Kimberlé Crenshaw: Backtalker

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory, a term she helped coin.

When Crenshaw was five years old in Ohio during the civil rights era, she was the only girl denied a lead role in her nursery play. Puzzled by her teacher’s behaviour, she spoke up – and never stopped.

That instinct to question power, to challenge what others accepted as fair, has shaped not only her own life but the way we now understand race and gender.

In Backtalker, Crenshaw traces her journey from a spirited girl in Canton, Ohio, to one of the most influential legal thinkers today.

Through childhood lessons and painful reckonings – a boyfriend’s violence in college, a back door at Harvard Law, the silencing of women in the civil rights movement – Crenshaw learned to see the patterns others missed, refusing to stay behind the lines the world drew for her.

Crenshaw’s voice has since echoed through some of the most charged moments in recent history – including Anita Hill’s testimony and the rise of Black Lives Matter – insisting that true justice means seeing the whole picture.

Afua Hirsch is an award-winning journalist and author, known for her work on culture, identity and social justice. She presents the BBC’s Africa Rising, the series Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson and the podcast Legacy. She is the founder of her own production company Born in Me Productions and is the author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2018), Equal To Everything (2019) and Decolonising My Body, A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty (2025). A journalist for more than 20 years, she is a former Guardian correspondent, Associate Editor at Vogue and professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.