This is a lightly edited transcript of the May 1 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. We have a great guest. Kimberlé Crenshaw is a professor of law at UCLA and also Columbia, and she’s very well known for writing about intersectionality, but also as a great professor, activist, and expert for decades now. So Kim, welcome.
Kimberlé Crenshaw: Always happy to be in conversation with you, Perry. Thanks for having me.
Bacon: Yes—you were a great guest, I think in November. You have a memoir out, so I want to talk about that—which is, I would say, great news, hearing from you in this kind of a—but I want to start with really important news from yesterday, and you’re the right kind of person to ask about this.
We now have another Supreme Court ruling further limiting the Voting Rights Act, and as we’re speaking right now, legislators and governors in Alabama, I think Louisiana, among other places, are literally talking about how do we redraw our districts to further limit the number of Black representatives we send to Congress and to state legislatures, and to limit Black voices in our states further. So talk about your reaction to that ruling yesterday, first of all.
Crenshaw: Perry, it was sadly expected. Anyone who has been following the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence over the last two decades knows that we are looking at a deliberate, devastating approach to the infrastructure of the civil rights movement.
The Voting Rights Act has been particularly painful to watch as it’s being destroyed. It’s been called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement for good reason. It’s the only law that actually focuses on results. It focuses on representation, and anything that is done in states that had a history of denying African Americans the right to vote is potentially subject to intervention.
Most other laws are not like that. To take an equivalency between voting and housing, for example—one could say practices and policies and procedures that predictably produce segregated housing, no matter what they are, whether it’s insurance, lending, redlining, restrictive covenants—all of these things are suspicious because they produce a particular end that we associate with discrimination, segregation, and white supremacy.
That’s what the Voting Rights Act has done. That’s what it has been. That’s why it is one of the most successful laws in the United States in terms of achieving a particular objective. It has become so much of our fabric in this society that when we look at Black representatives, we don’t think about how much had to happen, and what the infrastructure of voting procedures and policies has to be for that to happen.
Now, unfortunately, as you mentioned, these state legislatures are quickly going about—now that they have the green light—to have at it. We’re going to see how important these laws had been in creating a reality that we have since then taken for granted.
Bacon: So I’m not a lawyer or legal expert, but part of—if you read these opinions, not only this one but the past ones—is that the idea of critical race theory is in part to look at outcomes and results and not just intent. And it seems like Roberts’s intention is very much to make it so that—unless you said the N-word and said, “I want to stop every Black person from voting because [I’m a racist]”—they’re trying to define civil rights law down to express intent that very few people make in 2026, right?
Crenshaw: Yes. They are targeting a kind of discrimination—a reflection of discrimination that goes all the way back to a time that was 50, 60 years ago. People don’t discriminate like that anymore, and even when they did discriminate like that, they didn’t often say, “No Black person can come to the polls.”
What they would do is bury their discriminatory intent inside a process, inside a structure, inside a procedure. So when you had to pass a literacy test, or had to guess how many marbles are in a jar, or when you had to recite the Constitution—these were not said to be, “If you’re Black, you can’t vote,” but it gave the power, the authority, and the discretion to individual white people to effectively do what they wanted to do, which is not to let any Black people vote.
So even their telling of discrimination is anachronistic to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed. Now we’re talking a half-century later, and the only thing they think counts as discrimination is something that’s over a century old.
This is why they’ve gone after critical race theory, because critical race theory makes that clear. It says discrimination, exclusion can happen in any number of ways that are presumably race-neutral. The Voting Rights Act understood that—that’s why it was so effective. The MAGA judges understand that, and that is exactly why they gutted it.
Bacon: So talk about what the results will be. I guess there are two things I want to talk about. The first is you’re going to end up with a state like Louisiana or Alabama where you have very few—almost no—Democratic members of Congress.
And the second is: even if you have one, they’re less likely to be Black than before, I think. So talk about those things differently, because part of what I’m concerned about is Democratic members, but part of it is Black representation—and these things are being conflated in various ways. So talk about why those things are different and why they’re the same.
Crenshaw: Yeah. And let’s be clear about what it is that the Voting Rights Act protected. It protected the right of Black voters to elect someone of their choosing without their preferences being artificially diminished because of the structure of the voting regime. So the issue is: who is it that Black voters are preferring? How is it that their preferences are basically being swallowed up by—in some cases—districts that are drawn in such a way that either pack them all into one district, or crack them across several districts in order to minimize the voting power that they actually have? So it’s the choices of Black voters—not necessarily the identity or even the party of the choices that they make.
