When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive order intended to cut federal funding from schools teaching what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A wave of follow-up directives required the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion personnel across the federal government, whilst federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid, including “intersectional” and “intersectionality”. The result has been the comprehensive elimination of four decades of work by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the 66-year-old legal scholar who created the term intersectionality in 1989 and helped develop critical race theory as an academic framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: defending the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Cultural Conflict
What makes the force of this backlash especially notable is how just lately Crenshaw’s scholarship entered general public discourse. Until not long ago, these theoretical frameworks continued to be limited to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These frameworks were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered mainstream conversation or captured legislative interest. The wider society knew little of Crenshaw’s seminal work to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The pivotal moment occurred in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative campaigners, prominent commentators and politicians started promoting these ideas as political flashpoints. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the core of the culture wars. In the following five years, this has escalated into an comprehensive campaign against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the ultimate bogeyman. What was once technical jargon has turned deeply polarising, weaponised in debates about education, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender overlap to influence personal experience
- Critical race theory examines how racism is embedded in the legal framework
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Foundations of Opposition
Early Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s resolve in exposing injustice did not stem from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Growing up in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law failed to address. Her parents, themselves committed to civil rights, instilled in her a deep understanding that structural injustice required something beyond individual goodwill to overcome. These early years shaped her conviction that intellectual endeavour must support justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are left unseen by legal systems.
Her early years taught her that identifying concepts was an act of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became a form of complicity. Crenshaw learned early that her role as a academic would be to articulate what major institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to bring to light what systems actively worked to obscure. This core conviction would shape her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her present defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Setback and Perspective
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has grappled with significant personal hardships that deepened her understanding of structural inequality. These encounters solidified her commitment to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it became a ethical necessity. When she witnessed how legal systems fell short of protecting people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she recognised that traditional methods to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. Her academic work arose not from detached analysis but from observing the real-world impact of legal blindness, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This understanding has sustained her through decades of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw grasps that challenges to her views are not merely academic disputes but demonstrate a deeper resistance to accepting difficult realities about American systems. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite private toll and career resistance, arises from this painfully acquired knowledge that inaction aids only those determined to uphold the existing order. Her ongoing advocacy and written account represent her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Stemming From Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not arise from theoretical abstraction in academic institutions, but rather from seeing the concrete failures of the courts to defend those experiencing layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was addressing a particular case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be properly handled by established legal protections built mainly on single-axis oppression. The law, she recognised, treated race and gender as separate categories, failing to recognise how they operated simultaneously to influence everyday experience. This understanding revolutionised legal studies and activism, providing language for experiences that had previously remained unnamed and unrecognised by institutions meant to protect them.
What distinguishes Crenshaw’s work is its rejection of treating intersectionality as merely theoretical. She understood that naming these overlapping systems of oppression was not an academic exercise but a matter of survival and justice for those experiencing them. Her scholarship insisted that courts and legal institutions must adapt to understand how racism, sexism, classism and other types of prejudice do not operate in isolation but rather combine to produce unique patterns of marginalisation. By establishing intersectionality as both a theoretical lens and practical instrument for activism, Crenshaw created a language that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Price of Unity
Standing at the forefront of movements for racial and gender justice has exacted a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has encountered substantial resistance not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from detractors in progressive spaces who challenged her approach or took issue with her emphasis on intersectionality. The current backlash represents an intensification of this hostility, with her name and ideas intentionally marked for erasure by powerful political forces. Yet Crenshaw has steadfastly maintained solidarity with those whose experiences her work aims to illuminate, understanding that her position and standing carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This pledge of solidarity has meant withstanding criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her academic work. Crenshaw has watched as her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised and warped by opponents working to discredit comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. Despite these challenges, she continues her work with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, refusing to be silenced or to abandon the groups whose hardships motivated her academic contributions. Her resilience embodies a fundamental commitment that the endeavour for equity necessitates dedication and that backing away would constitute a betrayal of those depending on her words.
The Power of Naming, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to identifying the systems and frameworks that major organisations prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a core principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes the possibility of change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she offered a vocabulary for experiences that had previously gone unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This process of naming was never simply academic—it was a political intervention intended to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of realities that current systems had systematically ignored or denied.
The present efforts to erase her terminology from federal policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw identifies as fundamentally consequential. When government agencies flag words like “intersectionality” for elimination, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a system of understanding that challenges the legitimacy of existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this suppression is essentially a manifestation of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the mutual interconnection of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must continue, regardless of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework examining racism in legal institutions
- Established African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work confronts unprecedented political assault. The title itself bears significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who dare challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her intellectual journey from childhood through her innovative legal scholarship, giving readers insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how observing injustice firsthand, rather than encountering it solely through academic texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions understand and address institutional inequality. The book serves as both a personal account and intellectual statement.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work continues facing attack. Government bodies keep removing her terminology from policy documents, whilst school boards across America restrict access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw sees this period as validation of her ideas’ influence. The sheer force of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power understand how critical race theory and intersectionality risk revealing uncomfortable truths about institutions in America. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—constitutes a fundamental commitment to the people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.