When Donald Trump took office in January 2024, one of his first acts was to sign an executive decree designed to cut federal funding from schools teaching what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A series of subsequent orders ordered the removal of diversity, equity and inclusion personnel across the federal government, whilst federal agencies began identifying 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 introduced the term intersectionality in 1989 and contributed to critical race theory as an scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: defending the very ideas that have characterized her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Cultural Conflict
What renders the intensity of this pushback remarkably pronounced is how recently Crenshaw’s work became part of the broader public awareness. Until a few years ago, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be limited to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These ideas were discussed in universities and policy forums, but rarely penetrated popular discourse or captured political attention. The wider society had limited awareness of Crenshaw’s seminal work to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The pivotal moment occurred in 2020, when a informal alliance of conservative campaigners, prominent commentators and politicians commenced advancing these ideas as divisive political topics. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the centre of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has developed into an full-scale assault against what critics call “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the chief target. What was once technical jargon has grown deeply polarising, weaponised in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender intersect to shape personal experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is deeply rooted in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists promoted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Individual Bases of Opposition
Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s commitment to exposing injustice did not stem from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Raised in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, both civil rights activists themselves, fostered in her a deep understanding that structural injustice required far more than individual goodwill to challenge. These formative years shaped her conviction that scholarship must serve justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are rendered invisible by legal systems.
Her early years taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or did not recognise how various types of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a scholar would be to articulate what powerful institutions chose to keep unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This foundational belief would guide her entire career, from her first legal publications to her present defence against those attempting to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Comprehension
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that strengthened her understanding of structural inequality. These encounters crystallised her commitment to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she observed how legal frameworks failed people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights legislation were fundamentally inadequate. Her scholarship arose not from abstract theorising but from observing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This lucidity has carried her through many years of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw understands that challenges to her views are not merely theoretical differences but reveal a deeper resistance to recognising difficult realities about institutions in America. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite individual sacrifice and career resistance, originates in this hard-earned insight that inaction aids only those invested in maintaining the status quo. Her ongoing advocacy and written account embody her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Emerging From Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality was not born from abstract theorising in ivory towers, but rather from seeing the real inadequacies of the legal system to defend those confronting multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was reacting to a particular case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be sufficiently tackled by current anti-discrimination laws built mainly on single-axis oppression. The law, she understood, regarded race and gender as separate categories, neglecting to acknowledge how they operated simultaneously to influence lived reality. This insight transformed legal scholarship and activism, giving expression for encounters that had long gone unacknowledged by institutions meant to protect them.
What characterises Crenshaw’s work is its rejection of treating intersectionality as merely theoretical. She understood that identifying these interconnected forms of oppression was not an academic exercise but a question of survival and justice for those experiencing them. Her scholarship insisted that legal systems must evolve to recognise how racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination do not operate in isolation but rather interact to create distinct experiences of exclusion. By developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw established a framework that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Price of Collective Support
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has exacted a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has faced considerable opposition not only from those defending the status quo but also from detractors in progressive spaces who questioned her methods or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current backlash represents an escalation of this hostility, with her name and ideas intentionally marked for erasure by powerful political forces. Yet Crenshaw has consistently prioritised solidarity with those whose experiences her work seeks to illuminate, understanding that her platform and privilege carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This commitment to solidarity has meant withstanding hostility, false claims and campaigns against her research. Crenshaw has watched as her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised and warped by opponents working to discredit comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. Despite these challenges, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, rejecting silence or desertion of the communities whose struggles inspired her research. Her steadfastness reflects a deeper conviction that the pursuit of fairness demands commitment and that backing away would amount to a betrayal of those relying on her words.
The Power of Naming, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to naming the systems and structures that powerful institutions prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has consistently operated on a fundamental principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding determines the possibility of change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she provided a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal structures. This process of naming was never merely academic—it was a political intervention intended to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of realities that current systems had systematically ignored or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her concepts from federal guidelines and academic settings represent something Crenshaw sees as fundamentally consequential. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a analytical framework that challenges the validity of existing power structures. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is essentially a manifestation of power, an effort to make invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must persist, in spite of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established critical race theory framework analysing racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to advance race justice research and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work encounters extraordinary assault. The title itself bears significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term often used to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her scholarly development from childhood through her innovative legal scholarship, giving readers insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than experiencing it only through academic literature, drove her commitment to establishing frameworks that could actually transform how institutions comprehend and tackle structural inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual manifesto.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep removing her terminology in official policies, whilst school boards across America limit student access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw sees this period as confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory risk revealing uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—constitutes a core dedication to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.