The War on Intersectionality

Intersectionality scholars, including myself, spent much of the past 15+ years in what Jennifer Nash (2017) called the “intersectionality wars” (17), or fierce and sometimes deeply personal debates on the appropriate uses and perceived abuses of intersectionality in academic scholarship. Whereas the intersectionality wars played out in the pages of books (Carastathis 2016), paywalled academic journal articles (Bilge 2013), professional conferences (Nash 2017), blogs, symposia, and the like, we—the community of scholars and activists dedicated to advancing intersectional inquiry and social transformation—now find ourselves in a war on intersectionality (Bhatia 2025), or sustained attacks on intersectionality and its proponents by right-wing activists intent on eliminating intersectionality from public, civic, and institutional life. In fact, the war on intersectionality is now being waged at the highest levels of government and public policy. It is indeed time to take very seriously the coordinated assault on intersectionality and its practitioners throughout higher education and American society. Much of the post-2020 public discourse on diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in organizations, including higher education, has focused on the boogieman of “CRT.” CRT is distinct from actual Critical Race Theory (Delgado and Stefancic 2023), the legal studies framework—of which intersectionality is an integral part (Cooper 2015; Grzanka et al. 2019)—that examines how the law and public policy buttress white supremacy across registers of social life, including those that appear to be race-neutral or nonracial (see Ray 2023 for an overview). CRT, on the other hand, was purposefully constructed by Christopher Rufo and his functionaries on the far-right to serve as a malleable, boundaryless catch-all for antiracist things they oppose, such as acknowledging that racism is real and has observable consequences (Wallace-Wells 2021). Rufo and his allies used the signifier of CRT to drum up a moral panic about how elementary school teachers, high school social studies instructors, librarians, and college professors alike were systematically indoctrinating children across the United States into the idea that racism is “inherent”—a favorite word of theirs and the new Trump administration (Rufo 2023)—to U.S. institutions. CRT, they argue, is about making white children feel personally responsible and guilty for past and present racial atrocities and is a moral pestilence to be rooted out of institutions, starting with schools (Rufo 2023). Curiously, little coverage of the anti-CRT crusades focused on the ways intersectionality specifically became a central target of conservative activists. But the vitriol directed toward intersectionality, Black feminists, womanists, and queer and trans people of color was hiding in plain sight (Grzanka 2024). Although attempts to curtail free expression and to teach and learn about social inequalities have made concessions for certain terms, ideas, and people that are associated with social justice, anti-racism, and other progressive ideas, intersectionality is routinely forbidden. For example, after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took issue with the proposed Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies curriculum and threatened to not allow it in Florida public schools, the revised curriculum in 2023 reduced or eliminated a wide range of terms, people, and concepts opposed by conservatives (Banks 2023). According to a comprehensive analysis conducted by the Washington Post (Anderson 2023), no single word was more disappeared from the proposed curriculum than “intersectionality,” which went from 19 instances in the original to one in the 2023 revision. The next greatest reduction came from the word “womanism,” which went from 14 in the original to zero in the 2023 version. “Intersections” went from eight to one; the Black feminist-founded “Movement for Black Lives” went from six to zero, as did “Kimberlé Crenshaw,” who was absent in the revision despite five mentions in the original curriculum. Though “queer” was completely absent in both versions, the occurrences of “gay” increased in the 2023 revision (from zero to two), as did “Colin Powell” (from zero to three). Though mentions of the “Black Panthers” went down (from 23 to 18), “Malcolm X” went up by two to 18. Only “reparations” and “systemic” received similar censure; the former was mentioned only once in the revision (down from 15 in the original), whereas the latter went from 9 to zero. That the Black Panthers and Malcolm X were less objectionable to conservative opponents of the AP African American Studies curriculum than Crenshaw and intersectionality is invaluable data in our collective pursuit of clarity, strategy, and resistance in the present moment. It is imperative to recognize the unique threat that conservatives and the far-right political apparatus believe intersectionality poses to white supremacist Christian nationalism (Banks 2023), or what reproductive justice movement co-founder and activist Loretta Ross (2017) termed “Americanized fascism” (305). Across sites of cultural and political oppression and suppression in the U.S.