When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive decree intended to slash federal funding from schools teaching what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A flurry of subsequent orders mandated the removal of diversity, equity and inclusion personnel across the federal government, whilst federal agencies began identifying 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 introduced the term intersectionality in 1989 and played a role in developing critical race theory as an scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: upholding the very ideas that have characterized her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Cultural Conflict
What makes the force of this pushback particularly striking is how just lately Crenshaw’s work moved into general public discourse. Until not long ago, these theoretical frameworks stayed mostly limited to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and advocacy groups. These frameworks were discussed in universities and policy forums, but rarely penetrated general public discussion or garnered political attention. The general public knew little of Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The pivotal moment came in 2020, when a informal alliance of conservative campaigners, media personalities and politicians commenced advancing these ideas as political flashpoints. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the heart of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has escalated into an full-scale assault against what critics call “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the ultimate bogeyman. What was once technical jargon has grown deeply polarising, deployed in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender interconnect to form lived experience
- Critical race theory explores how racism is woven into law and justice systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Core Underpinnings of Defiance
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s commitment to exposing injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, fostered in her a deep understanding that systemic inequality required far more than individual goodwill to challenge. These formative years shaped her conviction that scholarship must serve justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are made invisible by the law.
Her early years taught her that identifying concepts was an act of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or did not recognise how multiple forms 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 worked tirelessly 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 life’s work.
Setback and Perspective
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that deepened her grasp of systemic injustice. These encounters crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than academic concept—it transformed into 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 legislation were fundamentally inadequate. Her scholarship emerged not from abstract theorising 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 decades of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw grasps that attacks on her ideas are not merely theoretical differences but demonstrate a underlying reluctance to accepting uncomfortable truths about American systems. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite personal cost and career resistance, originates in this hard-won understanding that inaction aids only those determined to uphold the existing order. Her ongoing advocacy and written account embody her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Rooted In Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality was not born from abstract theorising in academic institutions, but rather from seeing the concrete failures of the justice system to safeguard those confronting intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was addressing a particular case: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be sufficiently tackled by established legal protections centred on single-axis oppression. The law, she realised, regarded race and gender as independent classifications, failing to recognise how they worked in tandem to influence lived reality. This insight reshaped legal studies and activism, providing language for situations previously left unacknowledged by bodies established to defend them.
What distinguishes Crenshaw’s work is its rejection of treating 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 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 resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Costs 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 considerable opposition not only from those defending the status quo but also from detractors in progressive spaces who challenged her approach or took issue with her emphasis on intersectionality. The current backlash represents an escalation 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 position and standing carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This pledge of solidarity has meant enduring hostility, false claims and campaigns against her scholarship. Crenshaw has seen her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and warped by opponents working to discredit whole academic disciplines and social movements. In spite of these obstacles, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, declining to be quieted or forsake the communities whose struggles inspired her research. Her resilience embodies a fundamental commitment that the work of justice necessitates dedication and that stepping back would constitute a betrayal of those depending on her voice.
Naming Power, Confronting Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to naming the systems and structures that major organisations prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a core principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding shapes the potential for change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she provided a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This act of naming was never simply academic—it was a political act intended to make visible the invisible, to force recognition of truths that existing systems had systematically ignored or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her language from federal policy and academic settings represent something Crenshaw recognises as fundamentally consequential. When government agencies flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a system of understanding that challenges the legitimacy of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is itself a form of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must continue, regardless of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-established critical race theory framework examining racism in courts and law
- Established African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Backtalker’s Work Left Undone
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, emerges at a moment when her life’s work encounters significant political assault. The title itself holds significance—a conscious reclamation of a term often used to diminish and silence those who dare challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her scholarly development from childhood through her innovative legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the observations and experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than encountering it solely through academic literature, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions comprehend and tackle systemic inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual manifesto.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work continues facing attack. 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 confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority recognise 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 fundamental commitment to the people whose lived realities these frameworks clarify and affirm.