When Donald Trump took office in January 2024, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order designed to cut federal funding from schools providing what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A wave of follow-up directives ordered the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion personnel across the federal government, whilst federal agencies began marking 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 contributed to critical race theory as an theoretical framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: defending the very ideas that have defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Cultural Conflict
What renders the force of this pushback particularly striking is how just lately Crenshaw’s work moved into the broader public awareness. Until recently, these theoretical frameworks stayed mostly confined to academic legal work, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These concepts were examined in universities and policy forums, but seldom entered general public discussion or garnered legislative interest. The broader population had limited awareness of Crenshaw’s key contributions to the fields of law and civil rights.
The pivotal moment occurred in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative campaigners, prominent commentators and politicians began elevating these ideas as divisive political topics. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the heart of the culture wars. In the subsequent five-year period, this has snowballed into an comprehensive campaign against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the ultimate bogeyman. What was once technical jargon has grown deeply polarising, weaponised in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender interconnect to form everyday reality
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is deeply rooted in legal systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Personal Underpinnings of Opposition
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s commitment to identifying injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law did not address. Her parents, themselves committed to civil rights, fostered in her a profound awareness that structural injustice required something beyond individual goodwill to challenge. These foundational experiences shaped her conviction that scholarship must serve 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 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 a form of complicity. Crenshaw learned early that her role as a scholar would be to express what powerful institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to bring to light what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This foundational belief would shape her whole career, from her first legal publications to her current defence against those attempting to erase her life’s work.
Losing Ground and Understanding
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that deepened her understanding of structural inequality. These encounters crystallised her commitment to intersectionality as more than theoretical framework—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she observed how legal systems failed people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she recognised that traditional methods to civil rights law were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work arose not from abstract theorising but from witnessing the real-world impact of systemic oversight, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This understanding has supported her through many years of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw understands that criticism of her thinking are not merely academic disputes but reflect a fundamental opposition to acknowledging difficult realities about American institutions. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite personal cost and institutional pushback, arises from this hard-won understanding that quiet benefits only those invested in maintaining the existing order. Her memoir and continued activism represent her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Emerging From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s innovative concept of intersectionality did not arise from abstract theorising in ivory towers, but rather from witnessing the concrete failures of the justice system to protect those experiencing multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was addressing a particular case: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be adequately addressed by current anti-discrimination laws centred on single-axis oppression. The law, she realised, regarded race and gender as independent classifications, failing to recognise how they functioned together to determine actual circumstances. This realisation revolutionised legal academia and activism, giving expression for situations previously left unnamed and unrecognised by institutions meant to protect 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 developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw created a language that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Costs of Solidarity
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 protecting existing arrangements but also from detractors in progressive spaces who questioned her methods or disagreed with her emphasis on intersectionality. The current backlash 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 seeks to illuminate, understanding that her platform and privilege carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This pledge of solidarity has meant enduring hostility, false claims and campaigns against her academic work. Crenshaw has observed how her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and twisted by detractors seeking to delegitimise comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. 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 people whose experiences shaped her research. Her resilience embodies a fundamental commitment that the work of justice demands commitment and that backing away would constitute a betrayal of those depending on her voice.
Naming Power, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to naming the systems and structures that major organisations prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a fundamental principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding determines the possibility of change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she offered a framework for experiences that had previously gone unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This act of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act intended to make visible the unseen, to compel recognition of truths that current systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her language from federal guidelines and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw identifies as deeply significant. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for elimination, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a analytical framework that challenges the validity of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is fundamentally an act of power, an effort to make invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must continue, regardless of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to advance racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work faces significant political assault. The title itself holds significance—a conscious reclamation of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her scholarly development from childhood through her groundbreaking legal scholarship, offering readers insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than engaging with it only through scholarly texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could actually transform how institutions grasp and address structural inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work continues facing attack. Federal agencies continue removing her terminology in official policies, whilst school boards across America restrict access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw views this moment 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 difficult realities about institutions in America. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—represents a fundamental commitment to the communities whose experiences these frameworks illuminate and validate.