But because race, identity, Democratic Party affiliation, and voter preference are in many ways an amalgam—it is therefore that much easier to disenfranchise Black people, to say, “This is just a party gerrymander, not a racial gerrymander.” Here’s what’s the real kicker in this. The ability to gerrymander on the basis of party has been one of the ways that Black voters’ choices have been undermined, which in turn created the pressure under law to create corrective district line-drawing so that that political gerrymander doesn’t rob Black people of the right to vote. Now what they’re going to be able to say is that the remediation—the fix—the way in which the party gerrymander is no longer available to undermine Black voters because of the Voting Rights Act—that’s now gone.
So it’s a twofer. They can now freely use party gerrymandering to suppress Black voters, and Black voters don’t have recourse in the Voting Rights Act. That is what’s so insidious about this decision.
Bacon: So we talk a lot about Trump, but in reality we have a Republican—you said “MAGA judges.” What we’re really talking about is a much broader architecture of anti-Blackness. It’s not at all—if President Trump didn’t exist, all these six people—most of them were not even appointed by him—talk about the fact that we talk about racism as if it’s like Donald Trump, but this is a much deeper anti-Black project than Donald Trump, right?
Crenshaw: Oh, it—and it’s been an anti-Black project that has been in the making for a couple of decades. We’re looking at justices on the Supreme Court who argued in memos against Brown v. Board of Education. We’re talking about justices who attempted to participate in voter suppression. We’re talking about one judge in particular who wrote this opinion, who was known to say that the institutions that he attended were better when they practiced discrimination—Princeton, and gender discrimination, to be specific.
So this has been a very long fuse that was inevitably going to result in an explosive moment like this if that fuse was not extinguished, and it was not. So we’ve had a steady drumbeat of dismantling the beautiful infrastructure that was created out of the blood, sweat, and tears—the lives lost—in the 1960s. Now we’re at a point where that fire, as far as the law is concerned, is on the brink of extinguishing—if it has not already happened.
Bacon: I was going to ask you—you’re a law professor, courts and law and legal systems are your field. But on some level, have we lost the law? Is it all about winning elections? Because with these six people ultimately deciding what the law is, is the law—whatever it was in 1954—is the law no longer a tool that’s of much use for us?
Crenshaw: Yeah. I do think it’s important to acknowledge that there is no further appeal when the Supreme Court makes a decision. That is the it, and that is the all of it. Now, there are always possibilities of repassing the law. There are always possibilities at a local level of trying to work around this ideology that the Supreme Court has created. Our challenge often has been that when the court sets out a particular pathway—this pathway now is to label anything that is not colorblind as potentially unconstitutional—the tendency has been to give the other side the victory before they’ve had to litigate it.
Here’s the example in the reverse. In 1954, as we know, Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation in education was unconstitutional. It was not the case that all the segregating institutions said, Okay, we’re done, we’re going to go in the direction that the Supreme Court is leading us in. They in fact resisted massively. They shut down the schools rather than integrate them. They came up with freedom-of-choice plans. They extended their resistance so that each demand to abide by the law had to be litigated.
The question is: do we have that fight in us? Do we have the ability to say—even though we know what this court is trying to do with colorblindness—each case is its own case. So make them win it in each court. Make them win it each time they’re trying to apply this specious ideology to yet another arena. So there is room to fight. The question is whether there’s a will to fight.
And I have to say that the ledger doesn’t look so promising when we see how many law firms that used to be on the right side bending the knee, kissing the ring—universities, without even being asked to, eliminating their scholarships and their programs. We see some foundations scrubbing their support that they give for racial justice. And we even see some of our allies listing almost every issue that’s important to a progressive community except anti-Blackness.
So if anything, we have to hope that this moment is a wake-up call. There’s no pivoting our way out of it. There’s no “unsaying the thing that needs to be said” way out of it. The only thing we have right now is to fight our way out of it. Hopefully the bell has been rung.
Bacon: I hope you’re right, because as you were talking, I was thinking the universities folded so quickly and preemptively surrendered so much that the idea that other people will fight is not what we’ve seen so far. Okay, so you have a memoir out—it’s called Back Talker. So talk about the title, first of all. What—I think I know what that word means, but talk about why that’s the title.
