When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive decree aimed at cut federal funding from schools teaching what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A wave of follow-up directives required the elimination 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 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 brought to market, Crenshaw faces her most significant challenge yet: upholding the very ideas that have defined 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 not long ago Crenshaw’s research entered general public discourse. Until a few years ago, these theoretical frameworks remained largely confined to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These ideas were examined in academic institutions and policy circles, but rarely penetrated general public discussion or captured political attention. The broader population knew little of Crenshaw’s key contributions to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The pivotal moment occurred in 2020, when a informal alliance of right-wing activists, media personalities and politicians started promoting these ideas as divisive political topics. Abruptly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the heart of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has developed into an comprehensive campaign against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the principal scapegoat. What was once technical jargon has become highly contentious, deployed in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender intersect to form lived experience
- Critical race theory examines how racism is embedded in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists promoted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Personal Bases of Opposition
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s dedication to naming injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Growing up in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, instilled in her a strong conviction that entrenched inequality required something beyond individual goodwill to dismantle. These foundational experiences shaped her belief that academic work must advance justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are rendered invisible by the law.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was a form 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 scholar would be to express what major institutions chose to keep unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would guide her entire career, from her first legal publications to her current defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted significant personal hardships that deepened her grasp of structural inequality. These experiences solidified her dedication to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it became a ethical necessity. When she observed how legal frameworks failed 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 observing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This clarity has sustained her through many years of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw recognises that challenges to her views are not merely intellectual disagreements but reflect a underlying reluctance to recognising inconvenient facts about American systems. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite private toll and career resistance, originates in this painfully acquired knowledge that inaction aids only those determined to uphold the status quo. Her memoir and continued activism embody her determination to prevent her contributions from being overlooked.
Intersectionality Rooted In Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality did not arise from abstract theorising in university settings, but rather from observing the real inadequacies of the legal system to protect those experiencing multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was responding to a specific case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be adequately addressed by established legal protections designed primarily around individual forms of oppression. The law, she realised, treated race and gender as independent classifications, unable to see how they functioned together to shape actual circumstances. This insight reshaped legal scholarship and activism, providing language for experiences that had previously remained without recognition by institutions meant to protect them.
What distinguishes 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 matter of survival and justice for those experiencing them. Her scholarship insisted that courts and legal institutions must adapt to understand how racism, sexism, classism and other types of prejudice 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 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 movements for racial and gender justice has exacted a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has encountered 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 pushback represents an escalation of this hostility, with her name and ideas intentionally marked 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 advocate for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This dedication to collective action has meant enduring criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her academic work. Crenshaw has observed how her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and warped by opponents working to discredit entire fields of study and activist movements. Notwithstanding these difficulties, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, declining to be quieted or forsake the groups whose hardships motivated her academic contributions. Her determination embodies a fundamental commitment that the endeavour for equity demands commitment and that backing away would amount to a betrayal of those relying on her words.
The Power of Naming, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her career, 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 core principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding determines the potential for 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 simply academic—it was a political intervention designed to make visible the unseen, to compel recognition of realities that existing systems had systematically overlooked or denied.
The ongoing efforts to erase her concepts from federal policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw sees as fundamentally consequential. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are working to constrain a framework of analysis that challenges the justification for existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is itself a form of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the mutual interconnection of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must go on, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework examining racism in courts and law
- Established African American Policy Forum to advance racial justice scholarship and activism
The Back-talker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work faces significant political assault. The title itself bears significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her intellectual journey from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the observations and experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than encountering it solely through academic texts, drove her commitment to establishing frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions comprehend and tackle institutional inequality. The book serves as both a personal account and intellectual statement.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep removing her terminology in official policies, 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 sheer force of the backlash demonstrates, she argues, that people with authority recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory risk revealing difficult realities about institutions in America. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a fundamental commitment to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.