When Donald Trump took office in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an executive decree aimed at cut federal funding from schools offering what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A series of later orders ordered the elimination 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 deliberate removal of four decades of work by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the 66-year-old legal scholar who coined the term intersectionality in 1989 and played a role in developing critical race theory as an theoretical framework. Now, as her memoir is published, Crenshaw faces her most significant challenge yet: upholding the very ideas that have defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Culture War
What makes the force of this pushback particularly striking is how just lately Crenshaw’s scholarship entered the broader public awareness. Until recently, intersectionality and critical race theory remained largely limited to legal scholarship, academic debate and grassroots movements. These concepts were discussed in academic institutions and policy circles, but seldom entered mainstream conversation or garnered policy focus. The general public knew little of Crenshaw’s key contributions to the fields of law and civil rights.
The pivotal moment came in 2020, when a disparate group of conservative campaigners, media personalities and politicians began elevating these ideas as political flashpoints. Abruptly, intersectionality and critical race theory were placed at the centre of the culture wars. In the subsequent five-year period, this has developed into an all-out war against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the principal scapegoat. What was once technical jargon has grown highly contentious, utilised in debates about schooling, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender overlap to shape everyday reality
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is embedded in law and justice systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as political flashpoints in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a phrase for removal
The Personal Foundations of Defiance
Childhood Development
Crenshaw’s dedication to exposing injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Growing up in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, both civil rights activists themselves, fostered in her a strong conviction that entrenched inequality required more than individual goodwill to dismantle. These early years shaped her conviction that intellectual endeavour must support 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 an act of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a scholar would be to express what powerful institutions chose to keep unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This foundational belief would guide her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her present defence against those attempting to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has grappled with profound personal losses that deepened her grasp of systemic injustice. These experiences crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as more than theoretical framework—it transformed into a moral imperative. When she observed how legal frameworks failed people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she recognised that conventional approaches to civil rights legislation were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work emerged not from detached analysis but from witnessing 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 criticism. Crenshaw recognises that challenges to her views are not merely academic disputes but reveal a fundamental opposition to acknowledging difficult realities about institutions in America. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite private toll and career resistance, stems from this hard-won understanding that quiet benefits only those invested in maintaining the current system. Her sustained activism and published work represent her commitment to ensuring her legacy endures.
Intersectionality Stemming From Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not emerge from theoretical abstraction in ivory towers, but rather from seeing the tangible shortcomings of the courts to protect those facing intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was reacting to a particular case: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be sufficiently tackled by current anti-discrimination laws built mainly on one-dimensional discrimination. The law, she recognised, treated race and gender as separate categories, neglecting to acknowledge how they operated simultaneously to influence lived reality. This understanding revolutionised legal scholarship and activism, providing language for encounters that had long gone unnamed and unrecognised by institutions meant to protect them.
What characterises 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 develop to acknowledge 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 established a framework that extended well outside academic circles, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Price of Unity
Standing at the frontlines of campaigns advancing racial and gender justice has exacted a personal toll on Crenshaw. Throughout her professional life, she has faced substantial resistance not only from those defending the status quo but also from detractors in progressive spaces who questioned her methods or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an intensification of this hostility, with her name and ideas intentionally marked 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 speak for those whose voices institutions ignore.
This pledge of solidarity has meant facing criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her research. Crenshaw has watched as her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and warped by opponents seeking to delegitimise whole academic disciplines and social movements. Despite these challenges, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, refusing to be silenced or to abandon the people whose experiences shaped her academic contributions. Her determination embodies a fundamental commitment that the work of justice necessitates dedication and that retreating would constitute a betrayal of those depending on her words.
Naming Power, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures 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 establishing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she provided a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal frameworks. This process of naming was never merely academic—it was a political intervention intended to make visible the unseen, to force recognition of truths that current systems had systematically ignored or rejected.
The ongoing efforts to erase her concepts from government policy and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw recognises as profoundly important. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not merely erasing vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a system of understanding that challenges the justification for existing power arrangements. Crenshaw understands that this removal is essentially a manifestation of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her unwillingness to remain quiet reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must go on, notwithstanding political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established critical race theory framework examining racism in legal institutions
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work confronts unprecedented political assault. The title itself holds significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term commonly used to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her scholarly development from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, providing readers with insight into the lived experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how observing injustice firsthand, 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 manifesto.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work continues facing attack. 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 retreat, however, Crenshaw views this moment as confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The very intensity of the backlash demonstrates, she argues, that people with authority understand how critical race theory and intersectionality risk revealing difficult realities about institutions in America. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it undergoes deliberate suppression—represents a fundamental commitment to the people whose lived realities these frameworks clarify and affirm.