When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an presidential directive designed to reduce federal funding from schools providing what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A wave of subsequent orders required 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 created the term intersectionality in 1989 and played a role in developing critical race theory as an theoretical framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her greatest challenge yet: defending the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Culture War
What creates the intensity of this pushback especially notable is how not long ago Crenshaw’s work moved into general public discourse. Until not long ago, these theoretical frameworks continued to be confined to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These frameworks were debated within academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered mainstream conversation or garnered legislative interest. The wider society remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s key contributions to the fields of law and civil rights.
The turning point came in 2020, when a disparate group of right-wing activists, prominent commentators and politicians started promoting these ideas as political flashpoints. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were pushed to the centre 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 functioning as the principal scapegoat. What was once scholarly language has turned politically radioactive, weaponised in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender overlap to shape personal experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is deeply rooted in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as focal points of political debate in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Foundations of Opposition
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s commitment to naming injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Raised in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law did not address. Her parents, themselves committed to civil rights, instilled in her a strong conviction that structural injustice required far more than individual goodwill to dismantle. These formative 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 the law.
Her early years taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see how various types of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered 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 foundational belief would guide 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 career, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that strengthened her grasp of systemic injustice. These experiences solidified her dedication to intersectionality as far more than academic concept—it became 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 deeply insufficient. Her academic work arose not from detached analysis 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 many years of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw grasps that attacks on her ideas are not merely theoretical differences but demonstrate a deeper resistance to recognising difficult realities about institutions in America. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite personal cost and professional opposition, stems from this painfully acquired knowledge that quiet benefits only those determined to uphold the current system. Her sustained activism and published work represent her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Emerging From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s innovative concept of intersectionality did not emerge from theoretical abstraction in university settings, but rather from witnessing the concrete failures of the legal system to defend those facing multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was addressing a specific case: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be adequately addressed by established legal protections built mainly on individual forms of oppression. The law, she understood, regarded race and gender as distinct categories, neglecting to acknowledge how they worked in tandem to determine lived reality. This realisation transformed legal studies and activism, providing language for situations previously left without recognition by organisations designed to safeguard 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 forms of discrimination do not operate in isolation but rather combine to produce unique patterns of marginalisation. By establishing intersectionality as both a theoretical lens and practical instrument for activism, Crenshaw created a language that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Costs of Collective Support
Standing at the frontlines of movements for racial and gender justice has exacted a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has encountered substantial resistance not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from critics within progressive spaces who challenged her approach or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current backlash 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 aims to illuminate, understanding that her platform and privilege carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This commitment to solidarity has meant withstanding attacks, misrepresentations and attempts to discredit her scholarship. Crenshaw has observed how her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and twisted by detractors working to discredit comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. Despite these challenges, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, rejecting silence or desertion of the groups whose hardships motivated her scholarship. Her steadfastness embodies a fundamental commitment that the pursuit of fairness requires sacrifice and that retreating would constitute a betrayal of those relying on her advocacy.
Naming Power, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication 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 shapes the possibility of change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she offered a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal structures. This act of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act intended to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of truths that current systems had systematically ignored or denied.
The current efforts to erase her concepts from government policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw identifies as profoundly important. When public authorities 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 power structures. Crenshaw understands that this removal is itself a form of power, an effort to make invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must continue, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Work Left Undone
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, emerges at a moment when her life’s work faces extraordinary assault. The title itself holds significance—a conscious reclamation of a term often used to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her scholarly development from childhood through her groundbreaking legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than experiencing it only through academic literature, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions understand and address institutional inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual manifesto.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work remains under siege. Federal agencies continue eliminating her terminology in official policies, whilst school boards across America limit student access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw sees this period as validation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity 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—constitutes a fundamental commitment to the people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.