Crenshaw: Yeah. I was raised to talk, and I was raised to talk back against injustice. Those two ideas have come together throughout my career. And in thinking about how to express, explain, historicize this moment—and the need for us to talk back, and the need for us to use some of the tools, the concepts like critical race theory and intersectionality—it was important for me to talk back against one particular idea, which is that all these ideas are foreign imports. That they come from other people and are not homegrown reactions to the realities that we here in the United States have faced.
It reminds me of the way that the Freedom Riders and the civil rights movement was framed by folks in the South as outside intervention—of course, our Black people here have no problem going around to the back door, have no problem being denied the right to vote or denied education. It took somebody from outside to come and get them all stirred up. In a way, that’s what a lot of critics of critical race theory and intersectionality have been saying: This is coming from somewhere else.
I thought it was important to say it’s not coming from anywhere else but this country, this land, these places, these spaces that followed a policy and practice—in fact, a cultural politics—that created the recognition that yes, we live in a society that is still dealing with the shadow of segregation and enslavement. And that recognition, that literacy about what that means in our lives, doesn’t come from sitting in an ivory tower with one’s finger to the temple.
It comes from experience up. It comes from the things that we learned from the time we were little babies. It comes from the way that it got reinforced when we were in public school and when we went to college and when we gained career traction. This is a story about how we live in this country as racialized subjects and what knowledge that life has given to us.
Bacon: You write about the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill period, and you knew Anita Hill a little bit before she became nationally famous. So I guess the question would be: that’s a moment where intersectional beliefs and views were not really expressed—where it became that defending Black people meant you defended Clarence Thomas, functionally, and not Anita Hill, functionally.
Do you think as a society we’ve gotten better on that, where we recognize that Black women are different and have two sort of distinct identities? Are we getting better on this issue, you think?
Crenshaw: I would say that’s a difficult assessment to make—it is open to answer. After this last election, for example—where—we effectively had a candidate who was a Black woman being called out of her name repeatedly, being framed in such a misogynistic—I have to bring in Moya Bailey here, who calls it “misogynoir.” You take sexism and you take racism, and together they create a debacle. That was what it was to hear the way that Vice President Kamala Harris was regarded.
Then you come out of that election with so few people in the mainstream news environment willing to take up what that meant, what new bottom that created. And then of course you have the purging of Black women from positions of power. You have the undermining of their expertise. You have the idea that just seeing a Black woman in a job that requires expertise and knowledge and skill is, for them, a de facto unqualified—the worst stories about DEI.
So no, I would say that in terms of the broader political culture, being able to address the intersectional gaps that led to the confirmation of Clarence Thomas—I think it’s a big, continuing hole into which not only the well-being of Black women has fallen, and the well-being of Black communities, but the whole nation has been driven into this point of destruction.
I never miss the opportunity to remind people who complain about our politics now being owned by oligarchs that the five–four decision that defeated meaningful campaign finance reform was made possible by that fifth vote that was won when Clarence Thomas was confirmed. There’s not much that you could look at in this moment of disaster that you can’t point to some rule that the Supreme Court has made that created a permissive environment for precisely this thing to happen. That’s intersectional failure that has undermined us all, including the very republic that we claim to be part of.
Bacon: Another intersectional issue—one where I was surprised by what’s in the book. I like Barack Obama, I think he has done a lot of good things. But can you talk about—there was a program called My Brother’s Keeper that they started in the Obama White House in 2014, and the idea was we’re going to help Black men. And talk about that—you came to the White House and said, “Why don’t we do a program for Black women?” And their response was not yes, which is what it should have been—it was something different. What was it?
Crenshaw: The response was that this program, My Brother’s Keeper, was targeted to the specific ways that—frankly, it was conceived as a response to Trayvon Martin, so Black boys were always front and center—but it was then expanded to deal with all boys of color, and then eventually all boys, in some of the school and educational programs. But the idea was Black men and boys are exceptionally left behind. They’re exceptionally vulnerable, and because they have special needs, there has to be a program that is especially attentive to those needs.
Now, our complaint wasn’t that there weren’t specific needs that were racialized and gendered. Our point was that it’s not just Black boys who are experiencing racialized and gendered modes of underdevelopment, of risk, of vulnerability—that the many issues around which there was data that was quoted as the reason for the program applied to girls and women as well.
From the consequences of living in low-resourced communities, to the consequences of early dropping out of school, to the vulnerability to violence, to being surveilled, to being reflected in the culture as people without potential, as people who are a drag on our society rather than a benefit—nearly 80 percent of the data that was cited as just about boys was about all Black youth, and yet only the boys were carved out as a point of intervention, basically leaving their sisters and their mothers behind.
