When Donald Trump took office in January 2024, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order intended to reduce federal funding from schools teaching what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A series of subsequent orders ordered the termination 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 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 defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Cultural Conflict
What makes the intensity of this negative reaction particularly striking is how just lately Crenshaw’s scholarship became part of general public discourse. 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 concepts were debated within universities and policy forums, but seldom entered general public discussion or garnered legislative interest. The wider society remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s key contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The turning point came in 2020, when a disparate group of right-wing activists, media personalities and politicians started promoting these ideas as divisive political topics. Abruptly, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the core of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has developed into an comprehensive campaign against what critics call “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the chief target. What was once academic terminology has become politically radioactive, utilised in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender intersect to shape personal experience
- Critical race theory examines how racism is deeply rooted in legal systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Foundations of Opposition
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s commitment to naming injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Coming of age in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the contradictions and complexities that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, themselves committed to civil rights, cultivated in her a strong conviction that systemic inequality 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 left unseen by the law.
Her early years taught her that naming things was an act of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or did not recognise how multiple forms of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became complicity. Crenshaw learned early that her role as a academic would be to express what major institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to bring to light what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would guide her whole career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those seeking to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that deepened her grasp of structural inequality. These encounters crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than academic concept—it became a ethical necessity. When she observed how legal frameworks fell short of protecting people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that traditional methods to civil rights legislation were fundamentally inadequate. Her scholarship arose not from detached analysis but from observing the human cost of systemic oversight, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some actively harmed others.
This understanding has supported her through many years of work and now through the backlash. Crenshaw recognises that criticism of her thinking are not merely academic disputes but demonstrate a underlying reluctance to accepting uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite individual sacrifice and professional opposition, arises from this hard-earned insight that silence serves only those committed to preserving the current system. Her ongoing advocacy and written account represent her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Emerging From Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s groundbreaking concept of intersectionality was not born from disconnected theorising in university settings, but rather from witnessing the concrete failures of the legal system to safeguard those facing intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was responding to a distinct situation: Black women workers whose encounters with prejudice could not be sufficiently tackled by existing civil rights frameworks built mainly on one-dimensional discrimination. The law, she realised, regarded race and gender as independent classifications, neglecting to acknowledge how they functioned together to determine everyday experience. This understanding reshaped legal studies and activism, offering terminology for situations previously left unnamed and unrecognised 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 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 types of prejudice do not operate in isolation but rather interact to create distinct experiences of exclusion. By developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw established a framework that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to make sense of their personal encounters with unfairness.
The Expenses of Collective Support
Standing at the frontlines of movements for racial and gender justice has taken 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 intentionally marked for erasure by influential political actors. 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 institutional structures overlook.
This pledge of solidarity has meant enduring criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her research. Crenshaw has watched as her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised and warped by opponents attempting to undermine whole academic disciplines and social movements. In spite of these obstacles, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and in her written work, rejecting silence or desertion of the communities whose struggles inspired her scholarship. Her resilience demonstrates a profound belief that the pursuit of fairness requires sacrifice and that stepping back would amount to a betrayal of those depending on her voice.
Naming Power, 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 always 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 gone unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This process of naming was never simply academic—it was a political act intended to make visible the unseen, to force recognition of realities that existing systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her terminology from federal guidelines and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw identifies as profoundly important. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are working to constrain a framework of analysis that challenges the validity of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is fundamentally an act of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her refusal to be silenced reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must persist, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established critical race theory framework analysing racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Work Left Undone
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, emerges at a moment when her life’s work encounters unprecedented political assault. The title itself holds significance—a intentional reclaiming of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who challenge authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw traces her scholarly development from childhood through her groundbreaking legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how observing injustice firsthand, rather than experiencing it only through scholarly texts, drove her commitment to establishing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions grasp and address structural inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology in official policies, 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 very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power understand how critical race theory and intersectionality risk revealing uncomfortable truths 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.