Kimberlé Crenshaw Brings Her Memoir to the All Saints Forum

Few thinkers have reshaped the American vocabulary of race and gender as thoroughly as Kimberlé Crenshaw, who gave the world the term intersectionality and helped build the framework of critical race theory. On Tuesday evening, she comes to the All Saints Church Forum in Pasadena to discuss her new memoir, “Backtalker: An American Memoir.”

The book, published this spring by Simon & Schuster, turns Crenshaw’s own life into a lens. It traces her path from a childhood in Canton, Ohio — as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant — to her emergence as one of the country’s most influential legal scholars. The through-line is the habit named in the title: a refusal to stay quiet, a willingness to talk back, that she carried from a kindergarten stage to the Anita Hill hearings and the movement against police violence.

Crenshaw is a distinguished professor of law at UCLA, now marking four decades on its faculty, and also teaches at Columbia Law School. She cofounded and leads the African American Policy Forum. Her argument in “Backtalker” is that intersectionality and critical race theory are not abstractions but practical tools — ways of seeing what others miss and naming what has gone unnamed.

The memoir arrives at a moment when both ideas remain flashpoints in national debate, a context that gives her Pasadena appearance added charge. The evening at All Saints, long a hub for civic and social-justice programming, offers a chance to hear those concepts explained by the person who first articulated them.

“Backtalker: An Evening with Kimberlé Crenshaw” will take place on Tuesday, July 21 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Forum at All Saints Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., in Pasadena.