Intersectionality in Research

Intersectionality: A Brief History

Even before it had a name, intersectionality had a long history. In 1851, the renowned abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth delivered her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech to an audience at a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. With this speech, Truth succinctly and incisively articulated how abolishing slavery—and thus freeing African American women—was core to the mission of pursuing rights for women. Other Black women scholar-activists who worked at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century—such as Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett—also described the influence of multiple systems of oppression, such as racism, sexism, and classism, in the lives of Black women, their families, and communities. However, because of the very systems of inequality they critiqued, their intellectual insights were often deemphasized or obscured from history—that is, until their works were revived and popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by a new generation of Black women scholar-activists, such as bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and the Combahee River Collective. As with their intellectual predecessors, this generation of scholar-activists drew from their lived experiences to describe the co-occurrence and interdependence of systems of oppression. This central thesis was at odds with the dominant ideology and praxis of prominent civil rights organizations at the time, which resisted challenging more than one axis of domination at a time. That is, Black women were often pressured to combat racism or sexism (or classism, or heterosexism, etc.) rather than racism and sexism.

The coining of the term intersectionality is usually attributed to Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who critiqued the inability of critical race theory or feminist legal scholarship to adequately consider the influence of racism and sexism in the lives of Black women. She used the metaphor of a traffic intersection to illustrate how the discrimination Black women experienced (framed as a car accident) could result from cars coming from one direction (e.g., racism), from another (e.g., sexism), or all of them (e.g., racism and sexism and classism). Thus, the discrimination Black women experience may stem from racism and largely overlap with Black men’s experiences of racism. Alternatively, the discrimination Black women experience may stem from sexism and closely resemble the sexism encountered by white women. Importantly, however, Black women could also experience discrimination specifically because they are Black women—that is, their mistreatment is not simply the sum of racism and sexism but something qualitatively different and unique to them.

...