I first heard the word “intersectionality” during an identity workshop I took in undergrad. Inside our student center, my classmates and I stood under colorful signs naming different aspects of identity—like race, gender, sexuality—as we were asked a series of questions that required us to stand underneath one and talk about how that part of our identity impacted our lives.

Finally, I had a word that could help broach conversations with classmates, colleagues and friends about the parts of my experience as a queer Black person from a low income household that were usually too hard to articulate to those who lived outside of it. From then on, intersectionality became a tool that helped me open up about myself and understand the work I wanted to do as a writer.

Before distinguished law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term in 1989, she also was searching for the language to name the intricacies of her experience; “the racial burden of Black girlness and Black womanhood.” For her, this search began at 6 years old in Canton, Ohio when her elementary school teacher refused to pick her to play Thorn Rosa, a fictional fairytale princess, for her class. The emotions of that day clung to her like a “familiar shadow,” emerging again in moments like her first year of Harvard Law School, when she was told she’d have to enter through the back door of a Harvard club because she was a woman.

In her new memoir, BackTalker, which came out earlier this year, Crenshaw explores the idea of raising, becoming, and being a “backtalker,” which she defines as a person who doesn’t digest or accept “anything close to second-class status at the price of belonging.” The memoir draws from diary entries she’s kept through the years to weave together her personal experiences as a Black woman in America with historical events she’s lived through, from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to President Barack Obama launching My Brother’s Keeper, a movement focused on boys of color only.

While on a break from her book tour in Paris, Crenshaw and I spoke about her book, her parents’ lessons on race, the importance of intersectionality in the semiquincentennial, and her hopes for the future of other backtalkers. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You mentioned that you wrote some of the book in Paris, when did you know you wanted to write this memoir and what was the process like?

When I set off to do the memoir, it was at the height of the moment of racial reckoning in 2020. The tide had turned significantly in that short period of time, as the world started thinking much more critically about anti-Blackness, in particular, about the continuing shadow of our past, how it shapes institutions, how it shapes our actual experiences. So, the tools that I’ve been working with were in more demand at that moment. People were talking critically about race, they were talking about intersectionality, especially in light of the killings of both George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

And then there was this huge backlash against all of these ideas, and part of the backlash was to frame these ideas as dangerous, as divisive, as counterproductive, and as alien—foreign; this isn’t part of the American tradition. Which was shocking to me, because my understanding of my own life and the way that these........

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