Kimberlé Crenshaw: The election just gave us the ability to fight another day.

“The election just gave us the ability to fight another day. And that ‘another day’ is now,” Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw told Dr. James Peterson on Wednesday’s Evening WURDs, reflecting on the Midterm race.

Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar on critical race theory (CRT) and the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum. Her civil rights advocacy and legal work span decades and have been instrumental in shaping language and how scholars think about structural inequalities in the United States. She spoke candidly on-air about how the Blue Wave was made possible. She says that everyone except for the millions of Black people who waited in long lines and marched is getting credit for the outcome of the race.

“We are the people that are not really being called into the party, even though we made the party possible.”

Crenshaw and Peterson also talked about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas teaching on race and equality at the University of Texas at Austin this spring. In recent years, her work has been under strong criticism as Republicans and the far-right vilified CRT and banned it from being taught in K-12 public schools around the country, despite CRT being a legal framework that is only taught at undergraduate and graduate levels. She says there is still much work to be done to undo a lot of the anti-CRT, anti-woke policies that were put in place after 2020. She raised specific concerns about the university’s decision to add Thomas to its curriculum while phasing out multiple degree programs centered on race, ethnicity and gender.

“This is not simply an effort to de-racialize the curriculum,” Crenshaw told Peterson. “They are actually trying to replace the ways that race is thought about. They’re trying to replace the thinkers that are being foregrounded.”

On Nov. 20, Crenshaw will serve as the keynote speaker for WURD’s Founder’s Day Gala.

Listen to the full interview below.