Intersectionality

• Pages: 287-305
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

287

Chapter 13

INTERSECTIONALITY

In 1989, Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw published

“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist

Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and

Antiracist Politics.”

1

With the publication of this article, Crenshaw

introduced the world to the concept of “intersectionality,” a term that

refers to “the interaction between gender, race, and other categories

of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional

arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these

interactions in terms of power.”

2

The impact of this article, alongside

a subsequent article published two years later that further developed

the idea of intersectionality, cannot easily be overstated: Crenshaw

changed the way that academics in a variety of disciplines,

practitioners, government actors, and activists all over the world

think and talk about the experiences of multiply subordinated

individuals and groups.

The concept of intersectionality was born of Crenshaw’s

frustration that courts had refused to recognize that black women

could be discriminated against as black women. That is, courts had

failed to see that the discrimination that black women faced in the

workplace oftentimes was distinct from the discrimination that black

men and white women encountered. A case in point was

DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, which involved a group of black

women who sued General Motors for implementing a lay-off policy

that perpetuated the effects of past discriminatory hiring practices.

3

The court held that although General Motors had failed to hire black

women for a number of years, it had hired white women during that

period of time. This suggested to the court that General Motors had

not engaged in sex discrimination. The court then stated that the

black women plaintiffs’ suit ought to be joined with a race

discrimination suit that had been filed by a group that included black

male plaintiffs. This revealed the court’s assumption that the

discrimination confronted by black men and black women was

1

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex : A

Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrim ination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and

Antiracist Politics, 1989 U. CHI. LEGAL F. 139 (1989).

2

Kathy Davis, Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective

on what Makes a Feminist Theory Successful, 9 FEMINIST THEORY 67, 68 (2008).

3

DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, No. 75-487C(3), 1975 U.S. Dist. LEXIS

15938 (E.D. Mo. Sept. 30, 1975).

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INTERSECTIONALITY

Ch. 13

indistinguishable from one another. The DeGraffenreid court’s logic

suggested that if an employer hired black men and white women

while refusing to hire a single black woman, black women would have

no recourse. The structural impediments or individual bias that

might uniquely restrict black women’s access to institutional spaces

would be unchallengeable.

However, at the same time that some courts were denying that

black women were sufficiently different from black men and white

women, other courts were denying that black women were

sufficiently like black men and white women. Crenshaw looked to a

number of cases in which courts refused to certify black women as

class representatives in class action suits for race or sex

discrimination. In essence, these courts were saying that while black

women might have been discriminated against as black women, that

discrimination was not cognizable as “simple” race discrimination or

sex discrimination: It was something more than that. It was different.

Crenshaw recognized that this phenomenon of courts

schizophrenically perceiving black women to be too distinct, yet not

distinct enough, from their black male and white female counterparts

mirrored the schizophrenia that was taking place among social

justice organizations that were agitating for racial and gender

justice. She writes that among these groups, “Black women are

regarded either as too much like women or Blacks and the

compounded nature of their experience is absorbed into the collective

experiences of either group or as too different, in which case Black

women’s Blackness or femaleness sometimes has placed their needs

and perspectives at the margin of the feminist and Black liberationist

agendas.”

4

In her subsequent article, “Mapping the Margins:

Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of

Color,”

5

Crenshaw provided additional contour to the concept of

intersectionality. She reiterated the claim that the agendas of

feminist and antiracist organizations frequently overlook the specific

needs of black women. And she offered a thesis as to why this is so:

White women figure as the subject of feminism, and black men figure

as the subject of antiracism. She continued:

[R]acism as experienced by people of color who are of a

particular gender—male—tends to determine the

parameters of antiracist strategies, just as sexism as

experienced by women who are of a particular race—

4

Crenshaw, supra note 1, at 150.

5

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics,

and Violence against Women of Color, 43 STAN. L. REV. 1241 (1991).