Intersectionality and Multiple Inequalities

Kimberlé Crenshaw's 'Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,' published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989, introduced the term intersectionality into legal and sociological theory. Crenshaw was writing about three employment-discrimination cases (DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, Moore v. Hughes Helicopter, Payne v. Travenol) in which Black women plaintiffs lost because the courts could not conceptualize a plaintiff as both Black and female. GM had hired Black men into factory jobs and white women into clerical jobs; Black women, hired into neither, sued for discrimination. The court reasoned that since Black men were hired (no race discrimination) and women were hired (no sex discrimination), Black women could not claim compound discrimination — they were, the court said, impermissibly trying to create a new super-protected class.

Crenshaw's response used the now-famous traffic intersection metaphor. Discrimination, she argued, can flow down race avenues and gender avenues separately; it can also flow through the intersection where they meet. A Black woman standing in the intersection can be hit by traffic from either street or from both at once — and the law, if it recognizes only single-axis claims, cannot see the accident at the intersection. The employment courts had treated gender discrimination as a claim available to white women (the prototype) and race discrimination as a claim available to Black men (the prototype), leaving Black women invisible in both.

The essay made two moves that shaped subsequent scholarship. First, it diagnosed a structural feature of antidiscrimination law: its single-axis framework systematically fails those who experience compound, simultaneous disadvantage. Second, it proposed intersectionality as a methodological and conceptual corrective — an analytic stance that begins from the most marginalized positions (Black women, in Crenshaw's paradigmatic case) and asks what the world looks like from there. Crenshaw was not claiming Black women were uniquely oppressed; she was claiming that starting the analysis from their position reveals structural features invisible from more privileged angles.

The essay built on a longer tradition. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), drafted by Black lesbian feminists including Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier, and Beverly Smith, had already argued that 'the major systems of oppression are interlocking' and that Black women faced 'the interlocking nature of race, class, sex, and sexual preference' together. Angela Davis's Women, Race and Class (1981) and bell hooks's Ain't I a Woman? (1981) had documented similar patterns. Crenshaw's achievement was to crystallize the insight in a legal-theoretic framework and supply a vivid image that would make it portable across disciplines.