When Donald Trump came back to power in January 2024, one of his initial moves was to sign an presidential directive designed to slash federal funding from schools providing what the administration described as “critical race theory”. A wave of follow-up directives 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 created the term intersectionality in 1989 and contributed to critical race theory as an academic framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her biggest test yet: defending the very ideas that have defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Academic Study to Culture War
What makes the force of this backlash especially notable is how recently Crenshaw’s research moved into mainstream public consciousness. Until not long ago, intersectionality and critical race theory continued to be within the domain of legal scholarship, scholarly discussion and activist circles. These frameworks were discussed in universities and policy forums, but infrequently reached popular discourse or captured policy focus. The broader population remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s seminal work to legal academia and rights advocacy.
The crucial juncture occurred in 2020, when a informal alliance of conservative campaigners, prominent commentators and politicians began elevating these ideas as divisive political topics. Abruptly, intersectionality and critical race theory were thrust into the core of the culture wars. In the following five years, this has developed into an all-out war against what critics call “woke”, with critical race theory functioning as the chief target. What was once academic terminology has turned politically radioactive, weaponised in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality describes how race and gender interconnect to form everyday reality
- Critical race theory examines how racism is embedded in legal systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as political flashpoints in 2020
- Federal agencies now flag “intersectionality” as a term to remove
The Core Underpinnings of Defiance
Early Childhood Awakening
Crenshaw’s commitment to exposing injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Raised in the segregated South during the civil rights era, she witnessed firsthand the tensions and nuances that the law failed to address. Her parents, both activists in the civil rights movement, fostered in her a profound awareness that systemic inequality required something beyond individual goodwill to overcome. These formative years shaped her belief that intellectual endeavour must support justice, that ideas matter because they determine whose experiences are recognised and whose are rendered invisible by legal systems.
Her early years taught her that identifying concepts was a form of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how various types of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became a form of complicity. Crenshaw learned early that her role as a academic would be to articulate what major institutions chose to keep unspoken, to make visible what systems worked tirelessly to obscure. This foundational belief would shape her entire career, from her earliest legal writings to her current defence against those seeking to erase her body of work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has confronted profound personal losses that deepened her grasp of structural inequality. These encounters crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as far more than theoretical framework—it transformed into a ethical necessity. When she witnessed how legal frameworks failed people experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination, she identified that conventional approaches to civil rights law were deeply insufficient. Her academic work arose not from detached analysis but from witnessing the real-world impact of legal blindness, the ways that systems designed to protect some actively harmed others.
This understanding has carried her through decades of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw recognises that attacks on her ideas are not merely academic disputes but reflect a fundamental opposition to acknowledging inconvenient facts about American institutions. Her readiness to confront those in power, despite individual sacrifice and professional opposition, arises from this painfully acquired knowledge that inaction aids only those determined to uphold the current system. Her memoir and continued activism represent her refusal to let her work be forgotten or erased.
Intersectionality Emerging From Personal Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not arise from disconnected theorising in university settings, but rather from witnessing the tangible shortcomings of the justice system to protect those facing layered types of discrimination. In 1989, when she initially outlined the term, she was reacting to a specific case: Black women workers whose experiences of discrimination could not be properly handled by established legal protections centred on one-dimensional discrimination. The law, she realised, classified race and gender as distinct categories, failing to recognise how they worked in tandem to influence everyday experience. This realisation reshaped legal scholarship and activism, providing language for situations previously left unnamed and unrecognised by bodies established to defend them.
What characterises Crenshaw’s work is its rejection of treating intersectionality as merely theoretical. She understood that naming these overlapping systems 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 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 establishing intersectionality as both a theoretical lens and practical instrument for activism, Crenshaw created a language that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching vast numbers of individuals seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Price 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 substantial resistance not only from those protecting existing arrangements but also from detractors in progressive spaces who challenged her approach or disagreed with her emphasis on intersectionality. The current backlash 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 position and standing carry responsibility to speak for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This commitment to solidarity has meant enduring criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her academic work. Crenshaw has watched as her meticulously crafted ideas have been weaponised and warped by opponents seeking to delegitimise entire fields of study and activist movements. In spite of these obstacles, she maintains her involvement with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, rejecting silence or desertion of the people whose experiences shaped her academic contributions. Her resilience demonstrates a profound belief that the work of justice requires sacrifice and that backing away would constitute a betrayal of those counting on her voice.
The Power of Naming, Confronting Erasure
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to identifying the systems and frameworks that powerful institutions prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has consistently operated on a fundamental principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes the potential for change. By introducing intersectionality into legal and social discussion, she offered a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained 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 truths that existing systems had systematically overlooked or rejected.
The current efforts to erase her language from federal guidelines and schools and universities represent something Crenshaw sees as deeply significant. When government agencies flag words like “intersectionality” for deletion, they are not simply removing vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a system of understanding that challenges the legitimacy of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this removal is essentially a manifestation of power, an attempt to render invisible once more the mutual interconnection of oppression. Her determination to speak out reflects her conviction that the work of naming injustice must persist, in spite of political opposition.
- Developed “intersectionality” in 1989 to explain interconnected forms of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework analysing racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to promote race justice research and activism
The Back-talker’s Work Left Undone
Crenshaw’s latest memoir, Backtalker, arrives at a moment when her life’s work confronts extraordinary assault. The title itself carries significance—a intentional reclaiming 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 groundbreaking legal scholarship, offering readers insight into the experiences and observations that shaped her thinking. She reveals how observing injustice firsthand, rather than encountering it solely through scholarly texts, drove her commitment to developing frameworks that could actually transform how institutions comprehend and tackle structural inequality. The book serves as both personal testimony and intellectual declaration.
Yet following the publication of her memoir, Crenshaw stays keenly conscious that her work remains under siege. Government bodies keep eliminating her terminology from policy documents, whilst school boards across America restrict access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than retreat, however, Crenshaw sees this period as confirmation of her ideas’ influence. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that those in power understand how intersectionality and critical race theory risk revealing uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her refusal to abandon this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—represents a fundamental commitment to the communities whose experiences these frameworks clarify and affirm.