—museums (Ibssa 2025), libraries (Goncalves et al. 2024; Inouye 2025), national parks (Pineda 2025), syllabi (Hartocollis and Fawcett 2023; Shanley 2025), media and journalism (Mullin et al. 2025), visual and performing arts (Scherer and Parker 2025), and universities (Blinder 2025)—intersectionality is unquestionably under attack. Intersectionality's villainization is predictable (e.g., Banks 2023). On the one hand, at the level of representation, intersectionality signifies Black women, queer and trans people of color, and other non-prototypical group members whose very existence undermines the tenuous hegemony of white Christian supremacy. At the level of politics, education, and empowerment, intersectionality teaches an analysis of power that illuminates connections between systems of domination, privilege, and subordination that may be otherwise obscured by single-axis analyses or activism organized around a single dimension of difference (e.g., race, immigration status, and disability) (Crenshaw 1991). Coalitions have been a cornerstone of intersectionality theory for generations (Cole 2008; Luna 2016), because of the ways working in coalition toward shared commitment to justice can unite people from otherwise different backgrounds and social positions. Intersectionality has helped activists around the globe come together across differences to resist domination (Zinn and Dill 1996). Notably, though the reproductive justice movement was founded by a collective of U.S. Black feminists, the movement was also fundamentally multiracial (Luna 2020). Reproductive justice organizers used the term “women of color” to foreground the coalition of multiracial feminists (cf. critical race feminism, Few-Demo [Few 2007]) who challenged the traditional reproductive rights movement for its single-axis focus on abortion access (Luna 2016, 220). Reproductive justice leverages the intersectional and diverse experiences of women of color to advance a version of reproductive freedom that includes the right to have children and to raise them in safe and healthy environments, as well as the right to contraception and abortion access (Ross 2017). The pedagogy of intersectionality is an empowering education in the insidious workings of structural power and the creative ways multiracial, gender-diverse, feminist coalitions, in particular, have resisted domination. It is unsurprising that Rufo, DeSantis, and their allies do not want high schoolers or college students to learn about it. And it is also unsurprising that “intersectional” and “intersectionality” were targeted keywords in the politically motivated probe into National Science Foundation (NSF) funding that became the basis for the cancellation of billions in NSF and National Institute of Health grants to scientists studying social inequality throughout the U.S., threatening the foundation of the American scientific enterprise (Cruz 2025). Benson and Heiden-Rootes (2025) are wise to raise these and other emergent/emergency issues in this special issue of the Journal of Family Theory & Review. While many landmark special issues on intersectionality across the disciplines have advanced scholarly understanding of the concept and its applications (Carbado et al. 2013; Cho et al. 2013; Grzanka et al. 2017; Shields 2008; Parent et al. 2013; Overstreet et al. 2020), the shifting political landscape they point to suggests new, perilous challenges for scholars who study social justice—and perhaps especially those who explicitly use an intersectionality framework. By the time this issue is published, there will inevitably be more threats to social justice work in family science, human development, psychology, and beyond. These threats are indeed existential, and I empathize with those who wonder what will be left of our various fields and disciplines by the end of this presidential administration. But I remain inspired—which is not the same as optimistic—about our capacity to meet the moment if we trust and practice the lessons and wisdom of intersectional activists who have faced oppressive forces and groups that seek their total destruction because these activists and their movements have persevered and even thrived. Many scholars who are used to studying and teaching about inequality but who have little experience in social justice activism, collective organizing, or political strategizing are ill-equipped to confront Americanized fascism (Ross 2017) without relying solely on the traditional tools of academic expertise, empiricism, and argumentative writing. Faculty are shocked and disgusted by recent curtailments of research support and academic freedom—and they should be! But less than a year into the current Trump administration, I am personally concerned about how much talk of burnout and fatigue I am hearing from some professors across the country, some of whom are experiencing threats to their professional well-being for the first time. One of the most important lessons I learned from reproductive justice activists in Tennessee, where I lived and worked in coalition with them for over a decade, is the perspective of the long game. This includes reframing losses, which are often relentless, as the mitigation of even worse harms. And it means focusing on the mission—rather than only on what has been lost or destabilized by opponents. While the rest of the economy has been in freefall, many tenured and tenure-track professors continue to enjoy tremendous benefits and privileges that are unfathomable in many other sectors, even those that require prestigious credentials and extensive post-graduate training. That is not to mention the profound inequalities within academia, whereby tenured and tenure-track academics enjoy salaries, teaching loads, and infrastructural resources that are functionally withheld from those who do the bulk of the work of higher education: staff, graduate students, and contingent faculty (Colby 2023). Some of the things we have most recently lost make absolutely no sense to those who exist outside of academia, and lecturing people about why these things matter is not likely to change the pace of our collective undoing. In Tennessee, where civil rights have eroded at a stunningly fast pace over the past 15 years, my colleagues in the reproductive justice movement are skilled at perspective-taking: looking to other experts (rarely academics) for how to navigate new challenges, learning from others who have successfully fought back, and