When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an presidential directive intended to slash federal funding from schools teaching what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A series of follow-up directives ordered 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 deliberate removal 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 greatest challenge yet: defending the very ideas that have characterized her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Culture War
What creates the intensity of this negative reaction remarkably pronounced is how just lately Crenshaw’s research became part of general public discourse. Until recently, these theoretical frameworks remained largely confined to legal scholarship, academic debate and advocacy groups. These frameworks were discussed in universities and policy forums, but rarely penetrated mainstream conversation or captured legislative interest. The wider society knew little of Crenshaw’s key contributions to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The pivotal moment came in 2020, when a loose coalition of right-wing activists, prominent commentators and politicians started promoting these ideas as political flashpoints. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the centre of the culture wars. In the following five years, this has escalated into an full-scale assault against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the principal scapegoat. What was once scholarly language has grown politically radioactive, utilised in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender interconnect to shape lived experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is deeply rooted in legal systems
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as political flashpoints in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Bases of Resistance
Awakening in Childhood
Crenshaw’s commitment to naming injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Growing up in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she saw directly the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law failed to address. Her parents, both civil rights activists themselves, fostered in her a strong conviction that structural injustice required far more than individual goodwill to challenge. These formative years shaped her belief that academic work must advance justice, that ideas matter because they determine whose experiences are recognised and whose are left unseen by the law.
Her early years taught her that identifying concepts was an act of resistance. When institutions ignored 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 scholar would be to express what powerful institutions chose to keep unspoken, to bring to light what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would guide her whole career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those seeking to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Comprehension
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that deepened her understanding of structural inequality. These experiences crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as 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 identified that conventional approaches to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. Her scholarship arose not from abstract theorising but from observing the real-world impact of systemic oversight, the ways that systems designed to protect some caused direct harm to others.
This lucidity has sustained her through many years of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw understands that criticism of her thinking are not merely intellectual disagreements but reflect a deeper resistance to recognising inconvenient facts about institutions in America. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite private toll and career resistance, stems from this hard-earned insight that silence serves only those committed to preserving the current system. Her sustained activism and published work represent her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Rooted In Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not arise from theoretical abstraction in university settings, but rather from seeing the concrete failures of the legal system to protect those facing intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was responding to a particular case: Black women workers whose encounters with prejudice could not be sufficiently tackled by existing civil rights frameworks designed primarily around single-axis oppression. The law, she recognised, classified race and gender as independent classifications, failing to recognise how they operated simultaneously to shape lived reality. This insight revolutionised legal academia and activism, providing language for situations previously left without recognition by bodies established to defend them.
What sets apart 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 develop to acknowledge how racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination 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 established a framework that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Costs of Unity
Standing at the forefront of movements for racial and gender justice has exacted a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has encountered considerable opposition not only from those defending the status quo but also from detractors in progressive spaces who challenged her approach or took issue with her emphasis on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an intensification 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 aims to illuminate, understanding that her platform and privilege carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This commitment to solidarity has meant enduring attacks, misrepresentations and attempts to discredit her scholarship. Crenshaw has watched as her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and warped by opponents working to discredit entire fields of study and activist movements. Despite these challenges, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, declining to be quieted or forsake the people whose experiences shaped her scholarship. Her resilience reflects a deeper conviction that the pursuit of fairness necessitates dedication and that backing away would represent a betrayal of those counting on her voice.
Naming Power, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to identifying the systems and frameworks that major organisations choose to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a fundamental principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding shapes the potential for change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she offered a framework for experiences that had previously gone 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 denied.
The present efforts to erase her concepts from federal guidelines and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw recognises as deeply significant. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a framework of analysis that challenges the validity of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is fundamentally an act of power, an attempt to render invisible once more the mutual interconnection of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must persist, regardless of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework examining racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work confronts extraordinary assault. The title itself bears significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her scholarly development 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 establishing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions comprehend and tackle institutional inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep eliminating 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 confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory threaten to expose difficult realities about American institutions. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—represents a fundamental commitment to the people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.