When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive decree aimed at reduce federal funding from schools providing what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A flurry of later orders mandated 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 deliberate removal of four decades of work by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the 66-year-old legal scholar who introduced the term intersectionality in 1989 and helped develop critical race theory as an scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her most significant challenge yet: defending the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Cultural Conflict
What creates the intensity of this backlash especially notable is how just lately Crenshaw’s research moved into mainstream public consciousness. Until recently, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be limited to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and advocacy groups. These frameworks were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but rarely penetrated general public discussion or attracted legislative interest. The broader population knew little of Crenshaw’s key contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The pivotal moment happened in 2020, when a loose coalition of right-wing activists, media personalities and politicians began elevating these ideas as divisive political topics. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the centre of the culture wars. In the subsequent five-year period, this has developed into an all-out war against what critics call “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the principal scapegoat. What was once scholarly language has become deeply polarising, utilised in debates about education, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender interconnect to shape personal experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is embedded in the legal framework
- Conservative activists promoted these concepts as political flashpoints in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Personal Foundations of Defiance
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s dedication to naming injustice did not stem from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Coming of age in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law failed to address. Her parents, both civil rights activists themselves, cultivated in her a strong conviction that systemic inequality required more than individual goodwill to challenge. These early years shaped her belief 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 a form of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a scholar would be to articulate what major institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to bring to light what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would shape her whole career, from her first legal publications to her present defence against those attempting to erase her body of work.
Setback and Perspective
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has grappled with significant personal hardships that deepened her grasp of systemic injustice. These experiences crystallised her commitment 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 recognised that conventional approaches to civil rights legislation were deeply insufficient. Her scholarship emerged not from abstract theorising but from witnessing the human cost of systemic oversight, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This understanding has carried her through many years of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw recognises that attacks on her ideas are not merely theoretical differences but reflect a deeper resistance to acknowledging difficult realities about institutions in America. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite individual sacrifice and institutional pushback, originates in this painfully acquired knowledge that inaction aids only those committed to preserving the current system. Her ongoing advocacy and written account constitute her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Rooted In Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not emerge from disconnected theorising in ivory towers, but rather from seeing the concrete failures of the courts to defend those confronting multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was addressing a specific 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 independent classifications, neglecting to acknowledge how they functioned together to influence lived reality. This realisation reshaped legal scholarship and activism, offering terminology for encounters that had long gone without recognition by bodies established to defend them.
What characterises Crenshaw’s work is its refusal to treat intersectionality as merely theoretical. She understood that identifying these interconnected forms of oppression was not an academic exercise but a matter 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 combine to produce distinct experiences of exclusion. By developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw established a framework that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Price of Collective Support
Standing at the forefront of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has exacted a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has encountered considerable opposition not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from critics within progressive spaces who questioned her methods or took issue with her emphasis 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 advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This commitment to solidarity has meant withstanding attacks, misrepresentations and attempts to discredit her scholarship. Crenshaw has observed how her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised, distorted by critics attempting to undermine whole academic disciplines and social movements. Despite these challenges, she continues her work with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, refusing to be silenced or to abandon the communities whose struggles inspired her research. Her steadfastness embodies a fundamental commitment that the pursuit of fairness necessitates dedication and that retreating would amount to a betrayal of those relying on her advocacy.
The Power of Naming, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures 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 establishing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she provided a framework for experiences that had previously gone unnamed in formal legal structures. This act of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the invisible, to force recognition of truths that current systems had systematically ignored or denied.
The present efforts to erase her terminology from federal policy and academic settings represent something Crenshaw sees as deeply significant. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a analytical framework that challenges the validity of existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is essentially a manifestation of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her unwillingness to remain quiet reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must persist, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed critical race theory framework analysing racism in courts and law
- Established African American Policy Forum to advance race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Work Left Undone
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, emerges at a moment when her life’s work faces unprecedented political assault. The title itself carries significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who dare challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts 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 observing injustice firsthand, rather than experiencing it only through academic literature, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions comprehend and tackle systemic 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. Federal agencies continue removing her terminology in official policies, whilst American school boards restrict access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw views this moment as confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The sheer force of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power understand how intersectionality and critical race theory threaten to expose uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—represents a core dedication to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.