Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw is a civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She developed intersectionality, the study of how overlapping social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to structures of oppression. Her work includes intersectional feminism, which examines the systems of discrimination that women face due to their ethnicity, sexuality and economic background.

Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy

PUBLISHED 3/30/2026 by

The United States was founded not through declarations of equality, but through the labor of Black women whose political work reproduced the nation, even as it was erased from the democratic archive. 

Sally Hemings is rarely situated within the United States’ democratic legacy, despite her central role in the material conditions through which democracy was made possible.

In shaping the conditions of her children’s freedom, Hemings exercised a form of maternal political authority that governed who could move beyond enslavement. This labor stands in sharp contrast to Jefferson’s authorship of democratic ideals, which articulated freedom in abstract and ambiguous terms, while Hemings produced freedom materially through the governance of reproduction and kinship under constraint.

Hemings’ strategic negotiations secured her and her children’s futures within a political order that both denied her legal personhood and depended on her labor.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

California Becomes First State to Enshrine Intersectionality in Law, Recognizing the Amplified Harms of Overlapping Discrimination

PUBLISHED 10/11/2024 by

Thirty-five years ago, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to explain how multiple forms of discrimination interact to exacerbate each other, resulting in amplified forms of prejudice and harm. Last week, California became the first state to explicitly recognize intersectionality in discrimination law.

Everything You Need to Know About Sandra Bland

PUBLISHED 7/29/2015 by

“Once I put this baby in the ground, I’m ready…This means war.” These were the words spoken by Geneva Reed-Veal as she eulogized her late daughter, Sandra Bland, last week. On July 10, 28-year-old Bland was pulled over by police in Prairie View, Texas for allegedly failing to signal before changing lanes. According to police, she became […]

Black Girls Matter

PUBLISHED 6/23/2015 by

The following is excerpted from the latest issue of Ms. To read the entire article, get a print or digital subscription today! In 2012, 6-year-old Salecia Johnson was arrested and handcuffed in a Georgia school for having a temper tantrum. In 2007, 16-year-old Pleajhai Mervin was arrested after she dropped cake on the floor in […]

#BlackGirlsMatter: When Girls of Color Are Policed Out of School

PUBLISHED 2/5/2015 by

Last year, 12-year-old Mikia Hutchings was faced with expulsion from her Georgia middle school and possible felony charges by the local sheriff’s department. Her crime: writing the word “hi” on a locker room wall. Her white friend graffiti’d even more words on the wall, yet the school handled their punishments quite differently. Mikia’s friend paid […]

Sex, Power and Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later

PUBLISHED 10/18/2011 by

Almost everyone has an Anita Hill story. Some of us remember exactly where we were when that theater of sex, race and gender called a “hearing” was broadcast in primetime. Others recall water-cooler and sidewalk conversations and debates about guilt and innocence, about sexual harassment as a “white lady’s problem,” about the effect of the […]

In Case Being Abused in Mississippi Isn’t Bad Enough …

PUBLISHED 3/15/2011 by

Since the Arizona state legislature passed the draconian anti-immigration bill SB 1070, other states seem to be in a race to catch up. Nebraska and Mississippi, with some of the nation’s smallest percentages of Latinos living within their borders, are nonetheless trying to pass some of the toughest anti-immigration laws we have seen to date, […]