But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another.
Indeed, Crenshaw uses the following analogy, referring to a traffic intersection, or crossroad, to concretize the concept:Ĭonsider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Black feminist and scholar Barbara Smith, 1983 2īlack legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her insightful 1989 essay, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” 3 The concept of intersectionality is not an abstract notion but a description of the way multiple oppressions are experienced. “The concept of the simultaneity of oppression is still the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological contributions of Black feminist thought.” the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977 1
“Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.”
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