When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his first acts was to sign an presidential directive aimed at reduce federal funding from schools providing what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A flurry of later orders ordered the termination 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 introduced the term intersectionality in 1989 and contributed to critical race theory as an scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her most significant challenge yet: upholding the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Culture War
What makes the intensity of this pushback remarkably pronounced is how not long ago Crenshaw’s work entered the broader public awareness. Until not long ago, these theoretical frameworks stayed mostly confined to academic legal work, scholarly discussion and grassroots movements. These concepts were examined in universities and policy forums, but seldom entered mainstream conversation or attracted policy focus. The broader population had limited awareness of Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The turning point happened in 2020, when a disparate group of right-wing activists, media personalities and politicians began elevating these ideas as divisive political topics. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the centre 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 acting as the principal scapegoat. What was once technical jargon has turned politically radioactive, utilised in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender overlap to influence everyday reality
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is woven into the legal framework
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as focal points of political debate in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a phrase for removal
The Core Bases of Opposition
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s dedication to exposing injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Raised in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she saw directly the tensions and nuances that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, cultivated in her a deep understanding that entrenched inequality required more than individual goodwill to dismantle. These formative years shaped her belief that intellectual endeavour must support justice, that ideas matter because they establish whose realities are acknowledged and whose are rendered invisible by legal structures.
Her childhood taught her that naming things was a form of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how various types 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 chose to keep unspoken, to bring to light what systems actively worked to obscure. This core conviction would shape her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those attempting to erase her body of work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that strengthened her grasp of structural inequality. These experiences crystallised her commitment to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she witnessed how legal frameworks fell short of protecting people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that traditional methods to civil rights legislation were deeply insufficient. Her scholarship emerged 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 carried her through many years of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw grasps that criticism of her thinking are not merely intellectual disagreements but reveal a underlying reluctance to recognising difficult realities about American institutions. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite personal cost and professional opposition, originates in this painfully acquired knowledge that silence serves 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 Rooted In Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality did not arise from disconnected theorising in ivory towers, but rather from witnessing the tangible shortcomings of the legal system to safeguard those experiencing layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was reacting to a distinct situation: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be sufficiently tackled by existing civil rights frameworks centred on single-axis oppression. The law, she realised, regarded race and gender as distinct categories, failing to recognise how they operated simultaneously to shape everyday experience. This understanding transformed legal studies and activism, offering terminology for experiences that had previously remained unnamed and unrecognised by bodies established to defend 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 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 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 established a framework that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Costs of Unity
Standing at the forefront of movements for racial and gender justice has exacted a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has faced considerable opposition not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from critics within progressive spaces who challenged her approach or disagreed with her emphasis on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an intensification 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 advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This dedication to collective action has meant withstanding attacks, misrepresentations and attempts to discredit her research. Crenshaw has watched as her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and twisted by detractors seeking to delegitimise whole academic disciplines and social movements. Notwithstanding these difficulties, she continues her work with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, refusing to be silenced or to abandon the communities whose struggles inspired her scholarship. Her steadfastness embodies a fundamental commitment that the work of justice necessitates dedication and that backing away would represent a betrayal of those relying on her voice.
The Power of Naming, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures that major organisations choose to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a fundamental principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding determines the potential for change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she provided a framework for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This act of naming was never simply academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of realities that existing systems had systematically overlooked or denied.
The present efforts to erase her concepts from federal guidelines and academic settings represent something Crenshaw identifies as deeply significant. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are working to constrain a framework of analysis that challenges the validity of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is fundamentally an act 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 persist, in spite of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed 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 latest memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work faces unprecedented political assault. The title itself bears significance—a conscious reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents her scholarly development from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, giving readers insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than encountering it solely through scholarly texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions understand and address systemic inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual manifesto.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work continues facing attack. Federal agencies continue removing her terminology in official policies, whilst school boards across America restrict access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw views this moment as confirmation of her ideas’ influence. The very intensity of the backlash demonstrates, she argues, that people with authority recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory threaten to expose uncomfortable truths about institutions in America. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—represents a fundamental commitment to the communities whose experiences these frameworks illuminate and validate.