilities, there would be no redress for the Black kids who no longer had a place to swim. But this denouement was a story for another day, part of a pattern that would demand my attention once I’d seen how race reforms often seed retrenchment, and how the law can be used, quite innocuously to some, to perpetuate inequality.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“Traveling across time and around town with Mom was like living with a master griot—an oral-history-poet-slash-social-archaeologist who happened to have a lead foot. My mother had learned the back alleys and shortcuts all over Canton since she began driving at fifteen, taking my grandfather, who was a doctor, on house calls. She knew Canton like the back of her hand. And behind the wheel, she was a speed demon. But the maps in Mom’s head weren’t just routes from point A to point B. All around Canton, at almost every corner, there was a story, one that my mother would reveal to me in layers as the years passed. With each retelling, details would be laid on top of the initial sketch until the pictures became so vivid that they were etched indelibly into my memory. Because many of the sites where her stories took place were still around during my childhood, Mom’s recollections were more than just tales from an ancient past.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“While Miss V’s visit did not remedy the blow, it did acknowledge my injury. The worst thing would have been to find myself cast into the future with a wound that had not been seen and heard. A wrong without a name leaves no safe harbor, no space that stands between you and the dangerous assumption that this suffering is just the way of the world, and that the responsibility is on you to accept it. Without acknowledgment, there is simply denial or self-blame. Maybe I wouldn’t have been a good enough princess. Maybe I’m not pretty enough. Maybe I don’t deserve my dreams anyway. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Happily, my parents did not leave me to wallow in self-blame. Instead, they made clear—in their words and actions—that what happened to me shouldn’t have. By insisting that my teacher come to the house to make amends and promise a remedy—even one that a six-year-old could tell would never be kept—they offered a profound recognition. We see you. We hear you. We know what happened to you.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“My enduring love for my parents, despite their human limitations, is born from the fact that they refused to burden me with that kind of denial and self-doubt. They understood the idea that W. E. B. Du Bois had described as the conflicting two-ness of African Americans: the way we learn to see ourselves through our own eyes but also through the eyes of those who despise us, who judge us as lacking and then make us imagine we are responsible for their perception of our supposed shortcomings.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“I’ve been called a public intellectual because I have fashioned some words you may have heard about, like “intersectionality” and “critical race theory.” But if your vision of an intellectual brings to mind The Thinker’s pose—one with chin in hand who ponders abstract ideas and, with a lightbulb suddenly flashing overhead, writes down her epiphany—that’s not me at all. 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. That’s what these stories are.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“Duly bonded, we arrived at the venue and knocked at the door to announce our arrival. 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. “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 our mutual defense pact, but for Reese, solidarity applied only to things that were going to affect us both in the same way. Presumably, racial exclusion of both of us fit the bill, but the gender exclusion of me did not.”
― Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“At some point, future history books will tell stories about what is happening now. Maybe, they will tell the story of how money, new technologies, and old entitlements held us back long enough to forget the spirit of freedom that inspired ordinary people to fight against the odds. Maybe that story will reflect intersectional failures that undermined our ability to see the fight for democracy and the fight for racial justice are inseparable, the mirror images of the succubus twins that Morrison* invoked. My hope, though, is that the future will look back to tell a different story, one about how the spirit of freedom was nurtured by talking back against agendas that turned on ignorance and forced compliance. I hope ours will be a legacy that lives on through efforts to nurture, sustain, and grow a democracy that is shaped not from top down by race, gender, power, and privilege, but instead by the victories of those who rose up to create new possibilities for everyone.”
― Kimberlé Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir

“I have watched the experiences that have shaped my life and the words I fashioned to capture it be stolen, redefined, and weaponized in a campaign of mass destruction. To paraphrase Kendrick Lamar, this effort to destroy these words is bigger than the theory. It is about beating us down in a war to reclaim dominion of the few over the many.”
― Kimberlé Crenshaw, Backtalker: An American Memoir