This was not the strategy that we used to get this far. This was not the understanding of what it meant to stand in solidarity with each other as we press for greater forms of equity. What it was, however, was a throwback to a report in the ‘60s called the Moynihan Report, that basically said that the problem that Black people were facing was that our homes were in gender disrepair—women were heading up the household, men were not around, thus we cannot compete to be equal. And so determined was Moynihan to try to force this framework on the Black community that he advocated against providing Black women—who even then were disproportionately relied on to support their families—from having job training, from actually being able to increase their economic viability.
So Moynihan has always looked with a side eye toward the interests of Black women and girls. And because of that, the entire community has suffered, because we have to rely on all of our incomes and all of our advances to ensure the economic and social well-being of our whole community. So we were arguing for inclusion, not exclusion. We were arguing for a gender-integrated program to approach some of the issues that we still struggle with.
Bacon: I have two more questions. I guess the first one: I read your book, and I talked to Ibram Kendi a few weeks ago too—and it’s even more so for you, though. What is it like when you’ve done all this research, had excellent ideas, validated ideas that were rigorous, ideas that were well explained, ideas that reflected the reality of the world—those ideas had prominence for a long time, and then people with power banned the ideas on all kinds of disingenuous pretenses. Because you’re closer to the end of your career than the beginning. So what does it feel like?
You release this memoir, you’ve had all these ideas—intersectionality, CRT—that are, I would say, correct, but Samuel Alito has more power than you. So how do you—what do you—how do you feel about a world in which Samuel Alito gets to write the law even though he’s obviously not as smart as you are?
Crenshaw: Thank you. I appreciate, first of all, that acknowledgement, because it must be difficult—because it is. I do complain with my friends sometimes: “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that some of this idiocy is actually going to go down as the law of the land.” And then my friends will sometimes remind me, “Oh, you know what? Someone had a theory about that. What’s it called? Could it be intersectionality?” Or somebody had an understanding about how power is frequently not based on superior thinking. It’s not based on rationality. It’s often not based on legitimate forms of understanding. It’s based on sheer coercion. It’s based on force. And sometimes that coercion, sometimes that force, is racialized and gendered.
We do not live outside of the history that produced this country. There was never a moment where the whole deck was cleared and we started over. We still live in a society—we can’t say that this society was never a slave society, or never a genocide-based society. It’s a post-slavery society. It’s a post-segregation, post-genocidal society, which means there are elements of those things that still live.
We walk and breathe in a society in which the institutions that we live in, the laws that we are told to abide by, are grounded in and reflective of many of those commitments from the past. So it’s not surprising that MAGA goes after these efforts to remember and make that history present to this moment. It’s not surprising that they’re engaging in a process of trying to erase our literacy.
We have to remember—it used to be against the law, and you could be punished by death, even, to learn how to read. So it’s understood what literacy, the ability to think, to reason, to make sense out of our situation—how dangerous that is to oligarchs and those who want to maintain a status quo which predictably delivers privilege and power to some people who look and inherit a certain legacy, and the rest of us who are on the bottom.
So in some ways, at the end of the day, this moment does prove the correctness of the theory. The question is: what is the practice that comes out of it? I guess I just have to say—Perry, I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to write the book to drop in this moment.
I was bemoaning it during 2020 and during 2008 that I hadn’t done a memoir. But I had a lot more life to live and a lot more to say about what was happening at the time. So now I feel fortunate that yes, I’m toward the end of my career, and this might not be the mic drop yet—it’s letting people know: here is what the project was, here is what it still is, and here is the baton for you to run the next lap with.
Bacon: That’s what I’m going to end on. Okay, so you’re scholars—people like me who are younger than you but who are in the sort of more middle of their career—living in this moment where everything we believe seems to be eroding in front of our faces. It doesn’t feel very hopeful right now. I write things and it feels like John Roberts doesn’t care what I think.
So what do you tell people—scholars who are trying to come up with theories that acknowledge CRT, or acknowledge intersectionality, or acknowledge that there’s racism in America—when John Roberts and Alito get to say every day there isn’t? What’s your message for us? We’re people who are doing this work that feels futile right now. Is it futile?
Crenshaw: No, it is not futile at all. Now, I think we have to remember that we are planting seeds—of trees that might not give us shade. But the seeds nonetheless must be planted. This moment is particularly important to me because I’ve been spending some time trying to gather up the insights, the awareness, that our ancestors—who experienced precisely this at the end of Reconstruction—thought about. What is the wisdom that they passed on? What did they do? What did they try? What was a no-go? What is something that now, had we been more prepared, we could have done something different?
