In conversation with Dorothy Roberts

One of the country’s foremost authorities in civil rights, Black feminist legal theory, race, and the law, Kimberlé Crenshaw is a law professor at UCLA and Columbia Law School, where in 1996 she founded the African American Policy Forum. She is the co-author of Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women and Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected, and her articles have appeared in Harvard Law Review, the National Black Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, The New Republic, and The Nation. The coiner of the terms “critical race theory” and “intersectionality,” Crenshaw served on the legal team of Anita Hill during the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and wrote the background paper on race and gender discrimination for the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism in 2001. Including a forward by Janelle Monáe, #SayHerName explains how Black women are especially susceptible to police violence and the ways in which various communities can help empower them.

Addressing social justice issues of policing, state surveillance of families, and science, Dorothy Roberts’s books include Killing the Black Body, Shattered Bonds, and Fatal Invention. She has also authored more than 100 scholarly articles and has co-edited six books on various legal issues. The George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania, Roberts is the director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. In her latest book Torn Apart she explains that the abolition of the U.S. child welfare system—which is designed to punish Black families—will liberate Black communities.

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