When Donald Trump took office in January 2024, one of his first acts was to sign an executive decree intended to cut federal funding from schools offering what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A flurry of follow-up directives ordered the removal 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 contributed to critical race theory as an scholarly 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 Scholarship to Culture War
What creates the intensity of this pushback particularly striking is how recently Crenshaw’s research became part of the broader public awareness. Until a few years ago, these theoretical frameworks stayed mostly limited to academic legal work, academic debate and activist circles. These ideas were debated within universities and policy forums, but rarely penetrated general public discussion or captured political attention. The general public remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s seminal work to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The turning point happened in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative campaigners, media personalities and politicians began elevating these ideas as political flashpoints. All at once, 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 full-scale assault against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the chief target. What was once scholarly language has turned politically radioactive, utilised in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender intersect to form lived experience
- Critical race theory explores how racism is embedded in the legal framework
- Conservative activists promoted these concepts as focal points of political debate in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Personal Underpinnings of Resistance
Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s resolve in naming injustice did not stem from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Growing up in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the contradictions and complexities that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, fostered in her a strong conviction that structural injustice required more than individual goodwill to overcome. These formative years shaped her belief that intellectual endeavour must support justice, that ideas matter because they determine whose experiences are recognised and whose are made invisible by legal structures.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became a form of complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a academic would be to articulate what major institutions chose to keep unspoken, to make visible what systems actively worked to obscure. This foundational belief would shape her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her present defence against those seeking to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that strengthened her grasp of structural inequality. These experiences solidified her dedication to intersectionality as more than theoretical framework—it became a ethical necessity. When she observed how legal frameworks failed people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she recognised that conventional approaches to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. Her academic work arose not from abstract theorising but from witnessing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This lucidity has supported her through decades of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw grasps that criticism of her thinking are not merely theoretical differences but reflect a fundamental opposition to acknowledging uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite private toll and institutional pushback, arises from this hard-earned insight that quiet benefits only those determined to uphold the existing order. Her ongoing advocacy and written account constitute her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Stemming From Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality was not born from disconnected theorising in university settings, but rather from observing the tangible shortcomings of the courts to defend those experiencing multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was reacting to a specific case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be adequately addressed by established legal protections designed primarily around single-axis oppression. The law, she realised, regarded race and gender as separate categories, failing to recognise how they operated simultaneously to shape actual circumstances. This realisation revolutionised legal scholarship and activism, providing language for experiences that had previously remained 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 establishing intersectionality as both a theoretical lens and practical instrument for activism, Crenshaw created a language that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Price of Solidarity
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has exacted a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has faced considerable opposition not only from those defending the status quo but also from detractors in 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 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 position and standing carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This dedication to collective action has meant withstanding attacks, misrepresentations and attempts to discredit her scholarship. Crenshaw has watched as her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised and warped by opponents working to discredit whole academic disciplines and social movements. Despite these challenges, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, refusing to be silenced or to abandon the groups whose hardships motivated her research. Her determination reflects a deeper conviction that the endeavour for equity requires sacrifice and that backing away would amount to a betrayal of those depending on her voice.
The Power of Naming, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures that powerful institutions prefer 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 discourse, she offered a framework for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal structures. This process of naming was never simply academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the invisible, to force recognition of truths that existing systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her language from federal policy and academic settings represent something Crenshaw identifies as deeply significant. When government agencies 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 structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this removal is essentially a manifestation of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the linked character 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-established critical race theory framework examining racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to advance race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Work Left Undone
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, emerges at a moment when her life’s work confronts unprecedented political assault. The title itself holds significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who dare challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her scholarly development from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than engaging with it only through academic texts, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions grasp and address institutional 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. Government bodies keep removing her terminology in official policies, whilst school boards across America restrict access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw views this moment as confirmation of her ideas’ influence. The sheer force of the backlash demonstrates, she argues, that those in power 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 people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.