When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive decree designed to cut federal funding from schools providing what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A flurry of later 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 introduced the term intersectionality in 1989 and helped develop critical race theory as an theoretical framework. Now, as her memoir is published, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: protecting the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Cultural Conflict
What creates the severity of this backlash remarkably pronounced is how not long ago Crenshaw’s work entered general public discourse. Until recently, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be confined to academic legal work, scholarly discussion and grassroots movements. These concepts were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered general public discussion or garnered political attention. The general public remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s foundational contributions to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The crucial juncture occurred in 2020, when a disparate group of right-wing activists, media personalities 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 escalated into an full-scale assault against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the ultimate bogeyman. What was once scholarly language has grown deeply polarising, deployed in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender overlap to influence personal experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is embedded in the legal framework
- Conservative activists elevated these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Personal Foundations of Opposition
Early Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s dedication to naming injustice did not arise from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Growing up in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the contradictions and complexities that the law did not address. Her parents, both civil rights activists themselves, instilled in her a profound awareness that systemic inequality required far more than individual goodwill to dismantle. These formative 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 the law.
Her childhood taught her that naming things was a form of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or did not recognise 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 first legal publications to her current defence against those attempting to erase her life’s work.
Setback and Perspective
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has grappled with significant personal hardships that strengthened her understanding of systemic injustice. These encounters crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as more than theoretical framework—it became a moral imperative. When she witnessed how legal frameworks failed people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. Her academic work arose not from abstract theorising but from witnessing the human cost of systemic oversight, the ways that structures meant to safeguard some actively harmed others.
This lucidity has sustained her through decades of work and now through the criticism. Crenshaw understands that challenges to her views are not merely academic disputes but reflect a deeper resistance to acknowledging difficult realities about American systems. Her commitment to challenging authority, despite individual sacrifice and professional opposition, stems from this hard-earned insight that inaction aids only those determined to uphold the status quo. Her ongoing advocacy and written account represent her determination to prevent her contributions from being overlooked.
Intersectionality Rooted In Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s innovative concept of intersectionality did not arise from disconnected theorising in university settings, but rather from seeing the concrete failures of the legal system to safeguard those confronting multiple, compounding forms 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 properly handled by existing civil rights frameworks built mainly on single-axis oppression. The law, she recognised, treated race and gender as distinct categories, unable to see how they operated simultaneously to shape everyday experience. This realisation revolutionised legal academia and activism, offering terminology for experiences that had previously remained without recognition by organisations designed to safeguard them.
What sets apart 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 courts and legal institutions must adapt to understand how racism, sexism, classism and other types of prejudice do not operate in isolation but rather combine to produce distinct experiences of exclusion. By developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw created a language that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Costs of Unity
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has taken a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has faced considerable opposition not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from critics within progressive spaces who questioned her methods or took issue with her focus on intersectionality. The current backlash represents an escalation 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 aims to illuminate, understanding that her position and standing carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This dedication to collective action has meant facing criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her academic work. Crenshaw has seen her thoughtfully constructed frameworks have been weaponised, distorted by critics attempting to undermine whole academic disciplines and social movements. In spite of these obstacles, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, refusing to be silenced or to abandon the people whose experiences shaped her research. Her steadfastness embodies a fundamental commitment that the work of justice necessitates dedication and that stepping back would represent a betrayal of those depending on her advocacy.
The Power of Naming, Challenging Erasure
Throughout her professional life, 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 influences understanding, and understanding shapes the potential for change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, 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 intervention intended to make visible the invisible, to force recognition of truths that current systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The present efforts to erase her language from federal policy and academic settings represent something Crenshaw recognises as deeply significant. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a system of understanding that challenges the justification for existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is itself a form of power, an effort to make invisible once more the linked character of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must go on, in spite of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established critical race theory framework examining racism in courts and law
- Established African American Policy Forum to promote racial justice scholarship and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work encounters extraordinary assault. The title itself bears significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw documents her intellectual journey from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how experiencing injustice directly, rather than experiencing it only through academic literature, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions grasp and address systemic inequality. The book serves as both a personal account and intellectual statement.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Federal agencies continue removing her terminology in official policies, whilst school boards across America 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 demonstrates, she argues, that people with authority recognise how critical race theory and intersectionality threaten to expose uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—represents a core dedication to the people whose lived realities these frameworks illuminate and validate.