Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw (Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw) was born on May 5th, 1969 and is currently 56 years old. Kimberlé Crenshaw was born in Canton, Ohio, USA. Crenshaw attended Cornell University where he received a BA degree, Harvard University where he received a JD degree and University of Wisconsin, Madison where he received an LLM degree.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is a scholar of critical race theory and a civil rights advocate. She’s a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law, where she specializes in gender and race issues.

Kimberle is known for introducing and then developing intersectionality (also known as intersectional theory), the study of how intersecting or overlapping social identities, especially minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, discrimination, or domination.

From a young age, her parents encouraged her to discuss interesting things which she observed in the world that day. Such early training would become the basis of her career choices later on in life.

After finishing her LLM, she joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law in 1986. Kimberle is a founder of the field of critical race theory and a lecturer on civil rights, constitutional law, and critical race studies.

In 1991, she assisted the legal team that represented Anita Hill at the US Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In both 1991 and 1994, she got elected professor of the year by matriculating students.

Then in 1995, she got appointed full professor at Columbia Law, where she’s the founder and director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, which she established in 2011.

Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines challenges students and scholars to see race again. Examining the colorblindness and racial histories in fields that are as diverse as social psychology, musicology, the law, sociology, literary studies, and gender studies, this book documents the profoundly contradictory role of academy in naturalizing, constructing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary economic, political, and social crises that mark public life today.

Each academic discipline has got an origin story that’s complicit with white supremacy. Colonialism and racial hierarchy structured the very foundations of most disciplines’ research and teaching paradigms. During the early 20th century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, which was evident in the intervention of scholars including Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, as well as others.

By the middle of the 20th century, education itself became a center in the struggles for social justice. Scholars mounted some insurgent efforts so they could discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, however the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to further examine many of the racist foundations of their fields, rather they embraced a framework of racial colorblindness as their default mode.

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: F.A.Q