When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an presidential directive aimed at slash federal funding from schools providing what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A wave of later orders ordered the elimination 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 helped develop critical race theory as an theoretical 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 Scholarship to Cultural Conflict
What creates the force of this negative reaction particularly striking is how just lately Crenshaw’s work became part of the broader public awareness. Until a few years ago, these theoretical frameworks continued to be limited to legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and advocacy groups. These concepts were examined in universities and policy forums, but infrequently reached mainstream conversation or garnered legislative interest. The general public had limited awareness of Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The crucial juncture happened in 2020, when a disparate group of right-wing activists, prominent commentators and politicians started promoting these ideas as divisive political topics. Abruptly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the heart of the culture wars. In the following five years, this has escalated into an all-out war against what critics describe as “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the principal scapegoat. What was once technical jargon has turned highly contentious, utilised in debates about education, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality explains how race and gender intersect to form everyday reality
- Critical race theory examines how racism is deeply rooted in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as political flashpoints in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Core Underpinnings of Opposition
Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s resolve in identifying injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from lived experience. Raised in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the inconsistencies and intricacies that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, instilled in her a strong conviction that structural injustice required more than individual goodwill to overcome. These formative years shaped her conviction that academic work must advance justice, that ideas matter because they determine whose experiences are recognised and whose are left unseen by legal systems.
Her childhood taught her that naming things was an act of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see how various types of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became a form of complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a scholar would be to articulate what powerful institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to make visible what systems actively worked to obscure. This foundational belief would guide her whole career, from her first legal publications to her present defence against those seeking to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that strengthened her grasp of structural inequality. These encounters solidified her dedication to intersectionality as far more than academic concept—it transformed into a moral imperative. When she observed how legal systems fell short of protecting people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she identified that traditional methods to civil rights legislation were deeply insufficient. Her academic work emerged not from abstract theorising but from observing the human cost of systemic oversight, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This lucidity has sustained her through decades of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw recognises that criticism of her thinking are not merely academic disputes but demonstrate a deeper resistance to acknowledging inconvenient facts about American systems. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite private toll and career resistance, arises from this painfully acquired knowledge that silence serves only those determined to uphold the existing order. Her memoir and continued activism constitute her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Stemming From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality did not arise from theoretical abstraction in university settings, but rather from seeing the real inadequacies of the justice system to protect those confronting intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was responding to a specific case: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be adequately addressed by existing civil rights frameworks built mainly on individual forms of oppression. The law, she realised, regarded race and gender as independent classifications, unable to see how they worked in tandem to influence lived reality. This insight transformed legal studies and activism, offering terminology for situations previously left without recognition by bodies established to defend them.
What distinguishes Crenshaw’s work is its refusal to treat 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 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 developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, 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 Expenses of Solidarity
Standing at the forefront of movements for racial and gender justice has exacted a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has encountered considerable opposition not only from those defending the status quo but also from critics within progressive spaces who challenged her approach or took issue with her emphasis 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 steadfastly maintained 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 pledge of solidarity has meant withstanding hostility, false claims and campaigns against her scholarship. Crenshaw has observed how her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and warped by opponents seeking to delegitimise comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. Despite these challenges, 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 scholarship. Her resilience reflects a deeper conviction that the endeavour for equity necessitates dedication and that stepping back would constitute a betrayal of those counting on her words.
The Power of Naming, Resisting 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 consistently operated on a fundamental principle: that language influences understanding, and understanding determines the possibility of change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she offered a framework for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This act of naming was never merely academic—it was a political act designed to make visible the invisible, to force recognition of realities that current systems had systematically ignored or denied.
The present efforts to erase her concepts from federal guidelines and academic settings represent something Crenshaw sees as deeply significant. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for elimination, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are seeking to restrict a analytical framework that challenges the justification for existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is essentially a manifestation of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must go on, in spite of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work encounters unprecedented political assault. The title itself bears significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her scholarly development from childhood through her groundbreaking legal scholarship, giving readers insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than encountering it solely through academic texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions understand and address 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 remains under siege. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology from policy documents, whilst school boards across America limit student access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw views this moment as confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory risk revealing difficult realities about institutions in America. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a fundamental commitment to the communities whose experiences these frameworks illuminate and validate.