When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive order designed to reduce federal funding from schools providing what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A series of later orders mandated the elimination 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 coined the term intersectionality in 1989 and helped develop critical race theory as an scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is published, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: defending the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Culture War
What makes the intensity of this backlash particularly striking is how just lately Crenshaw’s work moved into mainstream public consciousness. Until a few years ago, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be within the domain of legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and grassroots movements. These frameworks were examined in universities and policy forums, but seldom entered popular discourse or attracted legislative interest. The wider society knew little of Crenshaw’s key contributions to the fields of law and civil rights.
The crucial juncture happened in 2020, when a disparate group of right-wing activists, prominent commentators and politicians started promoting these ideas as divisive political topics. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the heart of the culture wars. In the following five years, this has escalated into an full-scale assault against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the principal scapegoat. What was once scholarly language has turned highly contentious, weaponised in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender interconnect to influence everyday reality
- Critical race theory examines how racism is woven into the legal framework
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Bases of Opposition
Early Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s dedication to naming injustice did not stem from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Coming of age in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the contradictions and complexities that the law failed to address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, instilled in her a strong conviction that systemic inequality required something beyond 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 left unseen by legal structures.
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 operated simultaneously, silence became a form of complicity. Crenshaw learned early that her role as a academic would be to express what major institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to bring to light what systems actively worked to obscure. This core conviction would shape her whole career, from her earliest legal writings to her present defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Loss and Comprehension
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that deepened her grasp of structural inequality. These encounters solidified her dedication to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it transformed into a moral imperative. When she observed how legal systems fell short of protecting people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights law were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work emerged not from detached analysis but from witnessing the real-world impact of legal blindness, the ways that systems designed to protect some caused direct harm to others.
This lucidity has sustained her through decades of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw recognises that criticism of her thinking are not merely theoretical differences but reveal a fundamental opposition to accepting inconvenient facts about American institutions. 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 represent her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Stemming From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not emerge from disconnected theorising in academic institutions, but rather from observing the tangible shortcomings of the legal system to safeguard those confronting layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was addressing a distinct situation: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be sufficiently tackled by established legal protections designed primarily around single-axis oppression. The law, she recognised, classified race and gender as independent classifications, failing to recognise how they functioned together to determine actual circumstances. This understanding revolutionised legal studies and activism, offering terminology for experiences that had previously remained unacknowledged by institutions meant to protect them.
What characterises 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 legal systems must develop to acknowledge 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 Solidarity
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has taken a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has faced substantial resistance not only from those defending the status quo but also from critics within progressive spaces who challenged her approach or disagreed with her focus 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 steadfastly maintained solidarity with those whose experiences her work aims to illuminate, understanding that her position and standing carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This pledge of solidarity has meant enduring criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her research. Crenshaw has observed how her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised and twisted by detractors seeking to delegitimise comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. In spite of these obstacles, she continues her work with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, refusing to be silenced or to abandon the people whose experiences shaped her academic contributions. Her determination embodies a fundamental commitment that the work of justice demands commitment and that retreating would represent a betrayal of those relying on her words.
The Power of Naming, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to identifying the systems and frameworks that powerful institutions choose to leave unexamined. Her work has consistently 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 provided a vocabulary for experiences that had previously gone unnamed in formal legal structures. This act of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act intended to make visible the unseen, to force recognition of truths that current systems had systematically overlooked or denied.
The ongoing efforts to erase her concepts from federal guidelines and academic settings represent something Crenshaw identifies as deeply significant. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are working to constrain a system of understanding that challenges the justification for existing power structures. Crenshaw understands that this removal is essentially a manifestation of power, an attempt to render invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must go on, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-developed critical race theory framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Established African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work encounters unprecedented political assault. The title itself holds significance—a conscious reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her intellectual evolution from childhood through her groundbreaking legal scholarship, giving readers insight into the observations and experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how observing injustice firsthand, rather than engaging with it only through academic literature, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions grasp and address systemic inequality. The book serves as both a personal account and intellectual statement.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep removing her terminology from policy documents, 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 reveals, she argues, that people with authority understand how critical race theory and intersectionality risk revealing difficult realities about institutions in America. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—represents a core dedication to the communities whose experiences these frameworks illuminate and validate.