Critical race theory originated at a 1989 retreat organized by Kimberlé Crenshaw

Evidence

SEVERAL DOZEN LEGAL scholars met at a convent outside of Madison, Wisconsin, on July 8, 1989, as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” topped Billboard charts. They came together to forge an antiracist intellectual approach known as “critical race theory.” Thirty-year-old UCLA legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw organized the summer retreat the same year she penned “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” The essay called for “intersectional theory,” the critical awareness of gender racism (and thereby other intersections, such as queer racism, ethnic racism, and class racism). “Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices,” Crenshaw wrote three years later in another pioneering article in the Stanford Law Review. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1108

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives intersectionality its precise 1989 origin and original definition as awareness of intersecting forms of racism.