December 20, 2023

The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 although the concept had been knocking around in (especially black and lesbian) feminist circles since the 1970s and has roots going back to the 19th century. Until we all acquired an obsession with identity, it was an obscure and useful term used to describe how race and sex can connect and overlap in matters of discrimination and inequality.  Crenshaw has spent decades studying civil rights and the law, and her concern was how embedded discrimination and inequality get in the way of progress in racial justice. 

She presented her theory in a 1989 paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, writing about three legal cases that dealt with both race and sex discrimination. Crenshaw argued that the court’s view of discrimination was an example of the “conceptual limitations of…single-issue analyses”. 

Her metaphor of the crossroads of a traffic intersection shows how people (for example: a black woman) can get hit with discrimination from different directions (race and sex) at the same time.

“Intersectionality,” she explained, “was a prism to bring to light dynamics within discrimination law that weren’t being appreciated by the courts.”…