When Donald Trump took office in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an presidential directive intended to cut federal funding from schools offering what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A flurry of subsequent orders ordered 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 systematic erasure 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 scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: upholding the very ideas that have defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Culture War
What renders the force of this pushback particularly striking is how recently Crenshaw’s scholarship moved into general public discourse. Until a few years ago, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be within the domain of academic legal work, academic debate and grassroots movements. These concepts were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered popular discourse or garnered legislative interest. The general public had limited awareness of Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to the fields of law and civil rights.
The pivotal moment happened in 2020, when a loose coalition of right-wing activists, media personalities and politicians started promoting these ideas as political flashpoints. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the core of the culture wars. In the subsequent five-year period, this has escalated into an all-out war against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the principal scapegoat. What was once technical jargon has become politically radioactive, weaponised in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender interconnect to influence personal experience
- Critical race theory explores how racism is deeply rooted in the legal framework
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Foundations of Defiance
Awakening in Childhood
Crenshaw’s dedication to identifying injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Coming of age in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law did not address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, fostered in her a profound awareness that systemic inequality required something beyond 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 structures.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was an act of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or did not recognise how various types 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 preferred to leave unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This foundational belief would guide her entire career, from her first legal publications to her present defence against those seeking to erase her life’s work.
Setback and Perspective
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that deepened her grasp of systemic injustice. These encounters solidified her commitment to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it became a moral imperative. When she witnessed how legal systems fell short of protecting people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she recognised that conventional approaches to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. Her scholarship arose not from abstract theorising but from observing the real-world impact of systemic oversight, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This clarity has sustained her through many years of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw understands that criticism of her thinking are not merely academic disputes but reveal a fundamental opposition to acknowledging difficult realities about American institutions. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite personal cost and professional opposition, stems from this painfully acquired knowledge that inaction aids only those invested in maintaining the status quo. Her sustained activism and published work embody her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Emerging From Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality did not arise from abstract theorising in ivory towers, but rather from witnessing the concrete failures of the legal system to protect those facing layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was reacting to a distinct situation: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be properly handled by established legal protections centred on one-dimensional discrimination. The law, she recognised, classified race and gender as distinct categories, failing to recognise how they functioned together to shape lived reality. This insight revolutionised legal academia and activism, giving expression for experiences that had previously remained without recognition by bodies established to defend them.
What sets apart 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 matter 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 interact to create unique patterns of marginalisation. By developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw established a framework that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Costs of Collective Support
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has taken 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 took issue with her focus on intersectionality. The current backlash represents an escalation of this hostility, with her name and ideas deliberately targeted for erasure by powerful political forces. Yet Crenshaw has steadfastly maintained solidarity with those whose experiences her work seeks 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 withstanding hostility, false claims and campaigns against her scholarship. Crenshaw has observed how her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and twisted by detractors attempting to undermine whole academic disciplines and social movements. Notwithstanding these difficulties, she continues her work with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, declining to be quieted or forsake the people whose experiences shaped her scholarship. Her resilience reflects a deeper conviction that the work of justice requires sacrifice and that retreating would represent a betrayal of those counting on her voice.
The Power of Naming, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to identifying the systems and frameworks 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 remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This act of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the unseen, to force recognition of truths that existing systems had systematically ignored or rejected.
The present efforts to erase her terminology from federal guidelines and academic settings represent something Crenshaw sees as profoundly important. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a analytical framework that challenges the justification for existing power structures. Crenshaw understands that this suppression is essentially a manifestation of power, an effort to make invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must persist, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-developed critical race theory framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- 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 faces unprecedented political assault. The title itself carries significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who dare challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents her intellectual journey from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, offering readers insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than engaging with it only through academic texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions comprehend and tackle institutional inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology from policy documents, whilst school boards across America limit student access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw sees this period as confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority understand how critical race theory and intersectionality risk revealing difficult realities about American institutions. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—represents a fundamental commitment to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.