When Donald Trump took office in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive order aimed at cut federal funding from schools providing what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A series of later orders ordered 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 comprehensive elimination 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 scholarly framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: defending the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Culture War
What makes the severity of this backlash particularly striking is how not long ago Crenshaw’s research entered general public discourse. Until not long ago, intersectionality and critical race theory stayed mostly within the domain of legal scholarship, academic debate and grassroots movements. These ideas were examined in academic institutions and policy circles, but rarely penetrated popular discourse or attracted policy focus. The wider society remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s key contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The turning point happened in 2020, when a loose coalition of right-wing activists, prominent commentators and politicians commenced advancing these ideas as contentious political issues. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were pushed to the centre of the culture wars. In the subsequent five-year period, this has snowballed into an all-out war against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the chief target. What was once technical jargon has grown highly contentious, utilised in debates about education, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender overlap to shape lived experience
- Critical race theory explores how racism is embedded 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 term to remove
The Core Bases of Defiance
Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s dedication to naming injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Raised in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law failed to address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, cultivated in her a deep understanding that structural injustice required far more than individual goodwill to overcome. These formative years shaped her belief that scholarship must serve justice, that ideas matter because they establish whose realities are acknowledged and whose are rendered invisible by legal structures.
Her childhood taught her that identifying concepts was an act of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see how various types of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a academic 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 guide her whole career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those attempting to erase her body of work.
Setback and Perspective
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has grappled with significant personal hardships that strengthened her grasp of systemic injustice. These encounters crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than academic concept—it became a moral imperative. When she observed how legal systems fell short of protecting people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she recognised that conventional approaches to civil rights law were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work emerged not from abstract theorising but from observing the real-world impact of systemic oversight, the ways that systems designed to protect some caused direct harm to others.
This lucidity has sustained her through decades of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw grasps that challenges to her views are not merely intellectual disagreements but demonstrate a fundamental opposition to accepting difficult realities about American institutions. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite personal cost and professional opposition, originates in this hard-earned insight that quiet benefits only those invested in maintaining the existing order. Her ongoing advocacy and written account constitute her determination to prevent her contributions from being overlooked.
Intersectionality Stemming From Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s innovative concept of intersectionality did not emerge from disconnected theorising in academic institutions, but rather from observing the tangible shortcomings of the justice system to defend those experiencing layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was addressing a specific case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be adequately addressed by established legal protections centred on single-axis oppression. The law, she realised, treated race and gender as independent classifications, failing to recognise how they functioned together to shape actual circumstances. This understanding revolutionised legal academia and activism, providing language 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 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 forms of discrimination do not operate in isolation but rather combine to produce 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 millions of people seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Price of Solidarity
Standing at the forefront of movements for racial and gender justice has taken a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has faced substantial resistance not only from those defending the status quo but also from detractors in progressive spaces who challenged her approach or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current backlash 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 position and standing carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This commitment to solidarity has meant facing attacks, misrepresentations and attempts to discredit her research. Crenshaw has watched as her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised and warped by opponents seeking to delegitimise entire fields of study and activist movements. Despite these challenges, she continues her work with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, declining to be quieted or forsake the groups whose hardships motivated her scholarship. Her determination embodies a fundamental commitment that the endeavour for equity requires sacrifice and that stepping back would amount to a betrayal of those depending on her advocacy.
Naming Power, Confronting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to naming the systems and structures that powerful institutions prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has consistently operated on a core principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes the potential for change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she provided a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained 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 realities that current systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her terminology from federal policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw recognises as deeply significant. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a analytical framework that challenges the validity of existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this removal is itself a form of power, an attempt to render invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must continue, regardless of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-developed race-critical legal framework examining racism in courts and law
- Established African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Backtalker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work faces unprecedented political assault. The title itself carries significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents 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 encountering it solely through scholarly texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could actually 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. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology in official policies, whilst American school boards limit student access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw views this moment as validation of her ideas’ influence. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority recognise how critical race theory and intersectionality threaten to expose difficult realities about American institutions. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—constitutes a fundamental commitment to the people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.