When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive decree intended to cut federal funding from schools providing what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A wave of subsequent orders required 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 comprehensive elimination 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 scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her most significant challenge yet: defending the very ideas that have characterized her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Cultural Conflict
What creates the severity of this backlash particularly striking is how just lately Crenshaw’s scholarship became part of general public discourse. Until not long ago, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be within the domain of legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These frameworks were examined in academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered mainstream conversation or attracted policy focus. The general public had limited awareness of Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The turning point happened in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative activists, prominent commentators and politicians started promoting these ideas as contentious political issues. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the heart of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has developed into an full-scale assault against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the ultimate bogeyman. What was once academic terminology has turned politically radioactive, deployed in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender interconnect to influence everyday reality
- Critical race theory explores how racism is embedded in legal systems
- Conservative activists promoted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a phrase for removal
The Individual Foundations of Opposition
Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s dedication to naming injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Growing up in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law did not address. Her parents, both civil rights activists themselves, fostered in her a deep understanding that entrenched inequality required far more than individual goodwill to overcome. These formative years shaped her belief that academic work must advance justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are rendered invisible by the law.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms 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 make visible what systems actively worked to obscure. This core conviction would shape her entire career, from her first legal publications to her current defence against those attempting to erase her body of work.
Losing Ground and Understanding
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that strengthened her understanding of structural inequality. These experiences crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she witnessed how legal systems fell short of protecting people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that traditional methods to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. 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 actively harmed others.
This understanding has sustained her through decades of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw understands that challenges to her views are not merely theoretical differences but reflect a fundamental opposition to accepting inconvenient facts about American institutions. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite private toll and professional opposition, originates in this hard-earned insight that silence serves only those determined to uphold the status quo. Her ongoing advocacy and written account represent her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Stemming From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality was not born from theoretical abstraction in university settings, but rather from seeing the tangible shortcomings of the justice system to protect those confronting layered types 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 properly handled by established legal protections centred on single-axis oppression. The law, she recognised, regarded race and gender as distinct categories, neglecting to acknowledge how they functioned together to determine everyday experience. This insight revolutionised legal studies and activism, offering terminology for situations previously left unacknowledged by institutions meant to protect them.
What distinguishes Crenshaw’s work is its refusal to treat intersectionality as merely theoretical. She understood that identifying these interconnected forms 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 combine to produce unique patterns of marginalisation. By developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw created a language that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Costs of Collective Support
Standing at the forefront of movements for racial and gender justice has taken a significant cost 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 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 consistently prioritised solidarity with those whose experiences her work aims to illuminate, understanding that her position and standing carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This commitment to solidarity has meant facing criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her research. Crenshaw has watched as her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised and warped by opponents seeking to delegitimise comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. Notwithstanding these difficulties, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, rejecting silence or desertion of the groups whose hardships motivated her academic contributions. Her steadfastness demonstrates a profound belief that the pursuit of fairness requires sacrifice and that backing away would constitute a betrayal of those depending on her advocacy.
Naming Power, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to identifying the systems and frameworks that major organisations prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a core principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes the potential for change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she offered a framework for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This act of naming was never simply academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the unseen, to compel recognition of realities that existing systems had systematically overlooked or denied.
The current efforts to erase her concepts from government policy and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw identifies as fundamentally consequential. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are working to constrain a analytical framework that challenges the legitimacy of existing power structures. Crenshaw understands that this removal is fundamentally an act of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the mutual interconnection of oppression. Her unwillingness to remain quiet reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must continue, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-established critical race theory framework examining racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Back-talker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work encounters unprecedented political assault. The title itself bears 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, giving readers insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how observing injustice firsthand, rather than experiencing it only through scholarly texts, drove her commitment to establishing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions understand and address structural inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual manifesto.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work continues facing attack. Federal agencies continue eliminating her terminology from policy documents, whilst American school boards limit student access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw views this moment as confirmation of her ideas’ influence. The sheer force of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority understand how critical race theory and intersectionality threaten to expose difficult realities about American institutions. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a fundamental commitment to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.