ALOUD and ACLU of Southern California present an urgent and inspiring conversation with visionary legal scholar and writer Kimberlé Crenshaw and ACLU of SoCal Executive Director Chandra Bhatnagar to discuss Crenshaw’s new memoir. Charting her extraordinary journey from precocious child to one of the most influential thinkers of our time, Backtalker reveals the defining personal experiences that shaped her groundbreaking work on critical race theory and intersectionality—a term she coined in 1989 to shed light on how overlapping forms of inequality rooted in gender, race, and class shape lived experiences.
Featured Author and Moderator:
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law. Crenshaw’s work has been foundational in critical race theory and in intersectionality, a term she coined to describe the double bind of simultaneous racial and gender prejudice. Through her leadership at the African American Policy Forum, she is credited for creating the #SayHerName movement, a nationwide campaign to recognize Black women and girls in the national discourse on police violence. She teaches at Columbia Law School, UCLA School of Law, and is the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum.
Chandra S. Bhatnagar
Chandra S. Bhatnagar is executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. He joined the affiliate in July 2025 and is a leading expert on civil rights and human rights with a distinguished 20-year track record as an organizational leader and changemaker spanning the nonprofit sector, federal government, and higher education.
From his time at the ACLU national office’s Human Rights Program to his work under the Obama administration at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and at his previous post as the assistant vice chancellor for civil rights at UCLA, Chandra has creatively used litigation, community organizing, public education, and policy advocacy to defend communities who have been historically marginalized.
In 2015, Chandra was part of a legal team that successfully represented H-2B guest workers from India, who were defrauded and exploited in a labor trafficking scheme in Mississippi and Texas.
