When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2024, one of his first acts was to sign an presidential directive aimed at reduce federal funding from schools providing what the administration characterized as “critical race theory”. A series of later orders required 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 comprehensive elimination 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 theoretical framework. Now, as her memoir is released, Crenshaw faces her most significant challenge yet: protecting the very ideas that have defined her career as a scholar and civil rights activist.
From Scholarship to Cultural Conflict
What renders the force of this pushback especially notable is how recently Crenshaw’s work entered general public discourse. Until not long ago, intersectionality and critical race theory stayed mostly within the domain of academic legal work, academic debate and grassroots movements. These ideas were debated within academic institutions and policy circles, but rarely penetrated popular discourse or attracted political attention. The wider society remained largely unfamiliar with Crenshaw’s key contributions to legal scholarship and civil rights discourse.
The pivotal moment happened in 2020, when a loose coalition of right-wing activists, prominent commentators and politicians commenced advancing these ideas as political flashpoints. Suddenly, 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 term “woke”, with critical race theory acting as the ultimate bogeyman. What was once academic terminology has turned politically radioactive, deployed in debates about academic policy, identity and American values.
- Intersectionality illustrates how race and gender overlap to shape lived experience
- Critical race theory investigates how racism is embedded in legal systems
- Conservative activists highlighted these concepts as contentious political issues in 2020
- Federal agencies now mark “intersectionality” as a word to eliminate
The Individual Foundations of Resistance
Awakening in Childhood
Crenshaw’s commitment to identifying injustice did not emerge from abstract theorising but from direct experience. Coming of age in the segregated South in the civil rights era, she observed firsthand the contradictions and complexities that the law failed to address. Her parents, both civil rights activists themselves, instilled in her a profound awareness that entrenched inequality required far more than individual goodwill to dismantle. These early years shaped her belief that intellectual endeavour must support justice, that ideas matter because they determine whose experiences are recognised and whose are left unseen by legal structures.
Her early years taught her that naming things was an act of resistance. When institutions overlooked certain realities or failed to see how multiple forms of oppression functioned at the same time, silence became a form of complicity. Crenshaw learned early that her role as a scholar would be to articulate what powerful institutions chose to keep unspoken, to make visible 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 seeking to erase her life’s work.
Loss and Clarity
Throughout her career, Crenshaw has confronted significant personal hardships that strengthened her grasp of systemic injustice. These experiences crystallised her dedication to intersectionality as more than academic concept—it became a moral imperative. When she observed how legal systems 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 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 supported her through decades of work and now through the pushback. Crenshaw grasps that criticism of her thinking are not merely theoretical differences but reveal a underlying reluctance to recognising uncomfortable truths about American institutions. Her willingness to speak truth to power, despite individual sacrifice and institutional pushback, originates in this painfully acquired knowledge that quiet benefits only those determined to uphold the current system. Her ongoing advocacy and written account embody her determination to prevent her contributions from being overlooked.
Intersectionality Emerging From Lived Experience
Crenshaw’s pioneering concept of intersectionality did not emerge from disconnected theorising in university settings, but rather from witnessing the real inadequacies of the courts to defend those confronting intersecting dimensions of discrimination. In 1989, when she originally introduced the term, she was addressing a specific case: Black women workers whose instances of bias could not be sufficiently tackled by current anti-discrimination laws designed primarily around individual forms of oppression. The law, she understood, classified race and gender as distinct categories, neglecting to acknowledge how they functioned together to influence lived reality. This insight transformed legal academia and activism, offering terminology for experiences that had previously remained unacknowledged 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 matter 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 combine to produce distinct experiences of exclusion. By developing intersectionality as both analytical framework and activist tool, Crenshaw established a framework that resonated far beyond academia, eventually reaching millions of people seeking to understand their own experiences of injustice.
The Expenses of Solidarity
Standing at the forefront of movements for racial and gender justice has exacted a significant cost on Crenshaw. Throughout her career, she has encountered substantial resistance not only from those defending the status quo but also from critics within progressive spaces who questioned her methods or took issue with her focus on intersectionality. The current pushback represents an intensification 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 seeks to illuminate, understanding that her platform and privilege carry responsibility to advocate for those whose voices institutional structures overlook.
This pledge of solidarity has meant enduring criticism, distortions and efforts to undermine her academic work. Crenshaw has observed how her carefully developed concepts have been weaponised and warped by opponents attempting to undermine whole academic disciplines and social movements. Despite these challenges, she persists in her efforts with the African American Policy Forum and through her writing, rejecting silence or desertion of the groups whose hardships motivated her academic contributions. Her determination reflects a deeper conviction that the pursuit of fairness necessitates dedication and that stepping back would represent a betrayal of those relying on her words.
The Power of Naming, Resisting Erasure
Throughout her professional life, Crenshaw has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to naming the systems and structures that powerful institutions prefer to leave unexamined. Her work has consistently operated on a core principle: that language shapes understanding, and understanding determines the potential for change. By establishing intersectionality into legal and social discourse, she offered a vocabulary for experiences that had previously remained unnamed in formal legal structures. This act of naming was never simply academic—it was a political intervention designed to make visible the invisible, to force recognition of truths that current systems had systematically ignored or denied.
The ongoing efforts to erase her terminology from federal guidelines and educational institutions represent something Crenshaw sees as fundamentally consequential. When state bodies flag words like “intersectionality” for removal, they are not just taking out vocabulary—they are attempting to suppress a system of understanding that challenges the legitimacy of existing structures of power. Crenshaw understands that this suppression is itself a form of power, an bid to keep invisible once more the interconnected nature of oppression. Her unwillingness to remain quiet reflects her conviction that the process of articulating injustice must go on, regardless of political opposition.
- Introduced “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe overlapping systems of discrimination
- Co-established race-critical legal framework analysing racism in courts and law
- Created African American Policy Forum to advance race justice research and activism
The Backtalker’s Unfinished Work
Crenshaw’s new memoir, Backtalker, comes at a moment when her life’s work faces extraordinary assault. The title itself carries significance—a deliberate reclamation of a term frequently employed to diminish and silence those who question authority. Through the memoir, Crenshaw charts her intellectual journey from childhood through her innovative legal scholarship, giving readers 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 genuinely transform how institutions understand and address 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 in official policies, whilst American school boards restrict access to works exploring critical race theory. Rather than withdraw, however, Crenshaw sees this period as validation of her ideas’ influence. The very intensity of the backlash reveals, she argues, that people with authority recognise how intersectionality and critical race theory threaten to expose difficult realities about institutions in America. Her commitment to continuing this work—even as it faces systematic erasure—constitutes a core dedication to the people whose lived realities these frameworks clarify and affirm.