When Donald Trump took office in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive decree designed to reduce federal funding from schools teaching what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A wave of follow-up directives ordered the removal 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 coined the term intersectionality in 1989 and played a role in developing critical race theory as an scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is published, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: protecting the very ideas that have defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Cultural Conflict
What makes the severity of this pushback particularly striking is how not long ago Crenshaw’s scholarship became part of the broader public awareness. Until recently, these theoretical frameworks stayed mostly within the domain of academic legal work, scholarly discussion and advocacy groups. These frameworks were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but infrequently reached mainstream conversation or captured political attention. The wider society knew little of Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The turning point occurred in 2020, when a loose coalition of right-wing activists, media figures and politicians commenced advancing these ideas as divisive political topics. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the heart of the culture wars. In the subsequent five-year period, this has snowballed into an comprehensive campaign against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the principal scapegoat. What was once scholarly language has turned deeply polarising, weaponised in debates about education, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender intersect to form everyday reality
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is deeply rooted in the legal framework
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Individual Underpinnings of Defiance
Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s commitment to naming injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Raised in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law failed to address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, fostered in her a deep understanding that structural injustice required something beyond 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 an act of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see 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 powerful institutions chose to keep unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would guide her whole career, from her earliest legal writings 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 structural inequality. These encounters solidified her commitment to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she observed how legal frameworks fell short of protecting people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights legislation were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work emerged not from detached analysis but from observing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some caused direct harm to others.
This understanding has carried her through decades of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw grasps that challenges to her views are not merely academic disputes but reveal a deeper resistance to accepting uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite private toll and professional opposition, arises from this hard-won understanding that inaction aids only those invested in maintaining the existing order. Her sustained activism and published work represent her determination to prevent her contributions from being overlooked.
Intersectionality Rooted In Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality was not born from abstract theorising in university settings, but rather from seeing the tangible shortcomings of the justice system to protect those facing layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was reacting to a particular case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be adequately addressed by current anti-discrimination laws built mainly on single-axis oppression. The law, she understood, treated race and gender as separate categories, unable to see how they functioned together to determine lived reality. This understanding transformed legal academia and activism, offering terminology 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 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 distinct experiences of exclusion. 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 frontlines 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 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 escalation of this hostility, with her name and ideas deliberately targeted for erasure by powerful political forces. Yet Crenshaw has consistently prioritised solidarity with those whose experiences her work seeks to illuminate, understanding that her position and standing carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This commitment to solidarity has meant withstanding criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her academic work. Crenshaw has observed how her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised and warped by opponents seeking to delegitimise entire fields of study and activist movements. Notwithstanding these difficulties, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, declining to be quieted or forsake the people whose experiences shaped her research. Her steadfastness demonstrates a profound belief that the work of justice necessitates dedication and that stepping back would represent a betrayal of those counting on her words.
The Power of Naming, Resisting 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 consistently operated on a core principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding determines the possibility of change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she provided a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This process of naming was never merely academic—it was a political intervention designed to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of realities that existing systems had systematically overlooked or denied.
The current efforts to erase her language from federal policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw sees as fundamentally consequential. When government agencies flag words like “intersectionality” for elimination, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a framework of analysis that challenges the justification for existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this removal is fundamentally an act of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her unwillingness to remain quiet reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must persist, in spite of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework examining racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Work Left Undone
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, emerges at a moment when her life’s work faces significant political assault. The title itself holds significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents her intellectual evolution from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than experiencing it only through academic literature, drove her commitment to establishing frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions grasp and address institutional inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep removing her terminology in official policies, whilst American school boards limit student access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw sees this period as validation of her ideas’ influence. The sheer force of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority understand how critical race theory and intersectionality risk revealing uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—represents a core dedication to the people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.