I think we need to be thinking, at minimum, about providing this for the next generation. Did we know? Yes, we knew. Did we try to fight? Some of us did. Were our allies ready to fight with us? There is the problem right there, right?
Because some of them were willing to throw us under the bus, thinking that pivoting away from the great cause of the Civil War, for example, or dialing back the promises of citizenship, or refusing to celebrate the legacy of the Union soldiers, the Black Union soldiers, and the Black enslaved people who went on a strike that defeated the Confederacy—the erasure of that history, done by those who relied on us, is the crime that we need to keep focused on from back then, and also its shadow happening right now.
So yeah, there’s going to be fight back. There is going to eventually probably be someone else in the White House. Whether we go into the White House with that person—whether the eventuality of the collapse of this stranglehold that the MAGA faction has on our democracy will also open up a new possibility to regain what we’ve lost—turns on the fights that we’re having right now: with our allies inside the party that many of us vote for, with the media who cover these issues.
We’re fighting for our lives in this moment—not for something that’s going to happen two years from now or eight years from now. It’s about how these moments are being covered, and whether anti-Blackness is important enough for us to go to the mat to insist that it be discussed, that it be prioritized, and that it be organized around.
Bacon: All right—promise, my real last question. Okay, so I know right now some people I like—AOC, Ro Khanna, my governor Andy Beshear—some honorable people I think are thinking about running for president. But I know the advice they’re getting is: There’s too much wokeness. You saw the Kamala loss. When you talk about race, that means we lose. You can only talk about jobs and the economy. They’re getting this advice every day, even from people who ostensibly agree with you and me.
What would you tell them if they got the memo that says, Anytime you talk about race, you lose two percent—you should only obsess about the white working-class person in Wisconsin, wokeness is bad, whatever that means. What would you tell them if you got with these people? Because I don’t think they’re hearing from voices like yours very much—so at least through this podcast they can.
What would you tell one of them? Is like—this idea that you can forget about race and we can just win the election—I don’t think is correct, but I’d be curious what you would tell them.
Crenshaw: I don’t think it’s correct either. And so I think, first of all, we have to make sure that they understand that the allegation of wokeness that lost this last presidential election certainly didn’t come from Kamala over-indexing on talking about race, right? In fact—
Bacon: She never did. Yes.
Crenshaw: In fact, she couldn’t even talk about the fact that her race was being erased. So for people to think that she was over-indexing is just a false understanding of what happened. The person that did talk about race was the racist in the election.
Bacon: The person who won. Yeah.
Crenshaw: —the person who won. You cannot win an asymmetrical war when one side is weaponizing race, when it is appealing to white Christian nationalists, when it is openly embracing some of the most damaging racial tropes in the history of this country, and we’re mum about it. Our response is like, “What? Who? We didn’t hear that.”
That is not a workable solution. You’ve got the yee-haws happening, and you’ve got nothing on the other side. And we have a rich history, we have a rich tradition, we have a history in which we have been able to create winning coalitions who are not willing to sign on to that. But if you’re not willing to call them to the battle, if you’re not willing to say, This is not who we want to be, then you don’t deserve to win—because you’re not offering an alternative that is getting to the heart of why this country is on the skids in this moment. It’s because of these concerns about replacement. It’s because of the weaponization of resentment. It’s because they’ve been taught to punch down rather than lift up. We cannot win not addressing that, and I don’t think it’s just theoretical.
If we look at my mayor in New York City—he didn’t follow that logic, he didn’t bend the knee in the ways that he was told to, and he won, and it wasn’t close. We have other examples like this. So I would say: really challenge your pollsters, who many times are just asking the same old questions to give the same old answers.
And number two: ask if you’re really willing to move away from an entire part of the populace, or if you’re willing to leave their votes on the table and to move back into a democracy in which huge parts of the American public are not engaged. If that’s what you want, then that is not a prescription for many of us who are looking for a campaign, a candidate, a possibility that will reconnect us as a people to a democracy that’s worth fighting for.
Bacon: And great place to end. Thanks, everybody. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s book is called Back Talker. It comes out May 5th. I’m sure it’s on Amazon and other places. She’s on Instagram and Bluesky and Twitter. She’s a great voice. Kim, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
Crenshaw: Thank you, Perry. Always a pleasure.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
