When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive order designed to slash federal funding from schools providing what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A series of later orders required the elimination 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 contributed to critical race theory as an theoretical framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her greatest challenge yet: protecting the very ideas that have characterized her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Culture War
What makes the intensity of this backlash especially notable is how not long ago Crenshaw’s scholarship moved into mainstream public consciousness. Until not long ago, intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely limited to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and grassroots movements. These concepts were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered mainstream conversation or captured legislative interest. The wider society knew little of Crenshaw’s seminal work to the fields of law and civil rights.
The turning point came in 2020, when a informal alliance of conservative campaigners, media figures and politicians started promoting these ideas as contentious political issues. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the centre of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has snowballed into an all-out war against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the principal scapegoat. What was once academic terminology has grown deeply polarising, deployed in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender interconnect to shape lived experience
- Critical race theory examines how racism is embedded in legal systems
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a phrase for removal
The Personal Bases of Resistance
Early Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s resolve in exposing injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Coming of age in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, themselves committed to civil rights, instilled in her a profound awareness that systemic inequality required more than individual goodwill to challenge. These formative years shaped her belief that academic work must advance justice, that ideas matter because they establish whose realities are acknowledged and whose are made invisible by legal systems.
Her childhood taught her that naming things was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see how various types of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became complicity. Crenshaw learned early that her role as a academic would be to articulate what powerful institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would guide her whole career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has confronted significant personal hardships that strengthened her understanding of structural inequality. These experiences solidified her commitment to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it became a moral imperative. When she witnessed how legal frameworks failed people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she recognised that traditional methods to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. Her academic work arose not from detached analysis but from witnessing the real-world impact of systemic oversight, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some actively harmed others.
This understanding has supported her through many years of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw understands that attacks on her ideas are not merely intellectual disagreements but reflect a fundamental opposition to acknowledging difficult realities about American institutions. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite individual sacrifice and career resistance, originates in this hard-won understanding that inaction aids only those determined to uphold the existing order. Her memoir and continued activism represent her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Rooted In Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s innovative concept of intersectionality did not emerge from disconnected theorising in ivory towers, but rather from witnessing the real inadequacies of the legal system to protect those confronting intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was responding to a distinct situation: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be sufficiently tackled by existing civil rights frameworks built mainly on single-axis oppression. The law, she recognised, classified race and gender as independent classifications, failing to recognise how they functioned together to influence actual circumstances. This insight revolutionised legal studies and activism, giving expression for encounters that had long gone unacknowledged by bodies established to defend them.
What sets apart 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 adapt to understand how racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination do not operate in isolation but rather combine to produce distinct experiences of exclusion. 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 Price of Solidarity
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has taken a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has faced substantial resistance not only from those defending the status quo but also from detractors in progressive spaces who questioned her methods or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an escalation of this hostility, with her name and ideas intentionally marked for erasure by powerful political forces. Yet Crenshaw has consistently prioritised solidarity with those whose experiences her work seeks to illuminate, understanding that her position and standing carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This commitment to solidarity has meant enduring attacks, misrepresentations and attempts to discredit her academic work. Crenshaw has seen her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and twisted by detractors working to discredit whole academic disciplines and social movements. Despite these challenges, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, rejecting silence or desertion of the people whose experiences shaped her academic contributions. Her steadfastness embodies a fundamental commitment that the endeavour for equity requires sacrifice and that stepping back would constitute a betrayal of those relying on her advocacy.
The Power of Naming, Confronting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures that major organisations prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has consistently operated on a core principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding shapes the possibility of change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she offered a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This process 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 overlooked or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her language from federal guidelines and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw sees as fundamentally consequential. When government agencies flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are seeking to restrict a framework of analysis that challenges the validity of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this removal is itself a form of power, an effort to make invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must continue, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Established African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work confronts extraordinary assault. The title itself holds significance—a conscious reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her scholarly development from childhood through her groundbreaking legal scholarship, offering readers 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 creating frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions grasp and address systemic inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology from policy documents, whilst American school boards restrict access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw sees this period as validation of her ideas’ potency. The sheer force of the backlash demonstrates, she argues, that people with authority understand how critical race theory and intersectionality risk revealing difficult realities about institutions in America. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—represents a core dedication to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.