When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive decree intended to reduce federal funding from schools providing what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A flurry of follow-up directives mandated the removal 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 systematic erasure 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 most significant challenge yet: protecting the very ideas that have characterized her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Cultural Conflict
What makes the severity of this pushback remarkably pronounced is how just lately Crenshaw’s scholarship entered general public discourse. Until a few years ago, these theoretical frameworks stayed mostly confined to academic legal work, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These concepts were examined in academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered general public discussion or garnered political attention. The wider society knew little of Crenshaw’s key contributions to the fields of law and civil rights.
The crucial juncture occurred in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative activists, prominent commentators and politicians commenced advancing these ideas as political flashpoints. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the core of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has snowballed into an all-out war against what critics call “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the principal scapegoat. What was once academic terminology has become highly contentious, deployed in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender interconnect to form lived experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is woven into legal systems
- Conservative activists promoted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Individual Underpinnings of Defiance
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s resolve in identifying injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Raised in the segregated South throughout 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 far more than individual goodwill to overcome. These formative years shaped her belief that academic work must advance 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 naming things was an act of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how various types of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became a form of 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 foundational belief would shape her whole career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those seeking to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has grappled with significant personal hardships that deepened her grasp of structural inequality. These encounters crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it transformed into a moral imperative. When she witnessed how legal systems fell short of protecting people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights legislation were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work emerged not from abstract theorising but from observing the real-world impact of legal blindness, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some actively harmed others.
This clarity has sustained her through many years of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw grasps that challenges to her views are not merely academic disputes but reveal a underlying reluctance to recognising difficult realities about institutions in America. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite personal cost and career resistance, originates in this painfully acquired knowledge that inaction aids only those invested in maintaining the existing order. Her ongoing advocacy and written account embody her determination to prevent her contributions from being overlooked.
Intersectionality Stemming From Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not emerge from abstract theorising in academic institutions, but rather from witnessing the real inadequacies of the legal system to defend those confronting intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was responding to a specific case: 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 understood, classified race and gender as distinct categories, failing to recognise how they operated simultaneously to shape everyday experience. This insight transformed legal academia and activism, offering terminology for encounters that had long gone unacknowledged 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 courts and legal institutions 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 developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw established a framework that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Price of Unity
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has taken a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has encountered substantial resistance not only from those defending the status quo but also from critics within progressive spaces who questioned her methods or took issue with her emphasis on intersectionality. The current backlash represents an intensification of this hostility, with her name and ideas intentionally marked for erasure by influential political actors. 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 institutional structures overlook.
This dedication to collective action has meant facing criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her research. Crenshaw has seen her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised, distorted by critics working to discredit comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. In spite of these obstacles, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, refusing to be silenced or to abandon the communities whose struggles inspired her academic contributions. Her determination reflects a deeper conviction that the pursuit of fairness requires sacrifice and that stepping back would represent a betrayal of those counting on her words.
Naming Power, Confronting Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to naming the systems and structures that powerful institutions prefer 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 discourse, she provided 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 intervention intended to make visible the unseen, to force recognition of realities that current systems had systematically ignored or rejected.
The ongoing efforts to erase her language from federal guidelines and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw identifies as deeply significant. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a framework of analysis that challenges the validity of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this removal is fundamentally an act of power, an effort to make invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her unwillingness to remain quiet reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must persist, in spite of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework examining racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to advance racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work confronts unprecedented political assault. The title itself bears significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term often used to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her intellectual evolution from childhood through her groundbreaking legal scholarship, giving readers insight into the observations and experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how observing injustice firsthand, rather than engaging with it only through academic texts, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could genuinely transform how institutions comprehend and tackle institutional inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology in official policies, whilst American school boards restrict 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 people with authority understand how intersectionality and critical race theory threaten to expose uncomfortable truths about institutions in America. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a core dedication to the people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.