Addressing Your “Location” in Society

Intersectionality describes the human experience of possessing multiple social identities, especially in regard to our treatment by other people and by society at large. When we ask ourselves, “Who am I?” we are very likely to come up with more than one characteristic to paint a picture of who we are, and more than one group to which we “belong.”

History of the Term

Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989. She wanted to describe the layers of discrimination and marginalization that Black women experience. Crenshaw wrote in her 1991 paper, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color: “Because of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are marginalized within both.”

Let’s look at an example of this. Efforts to diversify workplaces sometimes include having a percentage of an organization’s employees be people of color, or women, or some other underrepresented demographic. Some organizations, when hiring, look at their particular workforce and determine that they have “enough” women, or “enough” people of color on their staff, and when a Black woman applies for a position, she often finds herself dually rejected. Black women frequently feel the full brunt of the racism and sexism hidden under the veneer of corporate “correctness.”

Intersectionality plays into many areas of a person’s life, from the example we see above, to experiences with the justice system, in educational institutions, and in social justice movements, especially the feminist movement.

Current Understanding of Intersectionality

While the concept of intersectionality was first explained in terms of the Black woman’s experience, it has grown to describe the multiple and inextricable identities of not only Black women, but of those people who identify with other races and cultures, who are differently abled, who are a part of LGBTQIA communities, who are religious adherents, and in a number of other ways.