Intersectionality of Race, Class, Gender, and Ethnicity

Intersectionality describes a way of understanding how individuals in society maintain multiple identities, and offers dimensions to categories such as race, gender, and class. Both the term and the concept find their most recognizable roots in Black feminist and critical race scholarship wherein activists and academics worked to highlight how “mainstream” movements to combat racism, homophobia, and gender and class discrimination had neglected to consider ways that some groups are marginalized when not all aspects of their social and political identities are acknowledged.

Though scholars began writing explicitly of the necessity to complicate identity categories as early as the 1970s, legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw is often credited with originating the concept of intersectionality. In a frequently cited article, Crenshaw echoes earlier analyses noting that “women of color,” for example, “are situated within at least two subordinated groups”—race or ethnicity and gender. These identities act together to present complex and very distinct challenges and interests, as “the imposition of one burden,” she adds, “interacts with preexisting vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment” (Crenshaw, 1999, pp. 1249–1252). For women of color, the intersections of race, gender, and class impact levels of privilege or access to the opportunity structure, leaving women of color to contend with systemic and institutional forms of power that counterparts in their larger community categories (e.g., low-income White women or middle-class Black men) may not face. Other factors such as citizenship status, language ability, physical ability, or sexual orientation may present even more specific dimensions to one's identity and level of access.

Intersectional analysis is useful for understanding the experiences of people who occupy multiple marginalized or minority identities as well as for mainstream groups. Intersectional analysis complicates many broad categories and allows researchers and practitioners to consider and learn from the particular experiences of a complex identity. Intersectionality reconciles without undermining the nuance of what may even appear to be contradictions of disadvantage and privilege.

The growth of intersectional analysis as a research paradigm has drawn scholars to avoid resimplifying the categories that an intersectional analysis seeks to complicate. The implications of multiple identity experiences are not amassed as [Page 1271]singular factors that influence behavior. Race does not simply interact with class or gender in equal measure, nor are the interactions of these categories fixed.

An intersectional analysis offers a critique of one-dimensional identity struggles that can alienate members of a social group when the aims of the broader struggle neglect to address the interests of members whose needs and concerns are complicated by the multiple ways that they are situated within society and by the multiple identities they possess. Studies of the civil rights movements led by African Americans and Mexican Americans, for example, often raised questions about the power and status of women within these movements. More recently, social protests raised by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender citizens seeking equality in marriage, health care, and worker and family rights invoke some of the same rationales that were used for racial and ethnic justice in the mid- and late 20th century. Yet, coalition-building across the multiple lines of marginalization attributable to race, class, gender, and sexual orientation remains challenging because of the invisibility or ignorance about of some of these identities within each of these identity-based movements. When these intersections are accounted for, groups can find new points of alliance with which to build coalitions—for example, women's rights with language minorities' rights with workers' rights and other social justice calls for equality. Coalitions can be built according to more than the one- or two-dimensional overlap of discriminatory or other experiences. Rather, the ways in which these rich and dynamic identity interactions locate individuals at a similar distance from the centers of power can serve as the basis of political organization. The call and commitment to an intersectional analysis has not been simply reactive, but it has developed as an intentional project that aims to decenter dominant and normative social categories.

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