When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive decree designed to slash federal funding from schools teaching what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A flurry of follow-up directives mandated the termination 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 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: upholding the very ideas that have characterized her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Cultural Conflict
What renders the intensity of this negative reaction particularly striking is how not long ago Crenshaw’s work became part of the broader public awareness. Until recently, these theoretical frameworks remained largely confined to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and advocacy groups. These concepts were discussed in universities and policy forums, but infrequently reached general public discussion or attracted legislative interest. The broader population knew little of Crenshaw’s seminal work to the fields of law and civil rights.
The pivotal moment came in 2020, when a loose coalition of conservative campaigners, media figures and politicians started promoting these ideas as political flashpoints. Abruptly, intersectionality and critical race theory were pushed to the core of the culture wars. In the following five years, this has developed into an comprehensive campaign against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the chief target. What was once scholarly language has grown deeply polarising, weaponised in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender overlap to influence lived experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is embedded in legal systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Underpinnings of Defiance
Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s dedication to identifying injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Growing up in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the contradictions and complexities that the law did not address. Her parents, both civil rights activists themselves, fostered in her a profound awareness that structural injustice required something beyond individual goodwill to overcome. These formative years shaped her conviction that academic work must advance justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are rendered invisible by legal structures.
Her early years taught her that naming things was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see how various types of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a scholar would be to express what powerful institutions chose to keep unspoken, to make visible what systems actively worked to obscure. This foundational belief would shape her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her present defence against those attempting to erase her life’s work.
Losing Ground and Understanding
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that deepened her understanding of structural inequality. These experiences crystallised her commitment to intersectionality as far more than academic concept—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she witnessed how legal frameworks fell short of protecting people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she recognised that conventional approaches to civil rights law were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work emerged not from detached analysis but from observing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that systems designed to protect some caused direct harm to others.
This understanding has sustained her through decades of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw recognises that challenges to her views are not merely intellectual disagreements but reflect a deeper resistance to recognising inconvenient facts about American systems. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite individual sacrifice and institutional pushback, originates in this hard-earned insight that silence serves only those determined to uphold the status quo. Her sustained activism and published work constitute her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Emerging From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s innovative concept of intersectionality did not arise from abstract theorising in ivory towers, but rather from seeing the concrete failures of the legal system to protect those experiencing multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was addressing a specific case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be sufficiently tackled by established legal protections designed primarily around one-dimensional discrimination. The law, she realised, classified race and gender as distinct categories, neglecting to acknowledge how they operated simultaneously to shape actual circumstances. This understanding revolutionised legal academia and activism, giving expression for situations previously left unnamed and unrecognised by bodies established to defend them.
What distinguishes Crenshaw’s work is its refusal to treat 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 develop to acknowledge how racism, sexism, classism and other types of prejudice do not operate in isolation but rather interact to create unique patterns of marginalisation. By developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw created a language that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Costs of Solidarity
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has taken a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has encountered considerable opposition not only from those defending the status quo but also from critics within progressive spaces who questioned her methods or disagreed with her emphasis on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an escalation of this hostility, with her name and ideas deliberately targeted for erasure by influential political actors. Yet Crenshaw has consistently prioritised solidarity with those whose experiences her work aims to illuminate, understanding that her position and standing carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This dedication to collective action has meant facing criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her research. Crenshaw has watched as her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised and twisted by detractors seeking to delegitimise whole academic disciplines and social movements. Despite these challenges, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, declining to be quieted or forsake the communities whose struggles inspired her scholarship. Her determination demonstrates a profound belief that the endeavour for equity requires sacrifice and that stepping back would represent a betrayal of those depending on her advocacy.
The Power of Naming, Confronting Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to identifying the systems and frameworks that powerful institutions choose to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a fundamental principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding shapes the possibility of change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she offered a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal structures. This act of naming was never simply academic—it was a political intervention designed to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of truths that existing systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The present efforts to erase her concepts from federal policy and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw recognises as fundamentally consequential. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for elimination, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are seeking to restrict a analytical framework that challenges the justification for existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is essentially a manifestation of power, an effort to make invisible once more the mutual interconnection of oppression. Her unwillingness to remain quiet reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must go on, regardless of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework examining racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to advance race justice research and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, emerges at a moment when her life’s work confronts significant political assault. The title itself holds significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her intellectual evolution from childhood through her groundbreaking 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 scholarly texts, drove her commitment to establishing frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions comprehend and tackle systemic inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work continues facing attack. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology from policy documents, whilst American school boards restrict access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw sees this period as validation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory risk revealing uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a core dedication to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.