3 - You Build the Roads, We Are the Intersections

Summary

IN HER ARTICLE “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the word “intersectionality” to describe how black women were not taken into account by either “feminist theory and in antiracist politics” or as she describes them: single-axis frameworks. In her 2016 Ted Talk, she talks about Emma, an African American woman who suspected she was not hired because of her race and gender. She filed a suit that was dismissed because she could not have two courses of action: according to the judge, that would give her an advantage over African American men and white women. Crenshaw explains:

It occurred to me maybe a simple analogy to an intersection might allow judges to better see Emma's dilemma. So, we think about this intersection, the roads to this intersection would be the way that the workforce was structured by race and by gender, and then the traffic in those roads would be the hiring policies and the other practices that ran through those roads. Now, because Emma was both black and female, she was positioned precisely where those roads overlapped, experiencing the simultaneous impact of the company's gender and race traffic.

In another article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” she offers, among many others, an example that illustrates how rigid criteria often fail to anticipate reality and, therefore, actively deny assistance to the most vulnerable people. Crenshaw writes about a non-English-speaking woman who fled her home with her son because her husband threatened both their lives. They had to live on the streets because most shelters deny assistance to people who are not fluent in English. Diana Campos, Director of Human Services for Programas de Ocupaciones y Desarrollo Económico Real, Inc (PODER), helped her be accepted in a shelter that initially refused to take her in, their justification being that her poor English could make her “feel isolated” because the house had “rules that the woman must agree to follow” which included “to attend a support group and they would not be able to have her in the group if she could not communicate.”