If you asked my two best friends from school about what I was like in school, they would say something like: “Tobi would backchat teachers,” and shake their heads. And you know what? It was true. Admittedly, part of it was teenage attitude, but a large part of it was because I had opinions and criticisms about what I was being taught.

So as someone who had read the work of Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the woman who coined the term intersectionality, throughout my degree and her new memoir called Backtalker, I knew I had to be at Southbank to finally see her talk about not just her life, but the world as it is in this very moment.

With Southbank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall hosting a sea of black women, and I mean a sea, every seat was filled and a majority of those seats had a black woman sitting in it. I even spotted one black woman holding last year’s Weekender tote bag. Kimberlé defined a Backtalker as: “the act of turning a critical eye to things we are told are unfixable or just the way things are.”