The Woman Who Named “Intersectionality” Comes to Pasadena

Kimberlé Crenshaw helped give American public life two of its most argued-over phrases: intersectionality and critical race theory. On Tuesday night, she brings the story of how she arrived at them to a church just east of City Hall.

Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA and Columbia, will appear at All Saints Church as part of its Forum Series to discuss Backtalker: An American Memoir, her account of the childhood and career that led her to challenge how the country talks about race and gender. Copies will be sold at the event by Octavia’s Bookshelf, the Pasadena Black-owned bookstore named for the late Pasadena native and science-fiction writer Octavia Butler.

Tonight’s talk, titled “Backtalker: An Evening with Kimberlé Crenshaw,” runs from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. in the church, at 132 North Euclid Avenue in downtown Pasadena. The church says all are welcome.

Crenshaw traces her path in the memoir from a childhood in Canton, Ohio, to a career spent naming ideas that others left unspoken. She coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how overlapping forms of inequality compound one another, and she helped develop critical race theory, the framework examining how race operates through law and institutions. Both phrases have since moved from the seminar room into national political argument.

Crenshaw is also the cofounder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. In a May interview with Forbes, she described the memoir as her way of answering critics of her work.

Backtalker was published by Simon & Schuster in May and quickly rose to become a New York Times bestseller. The memoir arrives, the church’s event description says, as Crenshaw’s work and that of other scholars, activists and artists now faces erasure “at the hands of the current administration.”

Details are posted at allsaints-pas.org. For more call (626) 796-1172.