When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive order aimed at reduce federal funding from schools offering what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A series of later orders required the removal 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 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 academic framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her greatest challenge yet: upholding the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Cultural Conflict
What makes the intensity of this pushback remarkably pronounced is how just lately Crenshaw’s scholarship became part of the broader public awareness. Until a few years ago, intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely within the domain of legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and grassroots movements. These frameworks were debated within academic institutions and policy circles, but infrequently reached general public discussion or garnered policy focus. The wider society knew little of Crenshaw’s seminal work to the fields of law and civil rights.
The pivotal moment occurred in 2020, when a informal alliance of conservative activists, media figures and politicians started promoting these ideas as contentious political issues. Abruptly, intersectionality and critical race theory were pushed to the heart of the culture wars. In the subsequent five-year period, this has snowballed into an all-out war against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the principal scapegoat. What was once academic terminology has grown politically radioactive, deployed in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender intersect to influence personal experience
- Critical race theory examines how racism is woven into law and justice systems
- Conservative activists promoted these concepts as political flashpoints in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Personal Underpinnings of Opposition
Early Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s commitment to exposing injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law did not address. Her parents, themselves committed to civil rights, instilled in her a deep understanding that entrenched inequality required far more than individual goodwill to overcome. These early years shaped her conviction that scholarship must serve justice, that ideas matter because they determine whose experiences are recognised and whose are made invisible by legal systems.
Her early years taught her that naming things was an act of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or did not recognise 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 powerful institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to bring to light what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would guide her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her present defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that deepened her understanding of systemic injustice. These encounters crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she witnessed how legal systems failed people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. Her scholarship emerged not from abstract theorising but from observing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some caused direct harm to others.
This clarity has sustained her through decades of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw understands that attacks on her ideas are not merely intellectual disagreements but demonstrate a underlying reluctance to acknowledging inconvenient facts about institutions in America. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite personal cost and institutional pushback, arises from this hard-won understanding that quiet benefits only those invested in maintaining the current system. Her sustained activism and published work represent her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Stemming From Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not arise from abstract theorising in university settings, but rather from witnessing the tangible shortcomings of the courts to defend those facing layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was addressing a distinct situation: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be adequately addressed by established legal protections designed primarily around one-dimensional discrimination. The law, she recognised, treated race and gender as distinct categories, failing to recognise how they operated simultaneously to influence everyday experience. This understanding transformed legal scholarship and activism, offering terminology for encounters that had long gone 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 interact to create 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 vast numbers of individuals seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Costs of Collective Support
Standing at the forefront 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 protecting existing arrangements but also from detractors in progressive spaces who questioned her methods 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 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 speak for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This dedication to collective action has meant enduring hostility, false claims and campaigns against her research. Crenshaw has observed how her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised and twisted by detractors attempting to undermine whole academic disciplines and social movements. In spite of these obstacles, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, rejecting silence or desertion of the communities whose struggles inspired her research. Her resilience reflects a deeper conviction that the endeavour for equity necessitates dedication and that stepping back would constitute a betrayal of those counting on her voice.
Naming Power, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures that powerful institutions prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a core principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding determines the potential for change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she provided a framework for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This act of naming was never merely academic—it was a political intervention designed to make visible the unseen, to force recognition of truths that current systems had systematically ignored or rejected.
The present efforts to erase her language from government policy and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw identifies as profoundly important. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a system of understanding that challenges the validity of existing power structures. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is essentially a manifestation of power, an effort to make invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must go on, regardless of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework analysing racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to advance racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work faces unprecedented political assault. The title itself carries significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents her intellectual journey from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, offering readers insight into the observations and experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than experiencing it only through academic texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions understand and address systemic inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual manifesto.
Yet despite publishing 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 limit student access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw views this moment as confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power recognise how critical race theory and intersectionality threaten to expose difficult realities about institutions in America. 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.