When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order designed to cut federal funding from schools offering what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A wave of later orders required the termination 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 systematic erasure of four decades of work by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the 66-year-old legal scholar who introduced the term intersectionality in 1989 and played a role in developing critical race theory as an scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is published, Crenshaw faces her most significant challenge yet: upholding the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Culture War
What creates the intensity of this backlash particularly striking is how not long ago Crenshaw’s work became part of general public discourse. Until a few years ago, intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely limited to academic legal work, academic debate and activist circles. These frameworks were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but rarely penetrated general public discussion or attracted political attention. The wider society remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The pivotal moment came in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative activists, prominent commentators and politicians started promoting these ideas as political flashpoints. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the core of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has escalated into an all-out war against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the ultimate bogeyman. What was once scholarly language has turned politically radioactive, deployed in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender overlap to form personal experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is embedded in legal systems
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as focal points of political debate in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Individual Underpinnings of Resistance
Awakening in Childhood
Crenshaw’s dedication to exposing injustice did not stem from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Raised in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law did not address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, fostered in her a profound awareness that structural injustice required more than individual goodwill to dismantle. 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 made invisible by legal structures.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was an act of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or did not recognise how multiple forms of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a academic would be to express what powerful institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to make visible what systems actively worked to obscure. This core conviction would shape her entire career, from her first legal publications to her current defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Loss and Comprehension
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that deepened her understanding of systemic injustice. These encounters crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than academic concept—it became a moral imperative. When she witnessed how legal frameworks fell short of protecting people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights legislation were deeply insufficient. Her academic work emerged not from detached analysis but from witnessing the real-world impact of systemic oversight, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some caused direct harm to others.
This lucidity has carried her through many years of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw grasps that attacks on her ideas are not merely intellectual disagreements but reveal a fundamental opposition to recognising uncomfortable truths about institutions in America. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite individual sacrifice and institutional pushback, originates in this painfully acquired knowledge that silence serves only those determined to uphold the current system. Her memoir and continued activism constitute her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Emerging From Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not emerge from abstract theorising in ivory towers, but rather from observing the real inadequacies of the justice system to defend those experiencing multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was responding to a distinct situation: Black women workers whose encounters with prejudice could not be sufficiently tackled by current anti-discrimination laws centred on single-axis oppression. The law, she realised, classified race and gender as distinct categories, unable to see how they worked in tandem to shape everyday experience. This understanding reshaped legal studies and activism, giving expression for situations previously left without recognition by bodies established to defend them.
What sets apart 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 question of survival and justice for those experiencing them. Her scholarship insisted that legal systems must adapt to understand how racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination do not operate in isolation but rather interact to create 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 Costs of Unity
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has exacted a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has encountered substantial resistance not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from detractors in progressive spaces who challenged her approach or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an intensification 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 seeks to illuminate, understanding that her platform and privilege carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This dedication to collective action has meant withstanding criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her scholarship. Crenshaw has seen her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised, distorted by critics attempting to undermine entire fields of study and activist movements. In spite of these obstacles, 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 constitute a betrayal of those counting on her words.
Naming Power, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures that major organisations choose 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 discourse, she provided a framework for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This process of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of realities that existing systems had systematically overlooked or denied.
The present efforts to erase her terminology from government policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw sees as fundamentally consequential. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a analytical framework that challenges the validity of existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this suppression is itself a form of power, an attempt to render invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must continue, regardless of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework examining racism in courts and law
- Established African American Policy Forum to advance race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work confronts unprecedented political assault. The title itself carries significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents her intellectual evolution from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, offering readers insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than engaging with it only through academic 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 remains acutely aware that her work remains under siege. Federal agencies continue removing her terminology in official policies, whilst American school boards restrict access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw sees this period as validation of her ideas’ potency. The sheer force of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority understand how intersectionality and critical race theory risk revealing uncomfortable truths about institutions in America. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a fundamental commitment to the people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.