revisiting existing practices to develop new ways of being in perilous times (McConocha and Grzanka 2025). I am worried about an academia conditioned to looking within rather than beyond the Ivory Tower for strategies to address the present crisis. I am also skeptical of our capacity to build coalitions to fight fascism if we frame our present challenges as threats to academic freedom, which is already far more limited than it is colloquially discussed, and resource allocation. The public's loss of trust in higher education is certainly the result of a strategic, decades-long attack on the secular left and a racist, patriarchal backlash against the social and economic mobility engendered by the diversification of higher education (Cokley 2025). But I do not think our path back to some version of respect and public value will be found by reinstating multi-million dollar grants and getting the government out of our syllabi. What has been is not what we should aspire to; we should imagine something far better than what we have lost. To borrow from critical psychologist Michelle Fine's (2025) recent remarks on the 30th anniversary of the first dual-Ph.D. program in women's and gender studies and psychology (at the University of Michigan), we need a confrontation and an opening. We need to first confront ourselves in order to decide what world we want; then, we need to collaborate to create new openings for justice and thriving (Fine 2025). Fortunately, we do not have to start from scratch. As many intersectionality scholars have stressed already, too often the value of intersectionality has been reduced in research to analytic potential and methodological sophistication (Bowleg 2021; Cole 2020; Grzanka 2020; Moradi 2017). Intersectional scholar advocacy, to use Benson and Heiden-Rootes's (2025) term, can embrace the present emergency as a rare opportunity to self-determine and re-articulate values moving forward. I concur with many of their recommendations for scholar-advocacy, particularly public engagement and community-focused/based training that considers the risks and dividends of scholars doing social justice work in various contexts and professional ranks. Benson and Heiden-Rootes name the critically important role that faculty in positions of power, including editors, administrators, and mentors, will play in the coming years while topics that fall under the diversity, equity, and inclusion rubric are maligned in the public sphere and even criminalized. We need bravery and courage from leaders who earnestly adopt the lessons of intersectionality, Black feminist thought, and women of color scholar-activism. Moreover, intersectionality indeed provides a potent framework for considering how existing structures of power have hindered (some) prior scholarly efforts to reach and meaningfully engage the public about issues of structure, violence, and inequality (Bonilla-Silva 2023). These problems are not exclusively outside of academia, as Benson and Heiden-Rootes state: “Family Science scholars are living in the social dynamics of power and privileges that intersectionality has taught us to critique.” As such, intersectionality invites an imperative consideration of how our extant habits and disciplinary norms reflect functional, possessive investments in systems that serve the interests of some scholars and not others (Settles et al. 2021). Intersectionality compels a confrontation in search of an opening. Many resource-rich scientists find themselves currently in positions that are familiar to scholars throughout the humanities and arts: under scrutiny, lacking respect, and uncertain about the future. Under the right conditions, oppression can yield critical consciousness and coalition-building. The Trump administration's attacks on the American scientific enterprise may be a moment for scientists of all stripes to consider how the humanities and arts—humanists and artists!—are indispensable to protect and save science in the 21st century. Fascism is not new; its contemporary instantiations are the products of decades of coordination already well documented by historians, cultural critics, and scholar-activists, most of whom are not social or applied scientists (e.g., Toscano 2023). Founding intersectionality theorist Patricia Hill Collins (2019, 2023) astutely observed that fascists are adept at constructing intersectional structures of violence, because fascism thrives on the interlocking nature of oppressions. As social scientists, psychologists, and those working in allied disciplines and the helping professions, we will undoubtedly turn to our in-group professional communities for support and solidarity in the years to come. Nevertheless, new connections across disciplines, professions, communities, borders, and economic sectors will be essential to building coalitions that are prepared to resist our destruction and to thrive beyond the present threats. Benson and Heiden-Rootes (2025) powerfully insist that “Scholars must question what family science is supposed to be and continue to advance research and teaching that enables all families to thrive.” I cosign their assertion and add that intersectionality has never really been just about scholarship (Collins 2019): intersectionality is about transforming our social worlds in the name of justice, which is why so many of its opponents have declared war on it. Intersectionality portends collective liberation, which is why learning from intersectionality's foremothers now—perhaps more urgently than ever—is so vital. I wish to thank Rajani Bhatia, Michelle Fine, and Elizabeth Cole for their insights, which have informed all of my work and especially this commentary. I also want to extend gratitude to April Few-Demo for her intellectual leadership and camaraderie in the ongoing project of intersectional psychology. The author has nothing to report.