When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive order intended to cut federal funding from schools teaching what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A wave of follow-up directives required the removal 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 deliberate removal of four decades of work by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the 66-year-old legal scholar who coined the term intersectionality in 1989 and played a role in developing critical race theory as an academic framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her greatest challenge yet: upholding the very ideas that have defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Cultural Conflict
What makes the intensity of this negative reaction remarkably pronounced is how just lately Crenshaw’s research became part of the broader public awareness. Until not long ago, intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely within the domain of academic legal work, scholarly discussion and advocacy groups. These frameworks were examined in academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered mainstream conversation or garnered legislative interest. The broader population remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s seminal work to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The crucial juncture came in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative campaigners, media figures and politicians began elevating these ideas as divisive political topics. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the core of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has snowballed into an all-out war against what critics call “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the chief target. What was once technical jargon has become politically radioactive, utilised in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender interconnect to shape lived experience
- Critical race theory explores how racism is deeply rooted in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a phrase for removal
The Personal Underpinnings of Defiance
Awakening in Childhood
Crenshaw’s resolve in identifying injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Growing up in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she saw directly the tensions and nuances that the law failed to address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, cultivated in her a profound awareness that systemic inequality required more than individual goodwill to overcome. These foundational experiences shaped her belief that scholarship must serve justice, that ideas matter because they establish whose realities are acknowledged and whose are rendered invisible by legal systems.
Her childhood taught her that naming things was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or did not recognise how various types of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became 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 actively worked to obscure. This foundational belief would shape her whole career, from her first legal publications to her current defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Setback and Perspective
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted significant personal hardships that deepened her grasp of systemic injustice. These encounters solidified her dedication to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it transformed into a moral imperative. When she witnessed how legal systems fell short of protecting people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that traditional methods to civil rights legislation were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work emerged not from abstract theorising but from observing the real-world impact of systemic oversight, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some caused direct harm to others.
This understanding has supported her through decades of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw recognises that criticism of her thinking are not merely academic disputes but reveal a underlying reluctance to recognising inconvenient facts about American systems. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite private toll and professional opposition, arises from this hard-earned insight that inaction aids only those committed to preserving the existing order. Her memoir and continued activism embody her determination to prevent her contributions from being overlooked.
Intersectionality Stemming From Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s innovative concept of intersectionality was not born from disconnected theorising in ivory towers, but rather from observing the concrete failures of the justice system to safeguard those confronting multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was addressing a particular case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be adequately addressed by current anti-discrimination laws centred on individual forms of oppression. The law, she realised, treated race and gender as distinct categories, failing to recognise how they operated simultaneously to shape lived reality. This understanding revolutionised legal studies and activism, providing language for encounters that had long gone unacknowledged by institutions meant to protect 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 types of prejudice 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 established a framework that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Price of Collective Support
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has taken a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has encountered considerable opposition not only from those defending the status quo but also from critics within progressive spaces who questioned her methods or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current backlash represents an intensification of this hostility, with her name and ideas intentionally marked for erasure by powerful political forces. Yet Crenshaw has steadfastly maintained solidarity with those whose experiences her work aims to illuminate, understanding that her platform and privilege carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This dedication to collective action has meant facing attacks, misrepresentations and attempts to discredit her academic work. Crenshaw has observed how her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and twisted by detractors working to discredit whole academic disciplines and social movements. Notwithstanding these difficulties, she continues her work with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, rejecting silence or desertion of the groups whose hardships motivated her academic contributions. Her resilience embodies a fundamental commitment that the work of justice demands commitment and that stepping back would represent a betrayal of those relying on her voice.
The Power of Naming, Confronting Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to identifying the systems and frameworks that major organisations choose to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a core principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes the possibility of change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she offered a vocabulary for experiences that had previously gone unnamed in formal legal structures. This process of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the unseen, to compel recognition of truths that existing systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her terminology from government policy and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw recognises as fundamentally consequential. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for elimination, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a system of understanding that challenges the legitimacy of existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this suppression is essentially a manifestation of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must persist, regardless of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed critical race theory framework examining racism in courts and law
- Established African American Policy Forum to advance racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work encounters significant political assault. The title itself carries significance—a conscious reclamation of a term often used to diminish and silence those who dare challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents her intellectual evolution from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the observations and experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than engaging with it only through academic texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions comprehend and tackle structural inequality. The book serves as both a personal account and intellectual statement.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Federal agencies continue removing her terminology in official policies, whilst American school boards limit student access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw sees this period as confirmation of her ideas’ influence. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power understand how intersectionality and critical race theory risk revealing difficult realities about institutions in America. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a fundamental commitment to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.