When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2024, one of his first acts was to sign an presidential directive intended to cut federal funding from schools providing what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A wave of subsequent orders required the termination 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 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 theoretical framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her most significant challenge yet: protecting the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Culture War
What creates the severity of this backlash especially notable is how just lately Crenshaw’s scholarship entered general public discourse. Until recently, intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely within the domain of legal scholarship, academic debate and grassroots movements. These ideas were debated within universities and policy forums, but rarely penetrated popular discourse or garnered policy focus. The broader population remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s seminal work to the fields of law and civil rights.
The crucial juncture occurred in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative activists, media personalities and politicians commenced advancing these ideas as contentious political issues. Abruptly, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the core of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has escalated into an all-out war against what critics call “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the principal scapegoat. What was once academic terminology has grown highly contentious, weaponised in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender overlap to form lived experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is woven into the legal framework
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Bases of Resistance
Awakening in Childhood
Crenshaw’s resolve in naming injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she saw directly the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, instilled in her a deep understanding that entrenched inequality required more than individual goodwill to dismantle. These early years shaped her belief that intellectual endeavour must support justice, that ideas matter because they shape whose voices are heard and whose are made invisible by legal systems.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a scholar would be to express what major institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would guide her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her present defence against those seeking to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that deepened her understanding of structural inequality. These encounters crystallised her commitment to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it became a moral imperative. When she observed how legal frameworks failed people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she recognised that traditional methods to civil rights law were fundamentally inadequate. Her scholarship emerged not from abstract theorising but from witnessing the human cost of legal blindness, the ways that systems designed to protect some caused direct harm to others.
This understanding has supported her through decades of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw grasps that attacks on her ideas are not merely theoretical differences but reflect a deeper resistance to accepting difficult realities about American institutions. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite individual sacrifice and institutional pushback, originates in this hard-won understanding that inaction aids only those committed to preserving the existing order. Her memoir and continued activism embody her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Rooted In Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not arise from abstract theorising in university settings, but rather from witnessing the concrete failures of the justice system to defend those confronting layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was addressing a particular case: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be properly handled by existing civil rights frameworks built mainly on individual forms of oppression. The law, she recognised, regarded race and gender as distinct categories, neglecting to acknowledge how they functioned together to shape everyday experience. This realisation transformed legal studies and activism, offering terminology for experiences that had previously remained unnamed and unrecognised by organisations designed to safeguard them.
What distinguishes Crenshaw’s work is its refusal to treat intersectionality as merely theoretical. She understood that naming these overlapping systems 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 evolve to recognise how racism, sexism, classism and other forms of discrimination 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 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 Collective Support
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has exacted a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has encountered considerable opposition not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from critics within progressive spaces who questioned her methods or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an escalation of this hostility, with her name and ideas deliberately targeted for erasure by powerful political forces. Yet Crenshaw has consistently prioritised solidarity with those whose experiences her work aims to illuminate, understanding that her platform and privilege carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This dedication to collective action has meant enduring criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her research. Crenshaw has watched as her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised and warped by opponents attempting to undermine entire fields of study and activist movements. Notwithstanding these difficulties, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, declining to be quieted or forsake the people whose experiences shaped her research. Her resilience embodies a fundamental commitment that the pursuit of fairness requires sacrifice and that stepping back would constitute a betrayal of those relying on her voice.
The Power of Naming, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to identifying the systems and frameworks that major organisations choose to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a core principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding determines the potential for change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she offered a vocabulary for experiences that had previously gone unnamed in formal legal structures. This act of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act intended to make visible the unseen, to compel recognition of truths that current systems had systematically ignored or denied.
The ongoing efforts to erase her language from government policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw identifies as fundamentally consequential. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress 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 bid to keep invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must persist, in spite of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework analysing racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Back-talker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work confronts unprecedented political assault. The title itself holds significance—a conscious reclamation of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents her intellectual evolution from childhood through her innovative legal scholarship, offering readers insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than engaging with it only through academic literature, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions comprehend and tackle structural inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work remains under siege. Federal agencies continue removing her terminology in official policies, whilst school boards across America restrict 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 demonstrates, she argues, that people with authority recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory risk revealing uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a core dedication to the communities whose experiences these frameworks illuminate and validate.