When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an presidential directive aimed at reduce federal funding from schools providing what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A series of follow-up directives required 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 deliberate removal of four decades of work by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the 66-year-old legal scholar who created the term intersectionality in 1989 and played a role in developing critical race theory as an academic framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her greatest challenge yet: protecting the very ideas that have defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Culture War
What renders the intensity of this negative reaction particularly striking is how just lately Crenshaw’s work entered mainstream public consciousness. Until recently, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be limited to academic legal work, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These frameworks were debated within universities and policy forums, but rarely penetrated mainstream conversation or captured policy focus. The broader population had limited awareness of Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The pivotal moment came in 2020, when a loose coalition of right-wing activists, media figures and politicians started promoting these ideas as political flashpoints. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the heart of the culture wars. In the following five years, this has developed into an comprehensive campaign against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the principal scapegoat. What was once scholarly language has grown politically radioactive, utilised in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender overlap to shape personal experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is embedded in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as political flashpoints in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Core Underpinnings of Resistance
Early Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s dedication to identifying injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Raised in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the contradictions and complexities that the law did not address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, instilled in her a deep understanding that systemic inequality required more than individual goodwill to dismantle. These foundational experiences shaped her conviction that academic work must advance justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are rendered invisible by the law.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became complicity. Crenshaw learned early that her role as a academic would be to articulate what major institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to bring to light what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would shape her whole career, from her first legal publications to her current defence against those seeking to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Comprehension
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has grappled with significant personal hardships that strengthened her understanding of structural inequality. These experiences crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she observed how legal systems fell short of protecting people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that traditional methods to civil rights law were fundamentally inadequate. Her scholarship arose not from abstract theorising but from witnessing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some actively harmed others.
This clarity has carried her through many years of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw recognises that challenges to her views are not merely academic disputes but reflect a underlying reluctance to accepting uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite personal cost and professional opposition, stems from this hard-earned insight that inaction aids only those committed to preserving the current system. Her memoir and continued activism embody her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Emerging From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality was not born from theoretical abstraction in university settings, but rather from seeing the tangible shortcomings of the courts to defend those confronting intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was reacting to a distinct situation: Black women workers whose encounters with prejudice could not be sufficiently tackled by existing civil rights frameworks centred on individual forms of oppression. The law, she realised, classified race and gender as distinct categories, neglecting to acknowledge how they functioned together to determine lived reality. This realisation transformed legal academia and activism, offering terminology for encounters that had long gone unnamed and unrecognised by bodies established to defend them.
What distinguishes 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 courts and legal institutions 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 resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Price of Collective Support
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has taken a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has faced substantial resistance not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from detractors in progressive spaces who challenged her approach or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an intensification of this hostility, with her name and ideas intentionally marked for erasure by influential political actors. Yet Crenshaw has consistently prioritised 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 commitment to solidarity has meant enduring hostility, false claims and campaigns against her research. Crenshaw has watched as her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised and twisted by detractors working to discredit entire fields of study and activist movements. Despite these challenges, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, rejecting silence or desertion of the people whose experiences shaped her scholarship. Her steadfastness demonstrates a profound belief that the endeavour for equity demands commitment and that stepping back would represent a betrayal of those relying on her words.
The Power of Naming, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures that powerful institutions prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has consistently operated on a fundamental principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding determines the possibility of change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she offered 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 designed to make visible the invisible, to compel recognition of truths that current systems had systematically ignored or denied.
The ongoing efforts to erase her concepts from government policy and academic settings represent something Crenshaw recognises as deeply significant. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are seeking to restrict a system of understanding that challenges the justification for existing power structures. Crenshaw understands that this removal is essentially a manifestation of power, an attempt to render invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must persist, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, emerges at a moment when her life’s work confronts significant political assault. The title itself holds significance—a conscious reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who dare challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her intellectual evolution from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, offering readers insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than experiencing it only through academic texts, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could actually transform how institutions comprehend and tackle structural inequality. The book serves as both a personal account and intellectual statement.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Federal agencies continue eliminating her terminology from policy documents, whilst school boards across America limit student access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw sees this period as confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The sheer force of the backlash demonstrates, she argues, that those in power understand how intersectionality and critical race theory threaten to expose uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a core dedication to the people whose lived realities these frameworks clarify and affirm.