When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive decree aimed at slash federal funding from schools offering what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A series of follow-up directives ordered the termination 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 deliberate removal 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 academic framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, 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 Culture War
What makes the intensity of this negative reaction remarkably pronounced is how recently Crenshaw’s work moved into general public discourse. Until not long ago, intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely limited to academic legal work, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These frameworks were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but infrequently reached popular discourse or attracted policy focus. The wider society remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s key contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The crucial juncture happened in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative activists, media personalities and politicians began elevating these ideas as contentious political issues. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the centre of the culture wars. In the subsequent five-year period, this has developed into an comprehensive campaign against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the principal scapegoat. What was once academic terminology has become highly contentious, utilised in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender intersect to shape everyday reality
- Critical race theory explores how racism is deeply rooted in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists promoted these concepts as political flashpoints in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a phrase for removal
The Individual Underpinnings of Opposition
Awakening in Childhood
Crenshaw’s commitment to exposing injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, themselves committed to civil rights, cultivated in her a deep understanding that entrenched inequality required more than individual goodwill to challenge. These foundational experiences shaped her conviction that intellectual endeavour must support justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are rendered invisible by legal systems.
Her early years 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 bring to light what systems actively worked to obscure. This core conviction would guide her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Loss and Comprehension
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that strengthened her grasp of systemic injustice. These encounters crystallised her commitment to intersectionality as far 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 conventional approaches to civil rights law were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work arose not from abstract theorising but from observing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some actively harmed others.
This clarity has carried her through decades of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw understands that attacks on her ideas are not merely intellectual disagreements but demonstrate a fundamental opposition to acknowledging difficult realities about institutions in America. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite personal cost and professional opposition, originates in this hard-earned insight that quiet benefits only those committed to preserving the existing order. Her ongoing advocacy and written account constitute her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Rooted In Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality was not born from theoretical abstraction in university settings, but rather from seeing the concrete failures of the courts to safeguard those experiencing intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was reacting to a distinct situation: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be properly handled by current anti-discrimination laws designed primarily around individual forms of oppression. The law, she realised, regarded race and gender as separate categories, unable to see how they operated simultaneously to shape actual circumstances. This understanding reshaped legal scholarship and activism, providing language for encounters that had long gone unacknowledged by bodies established to defend them.
What characterises 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 legal systems must adapt to understand how racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination 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 established a framework that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Price of Solidarity
Standing at the frontlines of movements for racial and gender justice has exacted a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, 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 took issue 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 steadfastly maintained 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 dedication to collective action has meant facing hostility, false claims and campaigns against her scholarship. Crenshaw has observed how her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised, distorted by critics working to discredit comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. Despite these challenges, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, rejecting silence or desertion of the communities whose struggles inspired her scholarship. Her resilience embodies a fundamental commitment that the work of justice demands commitment and that retreating would constitute a betrayal of those depending on her voice.
The Power of Naming, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her career, 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 shapes understanding, and understanding determines the possibility of change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she offered a framework for experiences that had previously gone unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This process of naming was never simply academic—it was a political intervention intended to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of realities that existing systems had systematically overlooked or denied.
The ongoing efforts to erase her terminology from government policy and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw recognises as deeply significant. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a framework of analysis that challenges the legitimacy of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this suppression is fundamentally an act of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her unwillingness to remain quiet reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must persist, regardless of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-developed critical race theory framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work confronts extraordinary assault. The title itself bears significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her scholarly development from childhood through her innovative legal scholarship, giving readers insight into the observations and experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how observing injustice firsthand, rather than experiencing it only through academic literature, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions comprehend and tackle structural 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 in official policies, whilst American school boards limit student access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw views this moment as validation of her ideas’ potency. The sheer force of the backlash demonstrates, she argues, that those in power recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory threaten to expose difficult realities about American institutions. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—constitutes a core dedication to the people whose lived realities these frameworks clarify and affirm.