Looking back, Crenshaw suggests that her traumatic childhood inspired her compassion for marginalized and invisible people. Even as we see the pall of sadness lift — Crenshaw has some fun when she works as an undergrad “smooth-groove cupid” D.J. on late-night radio — the theme of repressed pain persists throughout her Ivy League education in the 1970s and ’80s.
In these college chapters, the book’s velocity matches her quest for a language to challenge the calls for race and gender blindness that had become a popular solution to inequality in America. We see the earliest seeds of intersectionality as Crenshaw confronts a loophole in the legal system whereby courts denied Black women their standing to sue over gender discrimination, because, as Crenshaw puts it, judges believed that “white women’s experiences were capacious enough to represent all women,” but Black women’s experiences were not.
The insights she gleans from personal turmoil are just as rich. At a bruising inflection point in her early 20s, Crenshaw is exposed to the uncomfortable reality that a shared race or gender does not necessarily equate to empathy and solidarity. She recalls a college relationship with a “revolutionary wannabe” whom she names B.F.H., or “Boyfriend From Hell.” After a bad breakup, B.F.H. assaults her and, in a furious fit of pique, attempts to throw her out of a high window.
That the precise prose of this account, and numerous other anecdotes, is written with the kind of titanic certainty that would sway a jury is expected; what’s surprising, however, is Crenshaw’s candor in revealing her vulnerability and disappointments. In the aftermath of the assault, she grieves not the failed relationship with her boyfriend but rather the faltering sisterhood of a Black leftist friend called Naimah, who persuades her not to cooperate with the police to prosecute B.F.H., and then doesn’t return Crenshaw’s calls when B.F.H. starts stalking and harassing her.
Crenshaw pulls similar threads, a decade later, from the saga of Anita Hill. In 1991, Hill was preparing to testify that her colleague Clarence Thomas, on his way to becoming the second Black Supreme Court justice, had sexually harassed her at work. Crenshaw, who crossed paths with Hill a year earlier, quickly traveled to Washington to support her. Crenshaw is aghast remembering how Thomas successfully cast himself, especially with Black men and women, as the victim of a “high-tech lynching” while his supporters framed Hill as an “angry and sexually deviant Black woman.”