When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive decree aimed at slash federal funding from schools offering what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A series of later orders mandated the elimination 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 created the term intersectionality in 1989 and helped develop critical race theory as an academic framework. Now, as her memoir is published, Crenshaw faces her greatest challenge yet: upholding the very ideas that have characterized her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Culture War
What creates the intensity of this backlash especially notable is how not long ago Crenshaw’s research became part of mainstream public consciousness. Until a few years ago, intersectionality and critical race theory stayed mostly within the domain of academic legal work, academic debate and grassroots movements. These ideas were debated within universities and policy forums, but infrequently reached general public discussion or attracted political attention. The broader population remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to the fields of law and civil rights.
The crucial juncture occurred in 2020, when a disparate group of right-wing activists, prominent commentators and politicians started promoting these ideas as political flashpoints. Suddenly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the heart of the culture wars. In the following five years, this has developed into an full-scale assault against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the chief target. What was once scholarly language has grown highly contentious, deployed in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender interconnect to form personal experience
- Critical race theory explores how racism is deeply rooted in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as focal points of political debate in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Core Underpinnings of Opposition
Awakening in Childhood
Crenshaw’s resolve in naming injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Coming of age in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she saw directly the contradictions and complexities that the law failed to address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, instilled in her a deep understanding that systemic inequality required far more than individual goodwill to overcome. These early years shaped her belief that scholarship must serve justice, that ideas matter because they determine whose experiences are recognised and whose are left unseen by legal structures.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see 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 express what powerful institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would guide her whole career, from her first legal publications to her current defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Loss and Comprehension
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted significant personal hardships that strengthened her grasp of systemic injustice. These experiences crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it became a ethical necessity. When she witnessed how legal frameworks failed people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she recognised that conventional approaches to civil rights legislation were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work arose 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 lucidity has supported her through decades of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw understands that attacks on her ideas are not merely theoretical differences but reveal a fundamental opposition to accepting inconvenient facts about American systems. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite private toll and professional opposition, stems from this hard-won understanding that silence serves only those determined to uphold the current system. Her memoir and continued activism embody her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Emerging From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality was not born from abstract theorising in academic institutions, but rather from seeing the real inadequacies of the legal system to defend those experiencing multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was responding to a particular case: Black women workers whose encounters with prejudice could not be adequately addressed by established legal protections designed primarily around one-dimensional discrimination. The law, she understood, classified race and gender as independent classifications, neglecting to acknowledge how they worked in tandem to shape actual circumstances. This insight reshaped legal academia and activism, giving expression for encounters that had long gone unacknowledged by organisations designed to safeguard them.
What characterises 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 legal systems must evolve to recognise how racism, sexism, classism and other types of prejudice do not operate in isolation but rather interact to create unique patterns of marginalisation. By establishing intersectionality as both a theoretical lens and practical instrument for activism, Crenshaw created a language that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Price of Solidarity
Standing at the frontlines of movements for racial and gender justice has taken a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has encountered substantial resistance not only from those defending the status quo but also from critics within progressive spaces who challenged her approach or took issue with her focus on intersectionality. The current backlash 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 seeks to illuminate, understanding that her position and standing carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This pledge of solidarity has meant withstanding criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her research. Crenshaw has seen her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised and warped by opponents seeking to delegitimise whole academic disciplines and social movements. In spite of these obstacles, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, rejecting silence or desertion of the groups whose hardships motivated her research. Her determination reflects a deeper conviction that the endeavour for equity demands commitment and that stepping back would amount to a betrayal of those depending on her advocacy.
The Power of Naming, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to identifying the systems and frameworks that powerful institutions choose to leave unexamined. Her work has consistently operated on a fundamental principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes the potential for change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she provided a framework for experiences that had previously gone unnamed in formal legal structures. This act of naming was never simply academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the unseen, to force recognition of truths that existing systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The present efforts to erase her terminology from government policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw sees as fundamentally consequential. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are seeking to restrict a framework of analysis that challenges the validity of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is essentially a manifestation of power, an effort to make invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must go on, in spite of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work encounters unprecedented political assault. The title itself carries significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term often used to diminish and silence those who dare challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her intellectual evolution from childhood through her innovative legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than encountering it solely through academic texts, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could actually transform how institutions understand and address structural 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 continues facing attack. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology in official policies, whilst American school boards restrict access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw sees this period as confirmation of her ideas’ influence. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power understand how critical race theory and intersectionality threaten to expose difficult realities about American institutions. 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.