When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his opening actions was to sign an executive order designed to slash federal funding from schools offering what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A flurry of follow-up directives mandated the termination of diversity, equity and inclusion personnel across the federal government, whilst federal agencies began marking 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 helped develop critical race theory as an academic framework. Now, as her memoir is brought to market, Crenshaw faces her greatest challenge yet: defending the very ideas that have shaped her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Cultural Conflict
What renders the force of this backlash especially notable is how recently Crenshaw’s research moved into general public discourse. Until a few years ago, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be limited to academic legal work, scholarly discussion and advocacy groups. These concepts were debated within academic institutions and policy circles, but infrequently reached mainstream conversation or garnered legislative interest. The wider society knew little of Crenshaw’s key contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The crucial juncture came in 2020, when a informal alliance of conservative campaigners, media personalities and politicians began elevating these ideas as divisive political topics. All at once, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the centre of the culture wars. In the ensuing five years, this has snowballed into an comprehensive campaign against what critics term “woke”, with critical race theory serving as the chief target. What was once academic terminology has grown highly contentious, weaponised in debates about education, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender overlap to influence lived experience
- Critical race theory examines how racism is embedded in legal systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as focal points of political debate in 2020
- Federal agencies now identify “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Foundations of Defiance
Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s dedication to identifying injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from personal experience. Raised in the segregated South throughout the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the contradictions and complexities that the law neglected to tackle. Her parents, themselves committed to civil rights, cultivated in her a deep understanding that structural injustice required something beyond individual goodwill to dismantle. These formative years shaped her conviction that scholarship must serve justice, that ideas matter because they establish whose realities are acknowledged and whose are made invisible by legal systems.
Her early years taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions ignored certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms of oppression operated simultaneously, silence became complicity. Crenshaw discovered that her role as a academic would be to articulate what major institutions preferred to leave unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This core conviction would shape her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those attempting to erase her body of work.
Loss and Comprehension
Throughout her professional journey, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that deepened her understanding of systemic injustice. These encounters crystallised her commitment to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it transformed into a moral imperative. When she witnessed how legal frameworks fell short of protecting people facing multiple, overlapping forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights law were fundamentally inadequate. Her academic work arose not from abstract theorising but from observing the human cost 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 criticism of her thinking are not merely academic disputes but reflect a underlying reluctance to accepting uncomfortable truths about American systems. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite personal cost and institutional pushback, arises from this painfully acquired knowledge that inaction aids only those committed to preserving the status quo. Her memoir and continued activism embody her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Emerging From Direct Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality was not born from disconnected theorising in academic institutions, but rather from observing the tangible shortcomings of the legal system to safeguard those experiencing multiple, compounding forms of discrimination. In 1989, when she first articulated the term, she was reacting to a distinct situation: Black women workers whose encounters with prejudice could not be properly handled by current anti-discrimination laws built mainly on one-dimensional discrimination. The law, she recognised, treated race and gender as distinct categories, failing to recognise how they worked in tandem to determine everyday experience. This understanding revolutionised legal scholarship and activism, providing language for situations previously left unnamed and unrecognised by institutions meant to protect them.
What characterises Crenshaw’s work is its rejection of treating 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 combine to produce distinct experiences of exclusion. By establishing intersectionality as both a theoretical lens and practical instrument for activism, 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 Costs of Collective Support
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 considerable opposition not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from critics within progressive spaces who challenged her approach or disagreed with her focus on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an intensification of this hostility, with her name and ideas deliberately targeted for erasure by powerful political forces. 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 institutional structures overlook.
This dedication to collective action has meant enduring criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her academic work. Crenshaw has observed how her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised and warped by opponents seeking to delegitimise comprehensive areas of scholarship and grassroots campaigns. Despite these challenges, she continues her work with the African American Policy Forum and via her publications, declining to be quieted or forsake the communities whose struggles inspired her academic contributions. Her resilience embodies a fundamental commitment that the endeavour for equity requires sacrifice and that retreating would constitute a betrayal of those relying on her voice.
Naming Power, Confronting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated a steadfast dedication to naming the systems and structures that major organisations prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has always operated on a core principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes the possibility of change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she provided a framework for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal structures. This process of naming was never merely academic—it was a political intervention designed to make visible the unseen, to compel recognition of truths that current systems had systematically ignored or denied.
The ongoing efforts to erase her language from federal policy and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw recognises as profoundly important. When public authorities flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are working to constrain a analytical framework that challenges the validity of existing power structures. Crenshaw understands that this erasure is essentially a manifestation of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the act of identifying injustice must persist, regardless of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework examining racism in courts and law
- Established African American Policy Forum to advance race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Incomplete Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work encounters 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 traces her intellectual journey from childhood through her pioneering legal scholarship, offering readers insight into the observations and experiences that shaped her thinking. She reveals how witnessing injustice firsthand, rather than encountering it solely through academic texts, drove her commitment to creating frameworks that could meaningfully transform how institutions grasp and address systemic inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual manifesto.
Yet despite publishing her memoir, Crenshaw remains acutely aware that her work continues facing attack. Government bodies keep removing her terminology in official policies, whilst school boards across America restrict access to texts examining critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw views this moment as confirmation of her ideas’ potency. The sheer force of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power recognise how critical race theory and intersectionality risk revealing uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—represents a core dedication to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.