Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s path from ‘Backtalker’ to legal scholar

When you're shopping online, you and another person could be buying the exact same item and you'll pay more because of who you are, where you are, and your purchase history. Pricing has gone high tech. What we're seeing is big tech sort of reinventing the ripoff. The new realities of surveillance pricing and tips to avoid it. That's this week on the Life Kit podcast from NPR.

Listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, is a legal scholar responsible for naming two of the most contested ideas in American politics, intersectionality and critical race theory. She has written a new memoir about how she came to those words and what it has been like to watch the courts, legislators, and the media weaponize and redefine them.

The book is called Back Talker, an American memoir. The first of those words came together one late night in nineteen eighty eight at the University of Wisconsin. Crenshaw was a young legal scholar pulling apart one of the most important court cases of her career. A black woman had sued General Motors for discrimination, and a federal court told her she could sue either as a black person or as a woman, but not both at once.

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