September 14, 2026
Kimberlé Crenshaw - In Conversation with Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman
6:00pm CDT
Kraft Hall, 130
Contact Info:
Fatima Khan, fk20@rice.edu
Dr. Kimberlé W. Crenshaw will be in conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Associate Professor of Sociology at Rice University, about her acclaimed, bestselling memoir, Backtalker. Reception at 6 PM. Book signing to follow the conversation.
One of the most influential public intellectuals in the world and the architect of the two biggest ideas to reshape the American conversation about fairness offers the intimate story of how her life gave birth to these ideas.
It is not very often that someone comes along and permanently reshapes the way Americans think about two of the most important issues of the day. In this case: race and gender. But that is what Kimberlé Crenshaw did when she articulated two concepts that would forever change national and global debates about equality: intersectionality and critical race theory.
Backtalker is the powerful and intimate story of how a little girl from Canton, Ohio, came up with a new way to look at the world. Crenshaw’s memoir traces the way her lived experience made her see things others didn’t as the daughter of a strong-minded teacher and a pathbreaking public servant, and as the sister of a protective, yet bullying older brother. She starts to talk back, and that backtalking has continued throughout her life. It happens when she is denied a role in the kindergarten school play. When she is escorted to the back door of a private club. When Anita Hill is exiled for testifying against Clarence Thomas. When OJ Simpson goes on trial. When Obama launches My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only. When the movement against police violence overlooks Black women. Crenshaw is there for all of it.
In the vein of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, Crenshaw evokes each time and place like a gifted novelist with extreme honesty and specificity, making her book a series of awe-inspiring, deep revelations. As a result of her work, Crenshaw has become a force to be reckoned with across America–at schools, in the workplace, at dinner tables, and, of course, in our public square.
About the Author:
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. She was a founder and has been a leader in the intellectual movement called Critical Race Theory and is also known for introducing and developing the concept of intersectionality. She is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the cofounder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. Crenshaw writes regularly for The New Republic, The Nation, and Ms., hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters!, and has appeared as a commentator on media outlets including MSNBC and NPR.
About the Moderator:
Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Rice University whose scholarship advances an intersectional analysis of race, gender, family, and the African Diaspora. Her work examines how race and gender operate as mutually constitutive systems of power, with particular attention to the emotional regimes that sustain racialized and gendered hierarchies. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Brazil, her award-winning scholarship highlights the central role of emotion in systems of power and oppression. More broadly, she explores how global anti-Blackness shapes the structural and affective experiences of Afro-Latin Americans, Afro-Latinxs, and African Americans, especially Black women and families in the work and educational context.
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